What Lies Beneath? Exploring Our Thoughts and Inner Dialogue
What stories are you telling yourself?
What if some of the thoughts you have about yourself are not really yours?
We all have an internal dialogue, a constant stream of thoughts, assumptions, memories and interpretations that can shape how we experience ourselves, other people and the world around us. Some thoughts may feel so familiar that we don't even notice them anymore. They can become part of the background noise of our lives, influencing what we expect, what we believe and the choices we make. Perhaps we become so accustomed to our thoughts that we experience them as facts rather than as thoughts. I'm not good enough. I have to try harder. I must please people. I can't trust anyone. I need to be strong. I should be able to cope.
What if we became curious about our thoughts rather than automatically believing them?
What might we discover about the stories we have learnt to tell ourselves?
Why do some thoughts become so familiar?
“ Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This phrase was first used in 1949 by Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist known for his work in the field of associative learning. It offers one way of understanding how repeated experiences and patterns can become established. Our experiences, thoughts, feelings and physical sensations are connected to patterns of neural activity, and the more familiar certain pathways become, the more easily we may find ourselves travelling along them again.
Perhaps this helps us understand why some thoughts can feel so automatic. We can find ourselves thinking the same things about ourselves, other people or the world without stopping to question where those thoughts came from. A thought can become familiar enough that it feels like a truth, when perhaps it is a learned response or an old way of making sense of our experience. This doesn't mean that we are stuck with the thoughts we have learnt. Becoming aware of our patterns gives us an opportunity to begin noticing them, questioning them and making different choices.
What thoughts seem to appear automatically for you?
Where did you learn to think this way?
Like emotions, our internal dialogue and scripts are created through experience, developed early in life as a result of the unconscious messages we received from parents, peers and influencers. These experiences can shape the decisions we made then and potentially the decisions we make now. Scripts may have been learnt through the visible modelling of how adults behaved, through the attributions of being told “you're just like…”, through suggestions, hints and encouragements such as “try hard”, or through the strokes of injunctions and counter-injunctions, with demands to not do or do things.
We absorb messages about ourselves and about the world around us, sometimes without consciously realising that we are doing so. We learn what is expected of us, what is safe, what is valued and what might threaten our sense of belonging. These messages can be very empowering, giving us confidence, resilience and a sense of possibility. Yet they can also severely limit our lives, particularly when we continue to live according to old messages that may no longer fit who we are.
What messages did you receive about who you were supposed to be?
Which ones still have a voice in your head now?
What stories do we carry?
Our thoughts can become stories about ourselves, and stories can become familiar patterns. We may develop beliefs about who we are, what we can expect from others and what is possible for us. Sometimes our thoughts are trying to protect us. A critical inner voice may have developed from an earlier environment where getting things right felt important. A belief that we must always be strong may have helped us manage times when there was little space for vulnerability. A tendency to please others may once have helped us maintain connection and safety. Perhaps some of the thoughts we carry have been useful at one point in our lives. They may have helped us adapt to our environment, maintain relationships or make sense of experiences that were difficult to understand at the time. The question might not be whether these thoughts are good or bad, right or wrong, but whether they still serve us now.
What if a thought is not simply something to change, but something to become curious about?
When does thinking become a way of avoiding feeling?
We can become very skilled at thinking about our emotions without actually allowing ourselves to experience them. Perhaps this is another place to ask: what lies beneath?
What is happening underneath the thought?
What feeling might be there?
What might the body already know?
Sometimes the thought is the first thing we notice, but it may not be where the story begins. A thought may be carrying information about an emotion, a need or an experience that has not yet been fully understood.
What happens when we believe every thought?
We can have thousands of thoughts, and not every thought needs to be acted upon or treated as fact. Some thoughts are memories, predictions, assumptions, fears, interpretations or old scripts playing themselves out. There can be a space between having a thought and believing it. In that space, we have an opportunity to notice what is happening and make a choice. Instead of “I am a failure,” perhaps we can notice, “I am having the thought that I have failed.” That small shift can create some distance between ourselves and the story we are telling ourselves. It doesn't mean dismissing the thought or replacing it with something artificially positive. It means becoming curious about it.
Is this thought true?
Is it familiar?
Where did I learn it?
Does it still serve me?
Can we change the way we think without forcing ourselves to be positive?
Changing our thoughts is not necessarily about forcing ourselves to think positively. Sometimes positive thinking can become another demand: I should be happier, I should be more confident, I shouldn't think like this. Perhaps the invitation is instead to develop a different relationship with our thoughts. We can notice them, question them and understand where they came from. We can recognise the patterns that have become familiar and begin to consider whether we want to continue carrying them. The aim is not to silence the mind, but to create more freedom around what the mind says. Perhaps freedom comes when we no longer have to be defined by every thought that passes through us.
What lies beneath our thoughts?
We can explore our emotions, our bodies language and our thoughts in any order that reveals itself to us. There is no single right place to begin. Listening is an opportunity to notice and to make a choice. Perhaps it is not about becoming somebody completely different, but becoming more aware of the parts of ourselves that have been shaped by our experiences, recognising what has helped us survive and what may no longer serve us. We can begin to question the scripts we have carried and the stories we have believed. We can notice which thoughts belong to the present and which may be echoes of something learnt much earlier.
