Excessive Thoughts and Childhood Trauma: When Your Inner Voice Isn't Yours

Written by Roland Bal

Your thoughts aren't just your thoughts. They are often the internalised representation of what was taught to you as a child. If you were repeatedly told that you were no good and you took that on board, your adult self might continue to suffer the bombardments of guilt, shame, or self-reproach.

The trouble is that you see your internalised thought processes as part of self, and forget that, initially, they were a direct result of miseducation from a parent or caregiver. The voice that criticises you in your head isn't really yours. It belongs to someone else, and it has been living rent-free in your mind for decades.

Neglect, Abuse, and Internalised Thought Patterns

The thought patterns you have now aren't always the result of explicit behaviour, like the psychological abuse you might have gone through. Persistent neglect and the absence of care, love, and validation can equally create persistent thought patterns of unworthiness and self-reproach well into adulthood. The message doesn't need to be spoken to be internalised — what is withheld speaks just as loudly as what is said.

Triggers and reenactment of previous abuse and neglect can further fuel your existing guilt, blame, shame, embarrassment, or self-reproach — and reinforce your current reality through your continued belief in, and identification with, those default thought patterns. The thought feels true because it's familiar, not because it's accurate.

The voice that criticises you in your head isn't really yours. It belongs to someone else, and it has been living rent-free in your mind for decades.

Here-Now vs Then-There

When your trauma is activated, what happened in the past will associate to your unresolved emotions in the present. The difficulty is that you won't easily differentiate between what is happening right now and what comes rushing in as past emotional residue. The two collapse into each other, and the situation in front of you gets weighted with everything that came before.

This means that emotional residue keeps accumulating — through reenactment, and through new experiences, interactions, and circumstances — further overwhelming you. The work is learning to separate here-now from then-there in real time.

Harold's Story: A Flight-Fawn Response

Let me illustrate this with an example. When Harold was a child, his father was unsupportive — verbally and sometimes physically abusive. He would belittle Harold and was an unstable individual overall.

Harold's method of dealing with his father was to isolate and avoid where he could, or to anticipate and adapt if he had no other choice. His first response was to try to escape — flight — and if that didn't work, he tried to adapt through pleasing, the fawn response. The emotions he suppressed underneath those survival patterns are anger and deep sadness. His internalised thought patterns went in the direction of feeling unworthy, and quickly feeling guilty or doubtful about whether he had done the right thing in any given situation.

Doubting himself and not feeling adequate come up when he has a challenge at work, or when he has a discussion with his wife. He beats himself up for not being more assertive, and tries forcefully to act out in order to overcome his internal thought patterns. The attempt to overcome and the acting out do not address his deeper issues — and so he defaults back into guilt. The cycle continues. Because these patterns are so internalised, he is not able to link how he thinks day-to-day to what he experienced in childhood.

Working With Self-Reproach Somatically

When we work together, I ask him to stay with the feeling of guilt — but to be careful not to drown in it or try to escape it by judging it further. Hold it in awareness. Track the sensation of guilt on a bodily level.

Differentiating the Time Frames

Then I suggest he look at it from a wider perspective — not just as his own thought patterns. I ask: "When you allow yourself to go back in time, which person in your childhood would make you feel like you are feeling right now?"

With his eyes closed and his attention on the body sensation, he is directly accessing memory stored in his body cells — as opposed to trying to access the information cognitively. This gives him direct access to a part of his past. A memory of his father's behaviour comes flooding in, and he is aware again, on a visceral level, of the abuse he went through. Being able to relate how he feels in the here-now to what he went through then-there gives him a wider perspective and arrests the self-reproach. It also takes some of the edge off the guilt, when he remembers where those thoughts and feelings came from.

From Anger to Healthy Boundaries

Over the course of a number of sessions, we work on voicing his repressed anger toward his dad, allowing him to sit with the deep sadness of himself as a vulnerable young child. Expressing his anger as healthy boundaries helps him feel more empowered, gives him a sense of self-worth, reduces his anxiety, and puts the guilt back where it belongs.

By owning his sadness and reparenting himself, he begins to heal his core wound — by giving validation to himself, instead of continually looking for it outside of himself. It is the reestablishing of healthy boundaries and the containing of the core wound that pave the way toward healing.