I’ve been speaking a lot lately about my inner critic and silencing that negative voice in my head.
This week, I finally put a face to that voice and I cannot tell you the relief I felt.
You see, I honestly believed that voice was me. I believed they were my thoughts and feelings, and that I truly hated myself somewhere deep down.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only was it not me, it was someone from my past, someone, I had not seen for a very long time.
Although I had spent a lot less time crying this week with my morning walks helping me to balance my emotions. I was still determined to get to the bottom of why this was happening to me.
Every negative thought, I questioned, every dip in my mood, I picked apart, like a mental autopsy. Why am I feeling like this? What is causing this thought? What is this really about?
The answers didn’t always come, and it wasn’t an easy process but what I did know was that I desperately wanted my self-worth away back.
I went into my counselling session prepared to make some difficult admissions, to lay bare those last scraps of my inner soul, because I knew, somehow, that I was so so close to getting through this. I wanted to destroy this horrible, mean, inner voice so badly, I could taste it.
I spoke about the tears, the difficult internal conversations I had been having, and how I had bullied myself for almost two weeks. I told her how rewatching an old series had triggered some difficult feelings. And then, after some gentle questions, came a realisation, an awakening, a completely mind-blowing breakthrough.
For so long now, I have believed that I was destined to feel the way I have about myself forever and now there is a light and the end of a tunnel and I just want to run towards it, towards a version of me who knows her worth, towards a part of me I had almost given up on, that I thought was long gone.
As I unravelled parts of my life that I had buried for so long, puzzle pieces were fitting back together. Initially, I felt uncertain, had I remembered it wrong? Was it really like that? Was it really that bad? The voice, even then, telling me I deserved it.
My amazing counsellor, who, now armed with all of the information that I had unknowingly been guarding so fiercely, explained to me exactly how I had been manipulated, how it had been done so covertly, that years later, I was gaslighting myself.
But it had happened.
The face behind the voice is crystal clear and now that I know who it is, I can fight back. Because these thoughts don’t belong to me, they are not and have never been my beliefs, they were someone else’s, planted so very deep into my subconscious, that I started to hear my own voice saying those damaging things.
But now I know the truth and finally, I can start to heal.
