Chapter 4 Internal Dialogue
Who do you talk to when you talk to yourself? Depending on how you relate to yourself, that may be a loaded question. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re doing it at all until it becomes excessive, such as with ‘racing thoughts.” Racing thoughts can interrupt sleep because the brain won’t shut down. Notice, I said brain, not them, not you. You are not your brain- but by God, you can hear the noises it makes. You are not your body. These two statements are a theme I intend to iterate frequently. Your primary personality interface is likely composed of sophisticated linguistic programing. Again, you are not your brain, and you are definitely not your personality. You only think you are because no one has told you differently. Your personality is like clothing- something you wear every day, as if you were on a sitcom, like Gilligan’s island. Unless you’re Ginger, you’re likely wearing the same thing in every episode.
Where did these linguistic programing come from? Childhood. We were all born into a social world, and our family of origins, our systems of origins, gave us the language pattern that we employ. If you were born in a different country, with a different primary language and social structure, your personality would not be the same- nor would your triggers.
If you watch children, they talk to themselves. If you really watch children, you will see a sophisticated pattern of dialogue- theirs, and an assumed other, as they practice the social reality they experience around them. They have that shit down fast, before they’re even talking fast. Want a change a baby’s life? Read textbooks to them the first two years of their life. Speak two language two them if you are bilingual family, and don’t stop speaking both. The words they have in the beginning, the more keys they will have for their future map.
Most the time, the assumed other in this pretend talk is a parent or sibling that isn’t present. Sometimes there is ‘pretend’ friend. If you follow the dialogue, the script has natural place holders where ‘other’ is participating in the conversation. Unlike teenage fantasies, you never hear a child rewind the conversation and start over to achieve a desired goal. The conversation goes where it goes. Additionally, over time, that call and response goes deep. It becomes automatic. You are still doing this, but with such sophistication that most the time you are not aware of it.
You can demonstrate by just talking to people. They have staple answers that just shoot out. Also, if you know a core answer and you tell them information contrary to their core, people get upset. They fight for that thing the way religious zealots fight for dogma, and the way scientist hold to outdated ideas until the evidence is overwhelming. If you don’t think scientist can ridicule a person for having a contrary thought, you’re not paying attention. They’re not worse at it, or more malicious. We all do this. We do it with religion, politics, science- and definitely in what we regard as true about ourselves.
We are rehearsed some answer sets so much that we can’t help but answer the way we do. We have verbal tics, as well. My friend says, “You understand what I am saying?” His brother pointed it out to him and he was seriously mad that his brother kept interrupting him to point it out. We know these answers to these questions: Where do you live? Are you married? What do you do for a living? These questions are also the first questions we ask people, so we can quickly identify who they are and what they’re about. They are also, the least useful measure for determining whether or not they’re good people. Social scientists can actually use our reliance on staples to get at deep psychological artifacts using Projective Tests. It’s not a bad thing, unless the stuff you’re automatically putting out is resulting in you sabotaging your own success.
Reconsider this meme. Remember when you first learn to drive. If you were like me, you were hyper-anxious. Everything took focus and energy and it was exhausting. How slow did you have to go to make a casual turn versus a sharp right-angle turn? How observant were you of how close you were to others and how close others were to you? How much room did you leave for breaking and anticipating lights? Then one day, you got in your car and drove from point A to point B, all the while conversing on the phone, or singing a song, and switching stations or CD’s and you arrived without a care in the world. You probably don’t even remember the journey. I would not chastise you for not being present in the moment. You were present. You were also driving on autopilot. This means you have mastered that skillset. Had anything interfered, like a car cutting you off- you would have immediately become super focused. If you had an anger response to being cut off, well- that’s interesting, too. That is an example of ‘autopilot.’ Consider yourself a coke machine. Someone cutting you off is a person who just put in money and pushed a button. A coke was dispensed. “How dare you cut me off?!” “Watch where you’re going!”
The auto-response system is not just hard wired into the brain, but is a call and response part of your personality. Think about any argument you ever had with anyone. If you ever continued the argument in their absence, you likely played both parts, trying to refine your arguments so that you could be better prepared for the next encounter. Sure enough, the next time you get home and unload on them, and they’re dazed, mostly because- they were done with that hours ago and what you just gave them was loud, laser focused, and not proportional to their emotional state. You built a bomb and deployed it.
There is overwhelming scientific evidence you can change your brain. You do it through learning new activities. You do it by counseling. You do it through positive ‘relationships.’ Counseling is a relationship. New activities are a relationship. Medication helps stabilize and allow for normal ranges of emotions. If you do nothing else but take medications, and you only reinforce existing neural pathways, when you come off the meds, you will likely return to the previous depressed state. However, while stabilized on meds, you engage in positive social interaction, you learn a new skill, you engage a counselor in a productive way- what you’re doing is building new pathways- you’re changing the scaffolding of your brain so when you come off the meds, the new wiring holds you in this new place of emotional stability. You need structures to reinforce and maintain change.
When it comes to muscles and brain mass, there are only three possibilities. You are losing muscles and nerves, you’re building muscles or nerves, or you are maintaining. Do nothing, your muscles and brain will atrophy. Watching televisions, without any thoughtful engagement results in brain atrophying. Video games builds connections. Walking in nature builds connections. Interacting with pets builds connections. Meeting strangers builds new connections. You got to do stuff. What is watching television with thoughtful engagement? Watch something that challenges you. Watch something you wouldn’t normally watch and give it attention, as if you were going to be tested. Watch something that brings something new into your life. While watching, try to predict where the show takes you, or what you think might happen or be said. After it’s over, write a plot where you introduce yourself as a character. Be involved.
The inner dialogue you utilize affects how you change your brain, how you relate to the information. You need to modify your own internal dialogue, too. If you are learning a new task on auto-response, and you say to yourself “This is hard” or “I can’t do this…” it will likely become a true statement or take more time to acquire new skill, and new neural pathways. The brain is plastic; minus health issues, it will continue to make new cells. The older we get, the slower the process gets, but it’s never zero. Changing internal dialogue can be as simple as saying, “This is challenging; and I love learning new things.”
When it comes to personality from a system’s perspective, we become our scripts. One of the reasons it can be so difficult beating addictions with the help of family is because we unconsciously, through the auto-response system, maintain family scripts. An addiction typically has a system of origin component. A system is like a baby mobile. It is resistant to change. They can change. Adding a weight to one piece on the mobile can shift the whole mobile, but most systems don’t want to change, and so either the piece loses the weight or gets ejected. Though most people want the addict to change, it is also true that someone is likely to lose their job- such as the parent that enables addiction will suddenly have a problem. This is the external structure that maintains status quo.
Inner personality dialogue is even more complicated than this. All personalities are compartmentalized into sub-personalities. Some personalities are more compartmentalized than others. Freud used the term sub-personality, but I am not using the word the way he did. I am probably more in line with Jung and Campbell when they used archetypes. At risk of employing a dangerously evocative ‘religious’ term, we are Legion. Contained within your core personality is every age of you. You as a child are in there. The teenager you is also there. Every milestone of you is there. Every time you made a choice and there was a hard, real world consequence, or even an internal psychological consequence- there is the pre choice you and the post choice you. The core personality you, the primary interface- is a composite of all of those- usually the one that deviated to incorporate the understanding. The validity of that understanding is irrelevant, in terms of its veridical truth- you will respond to that truth in your dialogue with self and others- as if it were absolutely true.
Additionally, every person you have ever met in real life, seen on television, or read in a book- they’re in you, as well. The brain is in essence, a personality simulator. It creates and operates personalities. Some of the personalities are extremely accurate. Some of them are archetypes. Some are stereotypes. What gets rendered in perfect holistic stereoscopic versions and what gets downgraded to two dimensional, quick representations depends on the value the core personality places on the information they contain. In truth, none of it is two dimensional- it’s all perfectly rendered in the brain, but the primary personality navigating the information focuses light intensity based on need. You will always shine a light on the piece or person you need to move your internal dialogue. This is also true about perceptions of the real world. We take in trillions of bit of information, but only a tenth gets uploaded into our conscious awareness, and less than that is utilized by the primary personality. The personality is a filter system for regulating information, information that has been personified through the use of language.
Thinking of it this way almost invariably leads to the materialistic view that we are an illusion at best, a hallucination at worse. Some of this is the trap of the language. Some of it is the paradigm we live in. You could probably spend a lifetime reading books from neurologist, predominantly advocating we are only our brain and when that is gone, that is it. There are those that advocate for something more. I am in that camp. There is something more. The goal of this book isn’t to convince you that there is something more, but to try and illustrate just how complicated this thing we call us is. How complicated and heated the debates have been should tell you something. Science job is to simplify things, to break things down into constituent parts and explain functionality- but the more we try to break down the brain and consciousness- the greater the complexity arises. For example, are you aware that you are not ‘aware’ in real time? If you really think about it, it makes sense. It takes time for the senses to move information, for the brain to collect, collate, process, and deliver to the right centers to either be uploaded into the consciousness or ignored. Science has measured that time. It can take anywhere from 80 milliseconds upwards to 3 seconds. If you don’t struggle with hearing that, you’re missing some super strong implications. That alone implies we are an illusion.
There is no doubt about that information. People were studied making decisions in fMRI machines. The tech knew what the subjects decided prior to the subjects knowing what he were going to decide. You can read about this in Michael Gazzaniga’s book ‘Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain.’ Also in this book is another fascinating study involving people who had their corpus callosum severed due to stop seizures. In short, the interesting thing that came out of that was that it appears as if each half of the brain had its own personality. If you didn’t know, the left hemisphere of the brain speaks language and controls the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere controls the left side- and is effectively mute. It can spell. Scientist are very clever and they figured out how to give right brain messages and ask it questions, and the personality of the right was radically different than the left.
More interesting, they could tell the right hemisphere to do something that left hemisphere was not privy to, and when the left hemisphere was asked why are you doing this, they always gave an answer- and it was always wrong. Not once did the left hemisphere say, “I am not sure” or “I don’t know.”
Even without our brains being cut down the middle, we almost always have an answer, and we’re almost always convinced that our understanding of a thing is right. It is almost always not. Or at least not complete. We can always have a little more clarity. Some of that is learning to ask better questions. Some of that is learning to have better dialogue. Shad Helmstetter in his book, “What to Say When you Talk to Yourself” is a great book for changing inner dialogue. I consider this the ‘how to’ book, but I usually couple it with a harder book by Albert Ellis, “Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better.” It is REBT, and my preferred way of processing information.