What shall I write today?

So I write about boundaries and people pleasing and that mean little voice, but really they can be applied to all aspects of mental health.

That narrative in our head, it can cause us pain, it can cause us joy, or anxiety, uncertainty, fantastical beliefs, escapes from reality, creations of awful realties. It can project us into the future, a future that doesn’t exist but by the time that mean little voice has finished not only is that future a certainty but it has already happened, and you are firmly in the shame cycle. Stuck on rinse, repeat for no other reason than your own imagination, old patterns and the idea that because you thought it, it must be true.

It can stop us from living our lives, destroy our marriages, ruin friendships, make food the enemy, make love the enemy, hold us back, make us act impulsively without care or thought for others, for ourselves. It can make us doubt our abilities, make us believe we can run before we have learnt to crawl, let alone walk.

It’s power always amazes me. I am astounded how it is part of me, but also seems so without my control. I often joke about harnessing its’ power for good, as I so often use it for quite the opposite.

I have a narrative created by that mean little voice, one that tells me to quieten down, that I’m both too much, and not enough. It has been built over years, by many people, by myself. So it will take a while to deconstruct, to replace it with a more realistic version of life, of my self, of who I am. Not constructed by the fear of others, by the insecurities of childhood, or the sadness that gets carried around sometimes like a trophy and other times like a boulder, so weighted and heavy it could bury me into the earth.

There will be times that I think that I have it sorted and I will be on a role and then BOOM, out of nowhere, it feels, starting off quietly perhaps that little voice begins to tickle at my mind. Then a little louder now, it intrudes into my day, unwelcome but present just the same.

Because there is no quick fix, whatever the media says, or TikTok, or the just do these five things and then…

But there is resilience built and progression and small significant/insignificant changes and bad days, and good days and nothing days. And everything inbetween.

Talking helps. Because when you talk to others, you realise you are not the only one struggling, you are not the only one with these old beliefs entrenched in your behaviour. That moment when you feel understood is priceless, I know I have seen it many times on the faces of my clients. It’s a little chink in the shame, a little shift out the rut.