Talking to Yourself.

kumar

Well-known member
When i was a teenager and i realised i was going the wrong way down a street i would often pull my phone out and say "oh hello, whats that? the complete opposite direction is it? ok ill be 5 minutes" before turning around
 
Hahah. Well this is it, even when we're talking to ourselves we're always talking to an imagined audience, sometimes it's a hypothetical stranger on the street, sometimes with my mum it's an imagined disorganised future self that needs whipped into shape.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i got fired from a restaurant cos i put a napkin in my pocket and someone thought it was a 5er tip so i had a good one id reenact every few months for a while after, where i would DESTROY the boss with Facts and Logic

I don't get it - you got fired for receiving a tip? (Even though it wasn't a tip?)
 

kumar

Well-known member
you were supposed to share them out, it was a sting operation orchestrated by the girl who worked the till she was intimidated by my effortless charm and wide eyed innocence, they called me in and showed me the cctv and instead of going "fuck off thats a napkin" i started explaining the plot of the thin blue line
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
you were supposed to share them out, it was a sting operation orchestrated by the girl who worked the till she was intimidated by my effortless charm and wide eyed innocence, they called me in and showed me the cctv and instead of going "fuck off thats a napkin" i started explaining the plot of the thin blue line

Sounds like a missed opportunity to put on a sheepish demeanour, say "OK, you got me", pull the napkin out of your pocket and solemnly tear it into several pieces, as even in size as you could make them, and hand a piece to every other member of staff who was at work at the time.
 
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WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Once upon a time, a lass I was seeing lived with a particularly belligerent landlord. He was a complete cock tbh, frustrated music journo forced into youth work for a variety of reasons. Total ocd type. The house was spotless. Everything had its place, woe betide anyone who fucked up. Passive aggressive asshole now I really think back.

So one evening, while he was making dinner, I sat down in the lounge to watch the footy that was on. Cunt was a Gooner from Leeds. Traitor. Game was meandering, tedious Arsenal & from the kitchen this bloke starts on with this virtual diatribe about a Human Resources manager he’d had a row with earlier in the day. Except he was continuing the argument, on his own, to himself, with himself, about how she should’ve done x & y & he was sick of her mismanagement over z. Except the whole time he was oblivious anyone was in the room next door.

Think I made a noise with something & the talking stopped. Cue 5 mins of the most awkward silence this human has experienced. Then he strolled in, like nothing was going down, watches the football with me for 5 mins, so I had to ask him if everything was alright at work. Didn’t wanna rub his nose in it. Then he disintegrated into a Rio Mayall character “Yes, actually, lots, and I how long have you been sat there ear-wagging? Who listens in like you just did?” Hissy fit over, just laid it out I thought he was on the phone. “No I wasn’t, i was talking to myself!”. Again, the polite route, explaining I just came down to watch the game, so what? No problems mate. Last time I stayed round that gaff.

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Always talking to myself, mostly shouting at myself for being so lazy and unattractive.

One of the things you said that most stuck with me over the years Luka was about being depressed and how you used to have an inner critical voice and you killed it.

It actually was one of the most useful things I've ever read and learned about depression.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The inner critic is a major factor in depression. If you can mediate with it, talk it down from unhelpful patterns, or silence it altogether, that’s no small achievement.
 

woops

is not like other people
The inner critic is a major factor in depression. If you can mediate with it, talk it down from unhelpful patterns, or silence it altogether, that’s no small achievement.

strongly agreed and this is why i think writing can be particularly helpful, as i was trying to explain in the poetry corner.
 
it can't be killed and it isn't all bad. it's a bit too cautious and a bit too negative and quite boring and myopic but it serves its purpose

i liked adam phillips take on this.. he explores the idea of the inner critic through freud and literature, you might get something from it corpsey

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n05/adam-phillips/against-self-criticism

Freud’s super-ego is more than just conscience, although it includes this traditional form. It also has other functions, one of which is – in a limited sense – benign. The super-ego is not only the censor or judge but also the provider and guardian of what Freud calls our ‘ego-ideals’. The ego-ideal, Laplanche and Pontalis write in The Language of Psychoanalysis, ‘constitutes a model to which the subject attempts to conform’. Once again, Freud prefers the multiple view: ‘Each individual,’ he writes, ‘is a component part of numerous groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up his ego-ideal on the most vari0us models.’ The ego-ideal is both composite – made up from many cultural models and influences – and divisive. It keeps alternative models at bay, but it can also be surprisingly inclusive. In this ambiguity, which Freud can never quite resolve, he is wondering just how constricted the modern individual really is, or has to be. In making the ego-ideal, at its best, the ego has over-interpreted his culture, beginning with the family; he has taken whatever he can use from his culture to make up his own ideals for himself.

But that other aspect of the super-ego, the censor or judge, Freud believes, is just an internalised version of the prohibiting father, the father who says to the Oedipal child: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ The super-ego, by definition, despite Freud’s telling qualifications, under-interprets the individual’s experience. It is, in this sense, moralistic rather than moral. Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral. Psychoanalysis was Freud’s attempt to say something new about the police.

We can see the ways in which Freud is getting the super-ego to do too much work for him: it is a censor, a judge, a dominating and frustrating father, and it carries a blueprint of the kind of person the child should be. And this reveals the difficulty of what Freud is trying to come to terms with: the difficulty of going on with the cultural conversation about how we describe so-called inner authority, or individual morality. But in each of these multiple functions the ego seems paltry, merely the slave, the doll, the ventriloquist’s dummy, the object of the super-ego’s prescriptions – its thing. And the id, the biological forces that drive the individual, are also supposed to be, as far as possible, the victims, the objects of the super-ego’s censorship and judgment. The sheer scale of the forbidden in this system is obscene. And yet, in this vision of things, all this punitive forbidding becomes, paradoxically, one of our primary unforbidden pleasures. We are, by definition, forbidden to find all this forbidding forbidden. Indeed we find ways of getting pleasure from our restrictedness.

But how has it come about that we so enjoy this picture of ourselves as objects, and as objects of judgment and censorship? What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism? Freud’s answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love. Fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love (incestuous love, or interracial love, or same sex love, or so-called perverse sexuality, or loving what the parents don’t love, and so on). We need, in the first instance, the protection and co-operation of our parents in order to survive; so a deal is made (a contract is drawn up). The child says to the parents: ‘I will be as far as possible what you need me to be, in exchange for your love and protection.’ As with Hobbes’s story about sovereignty, the protection required for survival is paramount: everything must be sacrificed for this, except one’s life. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security. But this supposed safety, in Freud’s version, comes at considerable cost: the cost of being turned into, by being treated as, an object. We are made to feel that we need constant critical scrutiny. We must be cram-packed with forbidden desires, if so much censorship and judgment are required. We are encouraged by all this censorship and judgment to believe that forbidden, transgressive pleasures are what we really crave; that really, essentially, deep down, we are criminals; that we need to be protected primarily from ourselves, from our wayward desires.
 
strongly agreed and this is why i think writing can be particularly helpful, as i was trying to explain in the poetry corner.

Any externalisation can break the boring cycle. Say fantastic wonderful things about yourself out loud to others or yourself and feel the swell, you can be your own soothing mother or chat yourself up and feel energy lift, posture change. I’m fucking brilliant me, really smart and good looking too. Everyone loves me, especially you lot.
 

luka

Well-known member
it can't be killed and it isn't all bad. it's a bit too cautious and a bit too negative and quite boring and myopic but it serves its purpose

That's your experience but isn't necessarily universal.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
it's fine as long as it isn't negative. a "bad loop". then it's rumination and is a curse. to sort that out use a mantra.
 

catalog

Well-known member
What's yr go-to mantra Matthew? Do you favour one that you cannot actually attach any meaning to, or ones that are more literal?
 

luka

Well-known member
I will allow the 'inner voice' chat, tolerate it, but this is primarily a thread about talking to yourself aloud.
Sometimes I make up little inspirational songs, just a rousing chorus actually, and sing them.
 

luka

Well-known member
All of it. I mean, how would you know, you're stuck in your own head, no one else's.
 
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