Eckhart Tolle: “What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that.”

Leonard Cohen: “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.”

Ferne Cotton: “The voice in my head kept saying that I am a piece of shit. That I still really have a problem with, and I’ve got to get better at.”

Although most of us have them and hear them, there is a reluctance to admit we hear “voices” in our heads because of the association with mental illness. But the reference to “voices” – in this context at least – is really a synonym for the myriad of thoughts – some dark and unsettling – that pop up uninvited in our brains.

Therapists used to believe that it was possible to control our thoughts, suggesting painful interventions such as pinging an elastic band against our skin on the arrival of an unwelcome thought.

Thankfully, we have a better understanding of our thoughts and how they relate to who we are and these thought-stopping practices are no longer commonplace. A more modern approach is to see our thoughts not as forming our identity but as something distinct from our being, their nature and content derived from our upbringing and our experiences.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Ten Things I Hate about Me” by Comedian Joe Trancini, in which he describes his struggle to live with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In it, he names the voice of his mental illness as “Mick” and comes to see that it is Mick who plagues his brain, sending the thoughts which urge him to make mad, bad, impulsive decisions which hurt himself and the people he loves.

The idea of asking clients to name the different voices – and variations of that – in their heads is fairly commonplace in therapeutic work. Some therapists suggest clients communicate directly with the voice both to create a space between their identity and the voice, and to understand better why the voice – or thought – has popped up at that time. Similarly, Transactional Analysis therapists ascribe the way we communicate to a particular state of being – in short, the child state, the parent state and the adult state.

 

The Critical Voice

Many of us have a critical or disparaging voice: the one that says: “you’re not good enough” or “you’re a failure” or tells you that other people’s smiles are actually smirks and they are laughing at you.

If you name the voice – my clients have previously used a name they find unappealing, or some use the name of their parent – you will be better able to detach yourself from the content of the thoughts, making it easier to see the thoughts as something distinct from you. When the thoughts are frightening, cruel or “abnormal”, it means you can see them as unhelpful “suggestions” that can be dismissed rather than “commands” that must be obeyed.

Trancini uses an excellent metaphor to describe the difficulty of navigating the different thoughts in his head after he stopped using alcohol and drugs. He said it was like being in a bar filled with dangerous Micks, all with a different evil thought, all with a malevolent agenda urging him to do terrible deeds. Trancini is, in his own words, “still really fucked up” but I think we have all had the experience of at least one Mick in our heads, if not a bar full of them.

I’ll share a metaphor I use with clients to help them see that the thoughts they have are not, actually, things. If you do not act on a thought, it is not a thing. It is just a thought. And it is not, therefore, something which needs to be “stopped” with a painful ping of elastic. We are the sum of our actions rather than the content of our thoughts.

 

Technique

Think about all the voices you have in your head: perhaps it’s your own voice conveying different messages, or that of a parent or authority figure, or someone else.

Now imagine all those different voices as passengers on the bus. We can’t choose which passengers board the bus, they just arrive and leave at random. Some of these passengers are helpful, kind, supportive, whilst others are critical, angry, reckless. Each passenger has their own agenda, and loudly voice their opinion on where the bus should go, how it should get there.

Sometimes the supportive voices are drowned out by the angry voices, angrily complaining about the route taken by the bus or the critical voices finding fault with every decision.

The key question is this: who is driving the bus?

And the answer is that YOU ARE.

You are the bus driver. You have your hands on the steering wheel, so you get to decide where you are going and how to get there. You decide which passengers to listen to.

 

What Now?

The next time you have a dark or unwelcome thought, distance yourself from it and see it for what it is. It is not “you”. You could see yourself as the boss of your thoughts, the person in authority who decides which of the thoughts has validity, or is helpful. In doing so, you take authorship over your life. Even when unforeseen and unexpected things happen, you have the power to decide on which voice to listen to on the basis of what best fits the circumstances.

You might not feel like you are the bus driver yet, you might – at first – just have your hand on the gear stick, or your foot on the brake. It’s fine to take your time. Soon you’ll have your hands on the steering wheel.