The Inner Voice: How To Be A Friend Of Yourself?

Photo by KoolShooters

Somewhere in human minds, removed from the day-to-day, there sits a judge. The judge's verdict is more or less loving, more or less enthusiastic, but not according to any objective rule book or statute. Whatever the verdict, always remind yourself that there is always room for improvement and progression. 
 
Your Inner Voice
The judge watches what you do, studies how you perform, examines your effect on others, and tracks your successes and failures. Eventually, they pass a verdict. So consequential is this judgment; it colors your entire sense of yourselves. It determines your levels of confidence and self-compassion; it lends you a sense of whether you are worthwhile beings or, conversely, should not exist. The judge is in charge of what people call your self-esteem.

The foundation of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalization of the voice of people who were once outside humans. You absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth you will have heard in your formative years. People's heads are cavernous spaces; pretty much all have voices echoing within them. Sometimes, a cheerful and benign voice encourages you to run those final few yards: "you are almost there, keep running, keep going!" But more so, the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is punitive and defeatist, panic-ridden and humiliating. It does not represent anything like your best insights or most mature capacities. You find yourselves saying: "You disgust me; things always go to shit with someone like you."

People take in these voices because they sounded so compelling and irresistible at certain critical moments in the past. The authority figures repeated their messages until they got lodged in your way of thinking – for better and worse.
 
Why Does The Inner Voice Matter?
Humanity's level of self-love is very consequential across one's life. It can be enticing to suppose that being difficult on yourselves, though painful, is, in the end, quite helpful. Self-sacrifice can feel like a survival strategy that steers you clear of the many dangers of complacency and indulgence. Relatively, there are equal, if not more significant, dangers in an ongoing lack of sympathy for your plight. Despair, depression, and suicide are not incredibly minor risks.

Afflicted by a lack of self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible. Why? Because the central requirement of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for yourselves, built up over the years, mainly in childhood. People need a legacy of feeling that they, in some essential way, deserve love in order not to respond obtusely to affection granted to them by prospective adult partners. Without an ample amount of self-love, the kindness of another will mostly strike them as misguided or fake. And even as strangely insulting, for it suggests that they have not even begun to understand them, so different are their relative assessments of what they happen to deserve. People end up self-destructively – though unconsciously – disappointing the intolerable, unfamiliar love offered to them by someone who has no clue who they are.

Wendy Veronica Lisare's book about a journey through Inner-healing is her personal experience of moving from low self-esteem, fear, and abuse to knowing the undying love of God. Lisare has discovered hope, joy, courage, freedom, and fulfillment as she embraces her authentic identity as a child of God. She shares the personal details of her journals from a sad childhood, a divorce from a loveless marriage, a battle with cancer, and the loss of a grandchild, to gaining a nursing job and at the same time being a minister of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Her testimony and the spiritual tools she learned from her life's journey will inspire all her readers to make that move of befriending themselves through every challenge they face. This should be coupled with the understanding that God loves you and knowing that there is another side to fear.
 
Changing The Inner Voice
Part of improving how you judge yourselves involves learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to yourselves in a new and different way – which means exposing yourselves to better voices. Humanity must hear constructive, kind voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they become their thoughts.
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One approach is to identify a pleasant voice you previously knew and give it more scope. Perhaps there was a kindly grandmother or aunt who was quick to see your side of things and would offer you deft words of encouragement. 

The other primary strategy for changing the voices in your head is to try to become an imaginary friend yourselves. Initially, this sounds odd because you naturally imagine a friend as someone else – not as a part of your mind. But there is value in the notion because the extent you know how to treat your friends with sympathy and imagination does not apply to yourselves.