Externalising our inner voices

Writing, blogging and journaling as we all know can be amazing tools for trying to restore and heal our fragmented reality after trauma.  A follower recently drew my attention to a post he had written on trying to work with the internalised negative voices implanted inside him left by parents who were unable to be nurturing.  He quoted a lot of the concept of Melanie Klein ‘bad objects’.  It is interesting as to me I see that my parents had both negative and positive qualities.

My parents were more neglectful than actually downright abusive but there were forms of emotional abuse too.   It takes us so long to become aware of the inner legacy we have been left with after childhood trauma, abuse or neglect.  I was discussing it with my nephew the other day and saying how really we are all coming out of the dark ages emotionally speaking.

I don’t see abusive parents as ‘bad’, I see them as damaged and wounding and unfortunately they pass those wounds on to their children and I am a firm believer in the fact we all carry a multigenerational legacy of trauma that we are working to make more conscious.   In both my parent’s cases I see and understand that they were not nurtured themselves and did not fully know how to do it,  They also struggled with emotional expression.  Some parents can not tolerate emotions in their children or don’t understand their own and this leads to a state of what is called emotional dysregulation.  We then have difficulties either knowing what our emotions are, difficulty in acting them out and using them and often in the case of narcissistic abuse they become split off or shamed.

It helped  me in early sobriety to learn of the concept of Toxic Shame coined by John Bradshaw.  I had felt myself for a long time to be full of shame.   When I began to turn to alcohol to deal or not deal with feelings of insecurity and fear and shame the shame only grew worse.  And then I got into sobriety where the Twelve Steps and Big Book said I was full of defects of character.  I was willing to own that.  I was the scapegoat anyway in so many groups because of the way I acted out and I was sidelined or judged as many alcoholics or addicts are.

Freeing ourselves from the hidden legacy of shame does involve listening to our inner voices and becoming aware of our internal dialogue by externalising it so we can work with these voices.  Two inner forces in our traumatised psyche are the Inner Critic and the Persecutor.  We could also name other forces with similar negative intents.  The Saboteur or even the Killer.  These may be constantly admonishing us and when we chose recovery they are still on our case.

It has taken me years of therapy, reading and understanding and journaling even to begin to change these voices to more loving ones.  We can come to grow Inner Loving Parents, a caring Higher Self, a protective Inner Goddess.   In fact when I first began to do dialogue with the Inner Critic and Persecutor in my psyche, an alternative force soon showed up that was like a loving Goddess figure who was just so full of wisdom care and love for me.  She helped me through some of my darkest years spent in nearly total isolation following the end of my marriage.

I often wondered why my own inner voices came to be a lot more judging and negative than my own parents were most of the time.  It was explained to me recently how this negative inner voice or a ‘bad’ internalised inner object (if you want to use clinical psychodynamic language) grows even more powerful in those of us who are traumatised or left alone to cope.   The voice can often even act to split off connection with others all in a frenzied bid to keep us ‘safe’.

As Complex PTSD therapist Pete Walker has explained the Inner Critic then becomes an Outer Critic, no one out there is good enough or measures up and this judgement of others is really self judgement externalised or may be made up of defences acquired from the parents or culture at large.

I am noticing more and more lately what a shame and blame culture we are coming out of.  Things are slowly turning around but when we lack complex psychological insight the tendency is to blame or shame people for not living up to ideals and this can include our parents.  We no longer see them as damaged, deeply flawed humans who did their best with the wounds they had.  Instead they become demons or ‘bad objects’.  But really is any human being an object?  Aren’t they really full of flesh and blood and humanity?  A complex mix or cocktail of all shades of black and white?

Of course we do need for a time on our healing path to get very angry about what happened to us in childhood if we were hurt or damaged or traumatised.  We may have to feel for a while how bad and mad and sad it all really was in order to own the truth and find a healthier way.    This is all part of our authentic healing.   Some of us may stay trapped in how wrong our parents were and how much they hurt us, but some of us over time and with grieving begin to see a bit more deeply on our healing journey than this.   And in time some of us reach forgiveness and my experience is that when we forgive we become kinder to ourselves as well, things become less deadly serious and black and white and intense.   At least that is my experience on the healing path I am walking.

I was discussing Melanie Klein with my therapist yesterday and Kat said “she was a bit of a nutter”.  It made me wonder about her own trauma that she was trying to make sense of as well as that of her patients.   I have read a little of the work of Melanie Klein and I thought it was intense.  Did the baby really want to destroy the bad breast when it didn’t give what was needed or was it just that the baby was really, really hungry??? When our hunger to be loved, or noticed, or attended to isn’t met it can turn into a raging fire within the healing comes for us in finding ways to be ‘fed’ on all levels.   Part of abuse and neglect is that deep fundamental emotional needs remain unmet and often split off or shamed too.

It can be hard to own that we were once so vulnerable we were helpless without a parent.   If we carry that intensity into later life its only natural.  It speaks of a wound and a passion and a need for healing and attention.   How we direct that frustrated wound and its impulses may dictate the trajectory of our lives for good or ill.  I certainly see in my own life more lately what damage I did to myself and others at times out of that hunger or the frustrated impulses that drove me.  They were not ‘bad’ or ‘good’ but they did have positive and negative consequences in my life.  However what I have found more and more lately is that finding the gift even in the so called negative or ‘bad’ is so important.  If I cannot find a way to love it how can I accept it into the wholeness of me?   How can I become more complete?

These are just some of my thoughts for today.  There is probably more to write on this subject but I am hungry now, so I am going to go off and meet that impulse in a positive way by having breakfast.  🙂