Who are the voices in your head?

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

I’m in the dining hall, and I’m paralyzed.  It’s my freshman year of college, and I’m wandering around the cafeteria’s four meal stations like a deer in the headlights.  

At one station are hot meal options: lasagna, sausage and peppers, roasted potatoes, vegetable quiche, Spanish rice with peas.  

Then there are the made-to-order sandwiches with a selection of breads, meats, cheeses, veggies, and condiments.  Toasted or untoasted.  Mayo, no mayo, lite mayo, vegan mayo?  

Next to it is a salad bar with hard-boiled eggs, beets, sunflower seeds, sweet onions, roasted corn, shredded carrots, bleu cheese crumbles, croutons, and six different dressings.  There is a selection of soups: Maryland crab, potato leek, broccoli cheese, lentil.

In the back of the cafeteria is a row of bulk cereals: Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Corn Chex, Reese’s Puffs, four different granolas.  In the corner, three flavors of ice cream, including strawberry ice cream with chunks of real strawberries.  Next to that, a display of treats: fresh baked cookies, brownies, cheesecake, and gooey blondie squares.

My heart is racing.  I wonder what people are thinking as I shuffle aimlessly around.  I manage to smile politely at the kitchen staff as I make my third trip through the room, plate still empty. 

Outwardly, I’m in first gear—barely beyond idle.  But inside, it’s like a Nascar event.  Frenzied voices spin endlessly around the track of my mind—each one trying to get ahead of the other.  

Have the salad. You ate too much yesterday. There’s no harm in looking. Don’t let your workout go to waste. Hunger is an opportunity. Working out is a license to eat. Have a cookie. You’re pathetic. You don’t have the willpower you used to. You’re a better friend when you eat. You’re so fat. You used to be the skinny girl. You can be skinny again. You’ve already lost the game. One more binge won’t change that.

It’s a madhouse.  A complete madhouse.  They make it impossible for me to choose, so I make another round.  Then I stand facing the cereal, my back to the rest of the cafeteria, trying to breathe.  

It’s doubly hard because the decision isn’t just about this meal.  It’s about the trajectory of my entire week… of my life!  If I restrict, I’ll feel good for the moment.  But what about the next day?  And the day after that?  When do I stop?  I’ve played that game before, and there is no end.

But if I choose to eat, I won’t be able to stop.  I think I will, but I won’t.  Because as soon as I have the sandwich, I’ll want the lasagna.  And the bowl of cereal.  And the cookie.  

After years of not allowing myself even the smallest indulgence, the sensations of these foods on my lips and tongue are beyond pleasurable.  But they come with a side of guilt so strong that I want to literally rip open my stomach and tear them out.

It’s exhausting.  The voices are incessant.  The smells and the displays are overwhelming.  There's more food in one place than I’ve ever seen.  The pressure to figure it out and sit down with my new friends adds to my sense of urgency.  

Recently, I watched this TED Talk by Laura Hill.  Around the 3:30 mark in the video, she plays a recording of what it sounds like inside the head of someone with an eating disorder.  I’d never heard the cacophony of voices described better, or with more compassion.  For me, it’s spot on.

In the last article of “Who’s on your team,” I wrote about the importance of external support.  But it turns out that’s not the only team that matters when it comes to achieving recovery (or success as you define it).  There is another team that is just as important, and it exists within the very walls of our own minds and bodies.

This is our internal team, and you don’t need to have an eating disorder to experience the myriad characters that comprise it.  

It’s normal to have different, often conflicting, voices inside ourselves.  And it’s normal to struggle to choose which ones to listen to!  We are not failures for having competing motivations or for being torn sometimes.  This doesn’t mean we’re weak or noncommittal—it means we’re human.

Often, we try really hard to stifle certain voices on our internal team, to beat them into submission, cast them off, and disown them!  And who can blame us for trying—it’s a beautiful act of hope, actually.  

But unfortunately for most of us, denying parts of ourselves only reinforces the cycle of white-knuckled commitment, short-lived success, and breakdown.  And so we regroup and try again with the idea that we’ll do it “better” the next time.

If there are toxic influences on our external team, we can choose to let them go.  On the inside, however, distance is an illusion.  

So what can we do?

First, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for handling these different voices.  And I’m not a therapist or pretending to be one.  But I am an eating disorder survivor who has defied the odds and whose internal voices now sound more like music than noise.

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t arrived here by shutting certain voices out.  I played that game for over a decade before finally admitting that “trying harder” was getting me nowhere.  Counterintuitively, I had to let all the voices in—I had to learn about each one and understand what each was trying to achieve.

I had to soften my approach and get to know my internal team.  I had to realize that—unlike my external team, which I can shape (to an extent)—my internal team was here to stay.

It is counterintuitive—and scary, quite frankly—to have a face-to-face with the voice who is telling you that you need to binge, starve, vomit, drink, gamble, shop, or otherwise escape your own body and life.  Or to meet the voice that tells you how awful you are, how big of a failure you are, how hopeless you are.  To ask them what they want, to approach them with soft but certain eyes and whisper, “what do you need?”   

But when we can notice, accept, and (dare I say) love the quirks and conceits of our clunky but well-meaning internal team, everything shifts.  

Staring at the cereal in the cafeteria that day—and on countless occasions like it—I never thought I’d escape the noise.  I hated all of the voices because they paralyzed me.  Every decision I made required painstaking effort, and at the end of the day, it’s generous to even call them decisions!  More often, they were simply white flags, I-give-ups.

The process of getting to know the players on my internal team—to recognize their motivations and their ways of expressing themselves—took practice, work, humility, curiosity, diligence, and patience.  And to accept and love them is an ongoing effort.  But for me, it has been immensely freeing.

Nowadays, the voices are calm, like the surface of a lake.  There is movement underneath, but there has emerged a central self that can now moderate the discussion.  I can breathe above the water, while my body stays in touch with the push and pull of the tide below.  

In time, I’ve learned not to give each voice equal weight, but I also allow them to hold their space.  They are all beloved to me in their own way.

If you are curious or want to learn more about this process, please contact me.  I’d love to share some of the resources I found helpful along the way!