Someone wrote to me this morning:
“Triggered again! After years in recovery, we read an excerpt from the Big Book, and when we came to the sentence that states, ‘addicts are undisciplined’, I took umbrage – big umbrage. I was so triggered. After all this effort, am I undisciplined? I have no idea if I am undisciplined or if I am just holding myself to some crazy perfectionist ideal. Then doubt, confusion and an ongoing, uncomfortable fight continued in my own head. This is what my problem is – I don’t know what to trust, I do not know which voice to listen to.”
The reply:
We all have an inner voice. We establish an inner dialogue at a very young age.
Our inner voice has been with us since our minds neural network had an incredibly limited capacity. In other words, most peoples’ inner dialogue is like having argument with a child!
We’ve continually listened to our inner child’s voice as we age.
And it’s the main voice we hear when we are triggered.
The distress in our inner dialogues are arguments between a)our current adult inner voice and b)our inner child. The worst reactions and arguments are usually an indication our current adult has not learned to listen to our inner child with compassion and care.
So, what to do? First, we identify the two selves having the dialogue.
Is the adult the compassionate adult we aspire to be? or some other adult voice?
How old is our inner child? What do they want the adult to listen to?
Then our adult self can learn to pause and listen without getting reactive against our child.
We can learn how to love and care for our inner child, break the argumentative cycle that is the main driver behind our lack of trust and confidence.
The inner child voice was established early on to protect against offenses that in reality, are usually no longer threats. Learning to listen, discerning the voice of our inner child, learning to listen with compassion, then we can hear ‘what to heed? and what to comfort and quell?‘. This is the process of learning the wisdom to know the difference. This is how we learn to integrate our past in a way that serves us – learning to love our whole selves.
This is Self-care. Not an easy or short process, but a truly important one.
In short, Self-care is the ability to embrace and love our whole Self while honestly facing our issues.