Understanding and Reshaping the Inner Monologue
By: Jessica Mardian
Content Writer for The Stories We Need to Hear
Like putty, my inner monologue takes shape according to whatever is going on inside my internal landscape. She can drum nasty comments throughout my head if I’m trying on last year's jeans that don’t fit anymore, or in the exact same situation she can shower me with confidence and appreciation for my body. The inner monologue is a back and forth of ideas, the reminder to grab barbeque kettle chips at the store, the reason I bite my tongue, and the creator of my daydreams.
The way we move through and think in our heads comes across in different forms. Russell Hurlburt is a psychology professor whose research focuses on the inner experience. According to Hurlburt there are 5 primary ways of thinking: inner speaking, inner seeing, feelings, sensory awareness and unsymbolized thinking. The degree to which our inner monologue is running is different for everyone. In the article “What’s it like living without an inner monologue”, Hurlburt stated “There are very big individual differences...Some people have absolutely none and some people have pretty close to 100 percent”. The presence and strength of an inner voice being so varied, is a striking reminder that we not only don’t know what is going on inside someone else’s head, but also how they are processing it.
When I think I can come up with a description that encompasses my inner monologue, she pops up with a situation that falls just out of the lines of one metaphor. In conflicts with friends or when facing an issue with tons of different possibilities, it’s my inner voice running through every option or acting out different situations. She’s the wall I bounce a ball off of and the voice for my gut instinct. She’s coming up with the words I want to say or type seconds before I do. The bumps in the night, she makes them home intruders or nightmarish monsters. She’s repeating the affirmations on my mirror to me as I get dressed in the morning. Just as the inner monologue can offer comfort and ease, it can magnify anxieties and create unrealistic outcomes.
I hadn’t truly understood the power of my inner voice until I spoke aloud a few of the sentences she’d said to my former therapist. The words were pretty cruel things to say about myself. My therapist’s eyes grew large with this ache of sadness and shock at hearing them. At the time I was going through a depressive state and my inner voice had assumed a new role as my biggest bully. In a Healthline article covering the basics of internal monologues, Kristeen Cherney writes “A critical inner voice may develop during times of extreme stress. It’s also sometimes seen in mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. In such cases, your mind may engage in negative self-talk by criticizing the way you work, socialize, participate in family circles, and more”. The state of my mental health wasn’t encouraging kindness from my inner voice and my inner voice wasn’t bringing me any comforts with my mental health struggle. They both bit back at each other, leaving my self-worth bruised and depleted.
To start reshaping my inner monologue I had to tune into what it was saying and allow myself to really feel the impact of the words. No longer drumming on in the background and quietly beating up my confidence and sense of self-worth, my inner monologue had my attention. At the time I didn’t think my emotions or mental health issues were valid, so my inner voice would reflect that. Body insecurities and judgements were spoken inside my head constantly. Throughout this period, my inner monologue was still the way I worked out conflicts and thought through ideas. She would latch onto any nasty thought towards myself and berate it through my head, narrated in my own voice. I began to recognize the negative words I was spewing at myself inside my head and tracing them back to their points of origin. To mindfully change the course of my inner monologue, I started to confront these negative statements with this question: would I talk to a friend like this?
No. I would never speak the way I spoke to myself to a friend or anyone else. As someone who values friendship and treating people with kindness, I wasn’t practicing those with myself and I hadn’t even seen it that way. Posing this question to myself, helped me realize the length at which my inner voice shaped me. Whenever my inner monologue turned critical, I allowed the negative thought to be heard and then countered it with an affirmation or something I would tell someone else to validate them. As the months went on the self-hate that once soaked through my inner monologue, dried up. Day by day I was restructuring the way that voice inside my head reacted to insecurity, doubt, and uncertainty.
While avoiding what your inner monologue is speaking can be easy, it’s not sustainable. Listening and processing what the voice inside your head is saying is a part of mental health care. If your inner voice is like mine was, essentially a bully, not confronting it is like not going to the doctor for a nasty gash on your arm. The hurt is only going to fester. Recognizing your inner monologue can also be a means to realize that whatever routine you’re stuck in isn’t working out how you expected. The inner monologue can be the alarm for larger problems or realizations.
Inner monologues can rile up anxious thoughts, be safe spaces with no judgement, yell back hurtful thoughts that capitalize on insecurities, and serve as a guide. Problem solvers and problem creators are an internal double-edged sword. A blank whiteboard where solutions are found and an arena for ideas to be entertained in. They are mirrors in our minds reflecting what we are going through and the state of our mental health.
