Hearing yourself speak out is very different from thinking. To voice something you’ve been thinking about is like giving body to what might otherwise just be tortuous worrying. This is especially true when dealing with difficult emotional questions. The truth is that most of our emotionally tinged thinking is very confused by conflicting ways of looking at a problem. Before any consideration of solutions, how, in fact, should I look at the problem in the first place. Should I regard the problem as important or not; is it the real problem; is it my problem or his; is it that I am not being fair or that I am not being treated fairly; am I too soft or too judgmental; is the real problem that she wants everything her own way – or perhaps it’s me that’s too critical. What really is the problem? And so on – round and round!
Momentarily I might think I have arrived at a steady conclusion, but then another viewpoint intervenes and I’m back on the merry-go-round. Ruminating like this goes around in circles, always arriving at the place one started. The internal critic, the Mad Judge, is usually hard at work. Every thought, before it can be fully thought, is contradicted by an opposing viewpoint; which itself is stopped short by yet another contradicting viewpoint. It’s a battleground where nothing is vanquished and no way of thinking gains the upper hand. No single thought-line gets the chance to fully express itself. There is no way I can know what I think where every possible viewpoint is squashed before it has had a chance to fully express itself. In this state much of my deeper thinking is unknown – like the iceberg, most of it is below the water-line.
This is where ‘hearing-yourself’ it comes into its own. When you let a viewpoint speak out it seems to find more energy to follow through and is more immune to internal criticism. Hearing myself say it gives it strength to follow all the implications of itself. It finds its voice. I find myself saying more than I had yet thought or felt. I’ve heard it said many times, “I don’t really know what I think until I hear myself saying it.” It’s always a surprise and sometimes quite a shock when what was just a weak idea suddenly finds its voice. Hearing yourself speak out gives you courage.
But however forceful and convincing, it will be only one of the many voices within struggling to be heard. They are not all one’s own voice either, but the voices of others that have been adopted. Impinging on the problem-at-hand are all kinds of viewpoints that have gained a foothold in the psyche, bits you have read, lectures you have been given, advice, unwanted criticism, as well as the urges of our animal instincts. When speaking out like this you may find yourself taking a tour of them all; first one line of thought gains ascendancy then another, a veritable medley of contradiction as you switch from one to another. But the difference is that now you are more able to judge the worth of each viewpoint because you are actually hearing them speak out with greater force, as they battle for supremacy. Each one now reveals itself for what it is actually worth. The various viewpoints will now interact with each other and encourage new ideas, modifications never contemplated before. Instead of ruminating in the shadows, the thinking-mind gets out there and lets off steam in full view – somewhat like a rowdy brain-storming session.
Hearing-yourself fully will also include the changes of emotional tone as you express yourself and shift form one aspect to another: the sounds of your impatience, exasperation, groans and grumbles; physical gestures of futility, annoyance, resignation or amusement; the stamp of your anger with yourself and others. These physical gestures also need to be heard and recognized.
It would be easy to say that eventually you find your own true voice and with it your own reality and undying self. It certainly does appear this way because the final outcome of hearing-yourself seems eventually to settle the conflict and you arrive at a certain steadiness and rightness; and with it an ability to act more decisively. As moderator, you will finally have heard enough of the conflicts and have reached a settled conclusion.
As an analysis of what goes on we could easily leave it at that, but the truth is a little more complicated and less romantic. Ideas and viewpoints undergo a process very much like that of Natural Selection in biology. Even in the narrow compass of one’s personal life, why do some viewpoints survive and others go extinct. Why do you come out of this process feeling that you have at least settled what the problem is about ?
The answer is similar to that found in the natural world: some ideas are more conducive to survival, more able to flourish in a changing environment, whereas others are not. The battle between our viewpoints and ideas is a battle for survival that goes on in our personal, emotional life, taking all factors into account: my own interests, my family, my group; and, last of all, perhaps, way out there, what is best for human kind and the planet – in roughly that order of importance. This is the way evolution has designed the emotions that motivate us.
But we must imagine survival as not merely the ability to exist, but to flourish. The right solution to even a personal problem is the one that gains dominance by virtue of its ability to secure the survival of all that is dear to us. Of course, the style of survival will take into account the group within which we live; and these, of course, vary a great deal.
But on a basic individual level, the practice of ‘hearing-yourself’, as we have described it, is the process of bringing out into the open all the ideas and viewpoints that battle for dominance in one’s mind; and provided you have a good listener, hearing-yourself is a wonderful tool. And it is how and why person-centred therapy works.
There is one more aspect of ‘hearing-yourself’ that I can only touch upon here. This not about working through ideas that oppose each other, but ideas that compliment and can cross fertilise each other; this is more about the smoldering, but disconnected ideas in your own mind that need only to hear each other to light the spark of novel invention. But more about this in another bog.
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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