Shifting your internal voices from chaos to chorus

Being clear, effective and influential with others starts with internal clarity and equanimity. Rather than ignoring internal ambivalence, it can be useful to lend an ear to those dissenting inner voices.

A recent Life Kit podcast (link at the bottom of this post) explored IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy, an intervention in which a therapist creates space for an individual to listen to, identify and sort through the cacophony of internal voices (conflicting feelings, thoughts, intuitions, etc.) that we all sometimes experience, especially during periods of stress. Once the voices have been listened to, empathized with and labeled, the individual can use critical thinking to decide what to prioritize, how to address internal concerns and what steps to take to create forward momentum.

While this episode focuses on IFS as a form of therapy, we can all use a similar approach to create the internal alignment we need in order to be in the right mental, emotional and physiological state to make plans, understand other people’s perspectives and influence others to move forward with us.

The “parts” that tend to come out in IFS therapy can be thought of internalized simulations (often almost caricatures) of people who have had an important influence on us either over an extended period of time (e.g. parents, siblings, friends or classmates) or in critical moments (e.g. a boss, colleague, customer, teacher or coach).

Pioneer social psychologist G.H. Mead referred to the self as a “social structure.” He argued that the individual sense of self takes shape as we figure out how we are supposed to interact with others through observation, emulation and reaction to their attitudes and behaviors toward us (and the world).

As Mead put it:

“Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is definitely organized about the social individual, and that, as we have seen, is not simply because one is in a social group and affected by others and affects them, but because (and this is the point I have been emphasizing) his own experience as a self is one which he takes over from his action upon others. He becomes a self in so far as he can take the attitude of another and act toward himself as others act.”

It might be fair to say that IFS enables you to assert influence over this self-creation process so that you are not passively shaped by it in ways that do not redound to your interests and aspirations.

Link to Life Kit feature on Internal Family Systems therapy:

https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/life-kit/id1461493560?i=1000673358429

For more on George Mead’s socially-constructed self:

G.H. Mead: The self is constructed socially

© Dana Cogan, 2024, all rights reserved.

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