Noticing your inner bully can be tricky.
Have you checked in with your inner dialogue recently?
How are you talking to yourself?
What I’ve noticed recently… in friends, colleagues and clients… is that there’s been an uptick in awareness of a certain mean inner-dialogue going on.
Have you noticed this?
A mean voice that’s telling you what you’re doing wrong, why what you’re planning won’t work, why people won’t take you seriously etc etc etc etc etc…
For me, I had to really slow down to even notice this voice. I took an afternoon to do a silent retreat last week, and there it was.
An extremely mean voice running a constant dialogue of faults and failures.
“Woah!” I thought….”ok….well that’s intense….”
So the question is, what next?
It’s common to then get upset with this voice once you notice it, and to shout something back at it like, “hey, stop it!” (that’s the PG version).
Or try to battle it in some way energetically…
…push it way…
…try to make it shut up…
…tell it to leave you alone…
But the truth is that this inner mean voice, this inner bully, is an aspect of YOU.
So, getting mad at yourself for being mean to yourself is just adding more self-directed anger to the mix (this is so easy to do!)
And then from there, it can become a spiral of something like…
...I’m being mean to myself… AND I’m being mean to myself about being mean to myself… and I need to STOP being mean to myself about being mean to myself because it’s bad for me, or making me “low vibration” or means I’m doing life wrong…so I’d better stop, why aren’t you stopping?…what’s wrong with you?…
…until the voice that was trying to stop the bullying sounds EXACTLY LIKE the bullying voice.
SO instead, I suggest this practice to interrupt the loop:
How to Soothe Your Inner Bully…
When you notice that your mean inner voice is on high volume…
…no matter what part of the spiral you catch yourself in, either immediately, or deep in the self-bullying spiral loop…
…place your hands over your heart (or one over your belly and one over your heart)…
And say to yourself:
“Ok, I’m noticing what I’m doing. It’s ok that I’m doing this. I’m ready to stop now. Where do I go from here?”
And see what your system brings forward for you.
This practice will help you break the cycle and begin to create new patterns.
The earlier you can catch yourself in the spiral, through gentle mindfulness, the less momentum it will be able to gather.
But wherever you catch yourself, let yourself know each time that it’s ok. All of it is ok. It’s just time now to try something new.
(Yes! You may notice I’m using the same graphic as the last blog post. Why? Because it illustrates the hands positions + I like it!)
Some additional suggestions are this:
In the short-term…
Phase 1. Neutrality. Allow yourself some space from the information in that mean voice. View it from a neutral place. Kind of like background noise…
“Oh I hear you, there you are, hi” I see you over there, but I’m going to keep doing my thing.
Not fighting it will also cut off the spiral of self-bullying.
Phase 2. Cooperation.
Acknowledge that this voice actually wants the best for you (!)
It might not feel like it, but this voice is trying to keep you safe and on track, the best way it knows how.
To help with this, you can let this aspect of you know that you’re doing well and that you don’t need her to talk to you that way to be safe.
This way of motivating yourself may have been key in the past to helping you survive, move out of unsafe scenarios, and choose more for yourself..
…but now, you can acknowledge that even if this was useful in the past, it’s no longer how you want to treat yourself.
When you have the space for it, and it feels right, I would even suggest extending gratitude to this aspect of you for helping you get this far, helping you get to where you are right now, which is a place in your life where you no longer need this type of bullying to be motivated.
Reassure her that you’re safe and that this actually isn’t the best way to help you.
Perhaps you can even suggest ways to interact with you that would be more helpful.
Can you work together to commit to being even gentler...and even gentler than that…with yourself?
In the end, she is on your side. ✨
Longer term: Get curious about what’s driving this voice…
…experiences in childhood
…how your caregivers spoke to you or regulated themselves
…how you might have internalized tough things that happened in your life
….what subconscious beliefs you’re operating on
…the encoding of ancestral beliefs and experiences (i.e. epigenetics)
Etc.
This type of deeper work is part of what I offer support with as a transformation coach and intuitive healer. ✨
If you’d like to learn more about this type of support, check out one-on-one work here.
And if you enjoyed this practice, you may also like this guided meditation on self-love.
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