Kill The Goblins! How to Get the Negative Voices in Your Head to Shut up.

A tongue has no bones but it can break a heart.

Proverb

Out of the abuse I suffered throughout my childhood, the verbal abuse was the most pervasive. From the age of eleven upwards, after my siblings had left home and I was alone with my single parent, the daily diatribe about why I wasn’t important and why I was a burden screamed at me daily worked its way deep into my psyche. It imprinted on my subconscious, becoming a part of my internal dialogue that would repeat continuously after I left home at eighteen years of age. It caused disruption in every aspect of my life: relationships, friendships, and working life.

A series of nightly panic attacks in my early twenties that went on for six months, sent me into two rounds of therapy (twelve sessions each) where I learned some tools to try and find a balance again. Then somewhere in my late twenties, after terming myself ‘neurotic’ in a conversation, someone told me that the only person who thought I was neurotic was myself, and I started to become conscious of my negative internal dialogue and the negative scenarios I would enact in my mind: imagined arguments and conflicts with people around me. I realised it was ever-present, feeding my paranoia and envy of others, and leaving me feeling wrong, out of place, and disconnected.

After a breakdown at the end of my thirties caused by pressures in my external life (becoming a new parent, wife and being a social group leader) created a ‘noise’ of paranoid thoughts and voices in my head which reached fever pitch, I sought more help and returned to therapy, this time for six years. There I finally unravelled the voices that fed the negative internal dialogue and the cause that generated their arrival.

Up until this point I hadn’t thought my noisy mind was abnormal, but my therapist assured me it was indicative of a person living in high stress, introducing the idea that it was actually possible to quiet my mind. They helped me learn systems that I could put in place to break and stop them – if only for a moment – and change their trajectory from becoming overwhelming.

It’s taken a good ten years of solid, consistent and active work to reach this point, and I still can have days when the ‘goblins’ invade – a name I came across for the negative voices in my head when dabbling in oracle cards. Coined by Colette Baron-Reid in her Oracle Map Deck on card No. 5 (see the quote at the opening), she captured the essence of those voices in that name; describing the destructive trouble makers bent on causing mischief in the form of self-doubt, self-questioning, sabotaging self-trust and self-assurance.

Over those ten years I realised that the strategies I had developed weren’t just helpful to me on my ‘noisy head’ days, but to friends who also suffered. And when one of them suggested they might be useful to a wider audience, I decided it was time to put them in a book.

This book is written in two parts: the first covers the in-the-moment strategies that can divert your thinking at the point when you become conscious of negative internal dialogue; the second is for those looking to go deeper and try and uncover the layers behind the voices. The first part is for managing the symptoms; the second is for uncovering the root cause.

Take what works and leave the rest. This is simply a tool and a starting point.

A word about retraining your thinking

Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life.

Tony Robbins

Retraining the way you think isn’t easy, it requires determination and persistence. It’s about becoming conscious of what you are thinking on a daily basis, being aware of what is coming up in your conscious mind and observing it, rather than reacting to it.

Even in my teens when I was alone with my single parent, and they were letting loose on me with their life frustrations and making me the cause of them, I was aware it was possible to change how you thought and how you perceived life. I could observe my parent from an outside standpoint and see the mental patterns they were caught up in and repeating, and where they originated. I always believed it was just a matter of being able to see things from another perspective – however hard that might be in the moment.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand how difficult it would be to actually implement retraining my thoughts, because the older you get the busier your life becomes, and you don’t have the time to focus on your own behaviours and reactions, and unearth the thought processes and reroute them.

You have to go deeper to pull out the rotten core of what has been planted in your subconscious. Because it is that that feeds the conscious mind, and they run in an endless loop, until you break the conscious stream and literally replace the thoughts and words, and persistently do this, until one day your subconscious automatically starts throwing up those replacement thoughts and words automatically when you are having a bad day, to counter the negativity.

Yes, it can actually happen. It now happens to me quite a lot. I would say it has taken about ten years of consistent work.

But I didn’t realise my ability or knowing that I could retrain my thinking was unique. It seems most people didn’t have that kind of awareness and ability to self-reflect – certainly not at a young age. I believed everyone could do this, and they can, but for some (like my single parent) it can feel like an insurmountable task.

And it is exhausting, on a day-to-day basis having to constantly safeguard against falling prey to the negative internal dialogue. But I want you to know it IS possible; I have, for the most part, achieved it. And now, standing on the other side of what I refer to as a wall, one which I ploughed through to get here, it is totally worth it.

I do still read a LOT of self-help books (a guilty pleasure of mine) and still follow several of the strategies