So here I am chilling with a G&T in one hand, a book in the other and Mona, my dog, lying by my feet. Idyllic. I’ve had a productive week and today is my time to sit and contemplate in peace and quiet. And then it happens! “You should be working not chilling.” One of those inner voices that can create or kill the moment.
Inner voices? What are they?
The easiest way to think about this might be to envisage a team. Some in the team are more dominant, some more friendly, some more supportive, some more critical. Some try to please while some don’t care, some are sombre and reflective, some are carefree and erratic. And some are better communicators than others.
The job of a leader is to motivate teams of disparate people to work well together to achieve a common goal. When this works well there are high levels of congruence and success. When it doesn’t there can be dissonance and conflict.
Now, if you transplant this notion into your own mind, your inner voices are your own internal team which work well together or are in conflict. This is referred to, especially through psychosynthesis, as our sub-personalities, the different parts of our mind that want different things.
Carl Jung talked about Archetypes, such as "the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother ... and her counterpart, the maiden…" Archetypes are the mediators between the psychic realm and reality, meaning they govern our behavior through pre-set psycho-physical patterns.
Simplistically, Archetypes could be considered our shared cultural inner voices (the hero, warrior, sage, jester, lover, victim, etc) and sub-personalities our specific historical inner voices (often our key significant others Mum, Dad, auntie jeannie, our first teacher, etc). A point to bear in mind is that while some of these sub-personalities can appear to be negative they are actually doing so with positive intentions. They were initially created to help you in some way when they were needed. They are not your enemy, but a part of you that needs to be understood, accepted and integrated.
Sub-personalities should not be confused with multiple personality disorder which is a medical condition. Our sub-personalities are a natural state of affairs (albeit one that most of us have spent very little time paying any attention to).
Whether we think about archetypes or sub-personalities there will be a number of core patterns of behaviour which revolve around these inner voices. The key point is not to rid ourselves of these voices but to better connect to them and bring them into the light of day.
We do this through identifying and ‘naming’ them (for the purpose of then being better able to dis-identify with them). This is an important and difficult point to grasp, but without dis-identification we are not able to choose which aspect of our personality is the most appropriate for a given situation.
We rarely have all our friends around at once. We select who to invite depending on the occasion.
Bringing it all together
So if we refer back to my example of chilling in the garden, my inner voice at that time could be seen as the sage, the harridan or the victim depending on how I see the relationship between this inner voice, the environment and my current behaviour.
Getting to know ‘all ourselves’ is a complex thing, but doing so will help us better understand what it is our often conflicting inner voices are trying to achieve.
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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, trauma-informed, intimacy or spiritual coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com
See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2
And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1398437159