What does your Inner Voice tell you?

by: Courtney Hollingsworth, LPC

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.” ― Peggy O’Mara

I came across this quote and was struck by its simple profundity. Such a sentiment can surely cause you to step back and reevaluate your typical interactions with the children in your life, which I do believe was the author’s intent. But we can also use this insight to look into the inner voice we each carry and what has informed it over the years. This inner voice has often been born within us from significant people around us as we were growing up and learning to make sense of the world.

I’m not talking about audible voices in our heads, I’m talking about the way we talk to ourselves inside ourselves. We tend to trust this voice; often to the extent that we don’t even notice it. It flows in and around us like the air we breathe. It feels true and informed. It feels like the one we can trust to keep us from believing we are capable, we can depend on others, and we are worth something.

I often find when talking with people that this voice is unkind, unforgiving, shaming, and critical. It’s cynicism feels trustworthy and it’s avoidance of hope or longing feels safe. And yet, it is all too holding us back from developing deep relationships, learning how to care for ourselves, striving to take risks in life, and hoping for something better.

Often, this voice is so embedded it can never be completely silenced. However, it can be identified, labeled untrustworthy, and we can learn to react differently to it. We can learn to tell it to be quiet, we can learn to ignore it, mistrust it, or even argue with it. We can learn to walk through our lives with a different narrator, one that is informed by the present, by reality, by trustworthy people. Counseling is a very effective way to begin to label that voice and learn new ways to talk to yourself.