In the movie “The 6th Sense” a kid communicates with spirits that are dead or don’t know that they’re dead. The therapist in that movie, played by Bruce Willis, encourages the kid to talk with the spirits.
What I’ve found is that a lot of my own clients have conversations in their heads. We all have conversations in our heads, it’s a matter of becoming conscious, or aware of them so that we can then deal with them (We can actually change these if we want–totally doable). I’m not talking about people who experience schizophrenaform or schizophrenia. I’m talking about the average Jim, the average Susie, who is driving to work and having full on conversations with their bosses or coworkers about something that in real life, that conversation probably won’t happen.
One person with whom I was having a conversation said that the voices in her head were like monsters to her. Even right there in the room with me, for my client, there was another therapist in the room voicing all the things that she thought I might say to her. To be clear, there was no other therapist in the room, but a voice in my client’s head representing another therapist in the room. I was curious as to what this other therapist was saying, so I ask my client what the other therapist in the room was saying. After she told me, I was like, Oh my God, if that therapist were telling me this, I’d feel that way, too!
So then I asked permission from my client to share my response to the issue at hand (as opposed to the other fictional other therapist in the room). She said of course, and I shared my response which was totally different than that monster in my client’s head. “I knew you wouldn’t think that, but that other voice, it’s like a monster to me.”
Sometimes we think we’ll know what the other person is going to say to us. That might be true, but it doesn’t give the other person the dignity of his or her own process to respond to you in real life, real time. And like the conversation I was having with my client, she’d studied up on Freud and came to an “in the room” reality check that I’m, well, I’m not Freud.
What I encouraged my client to do was to talk to all her monsters (the other therapist in the room, the husband in her head, the boss in her head, the friend at church in her head, etc…). Sometimes I encourage people to tell their monsters to just shut the hell up (Often I encourage that to the Judge in people’s heads that judges them when others really aren’t). In that case, I also add seeing a Crossing Guard holding up a Stop sign while kids are crossing a crosswalk.
When I’m having those conversations with my monsters, I can retake control of the conversation. I have to become aware that I’m running a whole conversation in my head that’s just aggravating the hell out of me first. Once I become aware of the habitual conversation? Then I get to step in and say STOP. Shut the Hell up. I then get to change the conversation and tell me the truth about the situation or myself. I’m okay. I’ve been through something similar before, I will make it through now.
~ Jim