Tuning Into Yourself

+++ title = “07” date = 2019 +++

One of the hardest parts of therapy for me is when my therapist asks me to listen to my inner desires. It seems easy enough, and for most of my life, it seems that my inner desires have been pretty obvious and overwhelming.

But then again, I tend to seek out advice quite a bit for problems that only I could ever possibly have the answer to. Questions like, what job should I take? How should I handle this ambiguous situation? What car should I buy?

While advice from others isn’t unhelpful, sometimes I feel that I rely on external validation far too much.

Because if I’m able to listen to my inner voice, I can make decisions fairly easily. All of the people I ask for advice might say one thing, and my inner voice might say the complete opposite. So what do you do in that case? This is really tricky territory. On one hand, your voice maters, but on the other, can you trust it enough that you will shut out every external voice?

I’ve only recently learned to trust my inner voice enough to make certain decisions with it, but many people still don’t have a level of trust with their inner voice that they’re comfortable with. They’re the ones that will analyze and re-analyze every decision to the point of breakdown.

But if you trust your inner voice too much (as in, you never listen to anyone else), it’s possible that you’ll make regretful decisions. The voice is, after all, a part of you, but it is not you.

Maybe it’s best to maintain a healthy balance of skepticism and optimism when it comes to the inner voice.

For those quick and somewhat irrelevant decisions, such as whether to get salad or fries, we have our habit systems. Those might be optimal or they may be leading us down a dangerous path.

But for everything else, there’s the inner voice.