Sarah Palin and The Voices In Our Heads

Listening to the media hype about Sarah Palin this weekend, I’m aware of the lack of substance under all the noise.   There is something disturbing about the amount of money spent to feed one woman’s need for validation, when it could feed so many who are literally hungry.  But I digress.  What I find interesting are the similarities between the attention given to the vacuous voice of the woman who abandoned her job as governor to the people of Alaska, and the attention we often give the voices in our heads that, though they seem true because they’re familiar and loud, are in essence merely shadows of the past with no validity today but for that we give them through passive acceptance.  Just as it’s important to question political rhetoric, so is it vital to our being-ness today to question our internal rhetoric.

Our internal voices are most often reflective of how we were spoken to in childhood, the very important difference being that now we are speaking to ourselves. If we take the time to really listen to the repetitive, self-denigrating statements we make (I can’t, I shouldn’t, I should, I’m such an idiot, no one’s interested in me, he/she/they don’t like/respect/care about me, I’m stupid, I’ll never be successful, I’ll never this, I’ll never that, I’ll always be alone, and on and on - notice all the negatives and absolutes) we might recognize in them the voices from the past and remember that, like a politician who makes alot of noise, just because they’re loud doesn’t mean they’re accurate or have any value.  These negative self-statements continue because we’re not living consciously and questioning their validity based on today’s truth.  Very often these were the words of parents or other adult caretakers who were overwhelmed, insecure wounded souls repeating their own internal dialogues imbedded in beliefs about themselves passed down through generations.  These are beliefs of those who have been abandoned, neglected, abused, unseen, unheard whether actively, passively, consciously or unconsciously by someone else and have little to do with the truth of the individual currently passing them on to self and, sadly, often to another generation of innocent spirits. 

It’s important to really listen because, though one can often be outright abusive to or disparaging of self, the message can also be cleverly (or not) disguised in something that looks true.  When we develop beliefs as children, we grow up seeing everything in the world that supports them because the brain has developed the ability to recognize anything that resembles those beliefs as truth.   For instance when I say to myself I can’t write today because I have all these others things I (absolutely have) to do, or I’m too tired, or I can’t think of anything to write, I’m not feeling well, I deserve a break from working (there are endless variations).....what I’m really telling myself is, no one is interested, I have nothing of value to say, what if they don’t like what I write, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Like Sarah Palin’s tour bus and co-opting of the veteran’s Memorial Day motorcycle rally in Washington, these are just distractions from the truth that there is no substance to the underlying message.   Like Ms. Palin and other right wing extremists who vituperatively distort reality to support their own ends at cost to the entire middle class of this country, the inner states who distort our perceptions of self need to be questioned and understood as at best distracting, often destructive to who we are so capable of being today.  We can choose to stop allowing the old internal noisiness to continue to determine who we are.  And here’s a truth.  The more aware we become, the more we consciously develop new beliefs based on what actually is today, the less we hear from the unbidden rhetoric of the past that has taken up residence uninvited, and the more likely we are to manifest our dreams.