Naming the voices in our head

Kaitlyn Steele
Aug 9, 2024
3 min read

Voices in my head

Unbidden, unwanted,

you slip past the chinks in my defences

and lie in wait, silently watching,

weapons primed and ready,

waiting for the moment to attack.

And when it comes, and it always comes,

it begins with such quiet whisperings,

echoes of the past,

an all too familiar haunting.

You are my nemesis.

You diminish me.

Because of you, I am less than I am,

less than I could be.

You taunt me, goad me, crush me.

You feed my fears, my doubts,

you shame me.

You wear me down relentlessly

until there is no fight left.

I surrender.

Kaitlyn

These two verses come from a poem I wrote when when I was struggling to let go some of the damaging messages I had received about myself over the years, messages that were still replaying themselves in mid-life. All of us have heard such voices, whether we recognise them for what they are or not. We hear them in many places – in our families; in our schools, colleges and universities; in our workplaces; in our friendship groups; in our spiritual communities; and in wider society. Some are adult voices, others are child voices. Some are spoken or written, others are conveyed through facial expressions and actions. Some are infrequent, others assail us day in, day out in a constant, inescapable barrage. Some intend the damage they inflict, others do not. Some we can easily ignore or dismiss, most we cannot.

As I have listened to people recounting some of the most painful messages they have received about themselves over the years, I have often flinched at the their power to penetrate to the very core of our being. Messages like ‘You’re a waste of space’, ‘I wish you’d never been born’, ‘You’re a freak’, ‘You’re stupid’, ‘You’re a loser’ and ‘You’ll never amount to anything’ and many more. The tragedy is that these outer voices all too easily become inner voices. They become voices in our head like a tape recording that endlessly replays itself. Voices that label us, belittle us, diminish us, undermine us, shame us. Voices that strip us of our worth, our dignity, our self-respect. Voices that too often come to define us. Hildegard of Bingen likened the soul to a precious field. We need, she says, to give it whatever it needs to sustain 'its greening power' and 'to root out the useless grasses, thorns and briars' that threaten to overwhelm it. These voices in our head are the weeds that we need to pull out so that our soul can breathe deeply and grow freely once again.

Naming these voices is the first step in the process of weeding them out. Once named, their power begins to diminish. Though at first we may not be able to silence them, we begin to realise that we have the choice not to listen to them. Writer Maria Harris calls this ‘learning to practice disbelief’. We can say ‘no’ to them inwardly and quietly. Or we can shout our ‘no’ to the skies as I did one way while standing alone in the middle of a field. It was extraordinarily empowering. In her poem, ‘The Journey’, Mary Oliver speaks of the journey of leaving behind the voices around her that ‘kept shouting their bad advice’ and of the gradual arising of ‘a new voice’ within her, a voice that she knew to be her own, a voice that accompanied her as she ‘strode deeper and deeper into the world’.

Strangely, the process of writing about the voices in my head turned out be both healing and empowering in itself for it enabled me to recognise them for what they were, to name them and in doing so, to begin the process of letting them go. The last verse of my poem speaks of the arising of my own 'new voice'...

And yet, and yet…

there is this gentler, calmer voice

that stirs within

an older, wiser voice

that knows you for what you are,

that tells a different story,

that sings a different song,

that holds out the promise that one day,

one day,

you will be gone.

Bibliography

Matthew Fox (1985) Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen. Bear & Co