Chatterbox
Chatterbox is the name I have given to my negative inner critic. The badgering voice does its best to disrupt my inner peace and magnify to gigantic proportions my short-comings, failures, inadequacies, fears and doubts regardless of their veracity.
Psychologists call our inner voice ‘self-talk’. The critical inner voice is not conscience. It is the saboteur, the negative and well-defended part of ourselves that is opposed to personal growth and healthy maturation.
Twenty-five years ago I began the work of mastering my chatterbox. My out-of-control, running amok, negative inner voice kept me ruminating on the past and fearing the future. No present, no peace.
I launched an inner personal campaign to change my thinking style. ‘I can’t’, ‘I should’, ‘I have to’, ‘I shouldn’t’ were traded for ‘I can’, ‘I choose to’, ‘I want to’. Like boundary setting for two and three-year-old children, every time I caught my chatterbox using negative words, I changed them to positive.
I used mantras, repeated over and over to derail this powerful locomotive of negative thinking. One of my favorites, which I still use, is “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want….” Initially these efforts were not enough. I got a pair of headsets, plugged them into my bedside boombox and listened to Kitaro’s “Silk Road” for weeks and weeks.
Today my inner life is changed. Although my chatterbox is still with me and gets really turned up by any emotionally charged situation, it is no longer dominant, no longer able to rob me of present moments. This is really hard work, but diligent effort pays off.
I have inner peace to a degree I never imagined possible. I can actually be still and meditate without the obnoxious intrusion of the chatterbox.