This was the most beneficial and enlightening piece of information I learnt on my path to finding happiness. I heard it early on, but didn't fully appreciate what it meant until much further up the brick road.
We all have an inner critical voice inside our heads. The voice that worries about the future "I wont have anyone to talk to at the party", replays negative events from the past "you IDIOT! why did I say that?" and continuously criticizes, belittles, doubts, argues and compares ourselves to others inside our heads.
It is that voice that replays an earlier argument over and over, but ignores all the positive conversations from that same day. For me it was that voice that told me "you are not good enough" "you are worthless" "no one wants to know you" "you will NEVER be happy". It drove me to isolate myself, to drink too much, to believe in myself less and less. It was the affect that voice had on me that drove me to start therapy, because I was tired of hating myself so much.
Why is this voice so negative? Where does it come from?
Fact is that negative thoughts are natural to all of us. Our critical inner voice is just an outdated tool utilized by our brains for survival (I will go into this more in a following post).
Relax
For now, just knowing this should allow you to relax. It’s OK, the critical voice and it’s stream of negativity is neither you, nor is it speaking the truth about you. The critical voice is NOT fact. We do not have to listen to it.
It’s like listening to a voice on the radio. It is just an opinion. We can identify it and quieten it so that it no longer has esteem destroying power over us.
Further Reading
A great post that explains this concept further can be found here, from the famous author #EckhartTolle.
I have written a further post on the evolution of the internal critical voice as a human emotion so we can understand more about where it comes from "To really understand something is to be liberated from it."
I will also write a post on tools we can utilize to identify this voice and neutralize it’s affects on us.