The Voice of Reason

I want to teach you a powerful tool to balance your sense of accountability, so you’re not busy trying to pretend you’re perfect all the time, and you’re also not blaming yourself for everything that’s going wrong in the world. 

Developing a ‘Voice of Reason’ 

The following exercise shows you how to develop your own ‘Voice of Reason,’ which will help you to start relating to yourself in a kinder, more compassionate and more realistic way. Whenever you sense that your accountability is out of whack – either you’re trying to wiggle out of something you should be taking responsibility for, or you’re beating yourself up over everyone else’s problems – use the following three rules: 

Voice of Reason Rule 1: Remember that Nobody’s Perfect, and We All Make Mistakes 

Instead of beating yourself up when you make an honest mistake, forgive yourself, and try to learn from the experience. Don’t stew over it for days or berate yourself for being a worthless idiot. 

I know I’ve already said this, but it really bears repeating: We all mess up and make mistakes. It’s part of the human condition. Only a robot could never make a mistake – but even robots occasionally break down and malfunction, so give yourself a break! 

Voice of Reason Rule 2: Treat Yourself at Least as Nicely as You Treat Other People 

Don’t let your critical voice say anything to you that you wouldn’t say to someone else you care about. If you wouldn’t call your friend derogatory names under the same circumstances, then don’t say it to yourself, either. The following example makes this point very nicely. 

Before you start beating yourself up and berating yourself, just take a minute and think how you would encourage a friend of yours who found themselves in the same situation. Wouldn’t you try to look for the good in the situation? Wouldn’t you try to show them how it could have happened to anyone, and that they shouldn’t take it so personally? Someone with good spiritual health habits would try to find a way to turn it all around, and to show their friend that it really wasn’t the overwhelming problem they believed it to be. 

Just as you’d do that for your friend, you can also do that for yourself. 

Voice of Reason Rule 3: Don’t Go To Extremes – Just Look for the Message 

God gave you a sense of accountability to encourage and motivate you to change and improve. When you pointlessly start beating yourself up for being less-than-perfect, or when you go into denial about what you’re really doing, you’re missing the whole point. 

It’s Normal to Feel – Full Stop 

Feelings and passions, and even negative feelings and passions, are completely NORMAL. The only people who can be superficially ‘happy’ all the time are the people who are taking mood-altering medications. Everyone else will go through a gamut of emotions every single day, as they react to all the different stimuli being sent their way, both for the good, and for the inevitably bad. 

If certain people start telling you that you’re over-emotional or over-sensitive because you occasionally cry or look a little glum, or that they’re worried you aren’t coping properly because you’re not 100% switched-on and ‘happy’ 100% of the time – the chances are very high that THEY are the ones with the real emotional problems. 

Emotionally healthy and balanced individuals already know that most negative emotions are not something to run away from, or to be embarrassed and ashamed about. They’re just messages from God, and they need to be addressed, decoded and dealt with. 

When the ‘Emotional Charge’ is Overwhelming 

While most negative emotions are nothing to worry about, especially once you know how to deal with them, sometimes, negative emotions have been building up in your subconscious for so long that they start to be debilitating or disturbing. 

It’s beyond the scope of this book to go into a big discussion of why that might be occurring, but when negative emotions come packaged together with an overwhelming ‘charge,’ the root cause is usually a disturbing event, experience or trauma (or series of disturbing experiences) that occurred in childhood. 

The adult you probably can’t even remember what happened, but part of your subconscious somehow got ‘stuck’ at that stage, at the age the traumatic experience occurred, and whenever something in your present life triggers that subconscious memory or feeling, you can find yourself dealing with some hugely uncomfortable and overwhelming feelings, without really knowing why you’re reacting like that. 

These types of overwhelming feelings can be disturbing and upsetting and can even cause you some notable physical sensations and discomfort. The good news is, as soon as you trace the feeling back to its original cause, and properly address it, your negative symptoms and physical reactions will usually disappear immediately. 

There are a variety of tools and techniques you can use to do that. You’ll find some of them set out in this series a little later on, and you’ll find even more useful links, information, techniques and tools on my website: www.spiritualselfhelp.org. 

Energy Psychology techniques like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT), to name just two of the most popular techniques out there, can help you to defuse overwhelming or highly charged emotions fast, easily and effectively. If you’re experiencing anxiety, panic attacks or any other overwhelming or debilitating emotion, I highly recommend you give some of these Energy Psychology techniques a try, before exploring other therapeutic avenues. 

Unresolved childhood traumas aside, let me say it again that:  Emotions… even strong emotions… even strong negative emotions… are completely normal and usually very healthy. 

They are just prompts for you to change course, or fix something, or learn something, or do something different. 

Unfortunately, these days, lots of people can’t handle emotions, even healthy ones. That’s why it can often happen that when you’re trying to open up to another person, you hit a wall of apathy, blame or aggression, simply because the other person can’t handle what you’re trying to share. If that happens to you, don’t feel bad or start to blame yourself! Simply change the subject and find someone else to talk to who isn’t scared by strong feelings.