Most of us have an internal running dialog that is unkind and unhelpful. This internal dialog creates patterns of rigidity, shame, or chaos that prevent honest emotional engagement with ourselves. Our internal dialog is usually future focused, orbiting around fear fantasies of increasing catastrophe. The spinning and re-spinning of these stories activate old traumatic emotions, but they cannot be released and healed through trauma story repetitions. In that state, we are fused with our thoughts. These thoughts tend toward patterns; a negative self-blame story loop (inner critic) or a negative other-blaming story loop (outer critic).
The story keeps us activated but suppressed. This is the very definition of a vicious cycle. Internally reactive to our own thoughts, which tend to be catastrophizing, we become full of emotional energy, and we can’t move it through our bodies. This will often produce a kind of chronic freezing—internally frantic and externally motionless. Overwhelm. It can be debilitating if it won’t allow us to sleep, to alight, to stop incessant busy-ness.
One of the gifts of a mindful meditation practice is the development of “The Witness”, a dispassionate internal observer, who is not fused with the thoughts, feelings, or worries that make up our incessant internal chatter. The part that observes with acceptance our contradictions and tempers. This Witness is “a neutral observer of your own life” (Ram Dass: https://www.ramdass.org/cultivating-witness/). Why is that helpful?
If the internal dialog is ‘the talker’, the Witness is ‘the listener’. It listens and observes with acceptance. It does not attempt to control: it allows and accepts our feelings, our thoughts, our actions, our judgements, our decisions.
When we are controlled by our internal dialog, our lives tend to shrink. We shrink from challenges, because they cause more internal disturbance. We shrink from relationships, because they demand compromise or vulnerability. We shrink from making important or necessary decisions because we convince ourselves that it is too risky. What are we afraid of?
We are not afraid of what is outside of us. We are afraid of the internal voices that condemn and shame, the regrets that chase us in the middle of the night, the toxic shame that steals our joy, pollutes our celebrations, and intrudes like a nosy neighbor who will not give us a moment of peace. When we become fused with our thoughts, these inner saboteurs rule our emotional states. If this state becomes chronic, life loses its joy as we spin ever faster on the carousel of self-loathing, self-blame, and self-isolation. Stephen Hayes, the creator of ACT therapy, calls this “cognitive fusion’. We are defined by a very tiny part of our human existence: our fickle thoughts.
Thoughts arise from the body. They are the end product of autonomic (dys)regulation. If we are regulated, in a calm alert state, our thoughts can be kind, accepting, or positive. Often in that state, a beneficial feedback loop is established: accepting thoughts produce positive interactions with the world, which produce further accepting thoughts. As long as our autonomic nervous system is regulated, our thoughts and feelings arise from core safety and connection.
When we are sympathetically activated, our thoughts will reflect that underlying physiologic reality: they will be fearful flight thoughts or they will be angry or resentful fight thoughts. We can wrestle with the “top down’ and try to change our thoughts, or we can learn to shift our baseline autonomic regulation. Mind Body Medicine teaches us how to shift baseline autonomic arousal. When in our ‘rest and digest’ autonomic state, our thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise from a body bathed in parasympathetic safety.
The Witness is developed though any daily mindful meditation practice. This is the simplest way of building this capacity—the capacity for dispassionate observation of our internal workings without judgment or shame. The Witness can be engaged when we feel overwhelmed with life or our choices… the witness allows us to ‘go meta’… like a bird we can fly above the fray and get a bird’s eye view.
DAILY PRACTICE:
- Any mindful meditation practice; guided meditations are easiest to begin with. Try for at least 10” a day. www.soundstrue.com has free guided 10” meditations.
- One Minute Mindfulness: practice shifting your perspective internally during 1-minute of deep breathing—go within and engage the Witness several times a day.
- Heavy work, deep pressure touch, and play all increase parasympathetic tone.
- Massage, acupuncture, human touch increases parasympathetic tone.
- Pet your 4 legged—giving and receiving love from a pet will increase parasympathetic tone.
- Laugh as much as possible. Laughter restores autonomic regulation.
- When grief comes, welcome and allow it. Let your tears flow, they will ebb when the grief is released.
The only way out is through….
RESOURCES:
The Nature of Compassion, Fear, Safe Relating, and World Change: Free series by Paul Gilbert