Are you still uncertain about how therapy can help you? One important aim of the way we work is to enable you to hear your inner voice.
Finding your true self is more than a cliché – it means getting in touch with your true desires, your deepest emotions and your genuine needs. The most important question you will probably every ask yourself is: ‘Who am I really?’ What makes you tick? What makes you happy and what makes you unhappy? How did you get to be where you are? How did the past shape who you have become? And where do you want to go to from here?
With self-understanding can come the compassion to accept and love yourself as you are. As the very wise Ru Paul says in every episode of “Drag Race”, ‘If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?’ And from self-acceptance can come the strength to change what you feel needs to be changed, as well as to bear that which is outside of your control. As Erich Fromm, a famous 20th-century psychoanalyst, said: ‘The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.’
Getting in touch with your true self can enable you to live more authentically, congruently and, therefore, more fully.
But what if your inner voices are negative?
You might have read the lines above and thought… ‘No way! My inner voices are so negative, I need to shut them down not to bring them to light!’
Do your inner voices tell you negative things? Perhaps that you are not loved, you are not wanted, you are unworthy, ugly, fat, stupid, or that that bad things (whatever they are) deserve to happen to you? If any of this sounds familiar, you are probably concerned, and not without reason, that if you were to go into therapy and to turn your gaze and your ear inwards, to your inner world, these voices would get louder and you would hear them even more clearly? Maybe you have spent years trying to shut these voices down, so of course it would seem frightening to listen to them again, and you worry that you might fall prey to their power. Maybe you worry that the negative feelings that these voices induce in you would swamp you all over again?
To all these question, I would say… yes, the therapy process is very likely to be painful, because it might bring up all this negativity, but I promise you that it is worth it.
Imagine a CD player with a tune on repeat, that goes on playing… Maybe you’ve managed to tune it out a little bit, perhaps by wearing noise cancelling ear phones or even just ear plugs. But the buzzing is still there in the background. However much you try to tune it out, if you don’t know where the CD player is, or you can’t find the off button, it will still keep playing, and it will keep bothering you.
The same thing happens with the inner voices. The significant difference is that, unlike a CD player, which is in a room that you can physically leave, these inner voices are inside of your own head. So even if you do leave, they will follow you. Even if you can tune out their individual words, their buzzing will still be there, and the disturbance they cause will come back to bother you, sometimes in unexpected ways or at the worst of times.
If you want to shut down the CD player, you need to locate it and to find its off button. Just the same, if you want to shut down your inner voices, you need to allow yourself to hear them first. You need to understand them from within, to learn their source and their deep meaning. By doing so, you will be able to take control of them and to tell them to stop.
In a nutshell: If you want to shut down the negative voices, you’ve got to allow yourself to hear them first.
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