What Is Your Inner Voice Telling You?

Your conversations with yourself can be overly critical.

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You might experience your inner voice as thoughts inside your head, within your mind, which may or may not be telling you the truth. Sometimes, you may hear your inner voice as a conscience that helps you make ethical decisions. Your thoughts may also represent your instincts or innate feelings about a particular situation. But when your internal dialogue is nagging and intrusive and judgmental, it can easily lead to self-destructive thoughts and even hostile or antisocial behaviors toward yourself and others.

When you listen to and believe a deeply critical inner critic, you begin to question your deepest feelings and natural behaviors. Listening to that voice and believing it not only lowers your self-esteem and self-confidence but can also negatively affect your attitude and behavior toward others in personal and professional relationships. It interferes with your self-awareness and your ability to act in your own best interest. The good news is there are steps you can take to start breaking away from a negative and inhibiting thought process.

Who Is This Inner Critic, Anyway?

Your inner voice is likely to be the voice of your parents and other caretakers from your much younger days. Lisa Firestone, coauthor of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice, says we parent ourselves the way we were parented. Any negative thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs instilled at an early age can become roadblocks to your development as an individual and ultimately interfere with the success of your personal and professional relationships.

Your inner voice could also be formed by your peers when you were young. In effect, you may consciously or unconsciously be mimicking what you’ve heard others say to you or about you rather than developing your own beliefs about yourself and views of the world around you. While self-communication is difficult to study in experimental settings, researchers at Middle Tennessee State University determined that study participants who reported the greatest amount of critical self-talk were those experiencing more anxiety or sadness in their lives.

How Your Inner Voice Affects Your Relationships

Simply put, when you don’t feel good about yourself, it’s hard to feel good about others. If your inner voice tells you you’re not attractive or interesting or intelligent, that same voice will have you assume that others feel the same way about you. That makes commitment and trust difficult, and you can’t see just how much others appreciate you and care about you. That, in turn, can make you feel wary and mistrusting of others.

All this is because of the negative thrust of your own inner voice. How you think predicts how you’re likely to behave. And by diminishing your own value, you’re likely to underestimate the effect you have on others; you don’t think anyone cares enough about you to be affected by the way you speak to or act towards them.

How you feel about yourself affects the way you believe others feel about you. If you’re self-critical, then you think others are also critical of you. You may speak and behave in a way that’s appropriate towards someone who criticizes you, but, in reality, you may be the one who is actually the most critical. You mistrust, avoid, and back off from people. And, ultimately, this self-sabotaging behavior can push them away.

Quieting a Critical Inner Voice

Building self-compassion and allowing self-acceptance are essential steps toward quieting the negative noise in your head that is making you feel anxious, fearful, guilty, and sad about your life. It’s important to first understand that you are viewing your life through a heavily distorted lens. Ultimately, you must stand up to that critical voice and stop identifying with everything it tells you.

Getting in touch with your inner speech is thought to be a critical move in any attempt to change the way you think. It’s more difficult for those without a strong sense of self-talk than those who report an awareness of active inner speech. Although a critical inner voice is a complicated psychological experience, with the help of a mental health professional, Firestone says, you can begin to take steps to try to change negative criticisms into positive self-talk, stop unrealistic attacks on yourself and others, and start to live a more fulfilling and meaningful life. You can:

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• Recognize that your critical inner voice is an aggressive attack that can result in hostile thoughts and behaviors toward yourself and others.
• Mentally step back and determine just how that voice influences your thinking, your responses to people and everyday situations, and your behavior as you move through the world.
• Learn to stop feeling like a victim and take responsibility for the way you think, speak, and act.
• Listen to that negative inner voice and learn to talk back to it and fight against it rather than relate to it.

Besides improving your social functioning, the degree to which you can begin to understand your own mind and take control of negative and judgmental thinking can help determine your overall levels of satisfaction and happiness with life. Through that process, you may gain a better understanding of how others think and what type of thoughts and behavior you are capable of inspiring in those around you.