Your inner voices were once outer ones

She drops a glass at work. Before the shards have even settled, she hears in her head: “Of course. Who else.”

She did not say it out loud. Nobody else said it. And yet the sentence arrived so quickly and so naturally, as if someone had spoken it from the next room. When we slowed it down in therapy later, it turned out that someone really had once said it — not in the next room, but in a kitchen twenty-five years earlier, with the same sigh.

This is the second post in a series on the intrapsychic, the inner world in which what happens outside is translated into what we experience. In the first post I described what lives in that world. Here I turn to one of its most surprising parts: the voices we use to talk to ourselves, and how they moved there from the relationships we grew up in.

How outer speech becomes inner speech

If you have ever watched a three-year-old at play, you have probably heard them talking to themselves. “Now this block goes on top. No, not there. Carefully.” The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky saw something crucial in this: the child repeats aloud what adults used to tell them, and in doing so gradually takes over their role. Research on inner speech, reviewed by Ben Alderson-Day and Charles Fernyhough, shows that this out-loud “private speech” is most common in the preschool years and then, by the early school years, mostly moves inward. It does not disappear — it goes quiet.

Along with the speech, the tone moves inward too. If adults responded to a child’s mistakes with “never mind, try again”, the child learns to tell themselves “never mind”. If they sighed and said “of course, who else”, the child learns to sigh at themselves. Not because they consciously decided to be hard on themselves, but because that was the only language about mistakes they ever heard.

In psychology this is called internalisation. In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we stress that we internalise not just words and not just people, but whole relationships: who spoke, with what feeling, and what it was like for me to listen. That is why an inner voice almost never comes alone. It comes with the feeling that accompanied the original scene — with shame, with helplessness, with a lump in the throat.

Why we keep even the voices that hurt

The logical question is: if a voice hurts us so much, why not simply silence it? Why do we hold on to it so tightly, even when we have long known it is unfair?

The Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn answered this with an idea I find among the most human in all of psychology. A child, he said, cannot survive feeling that the people they depend on completely are bad or dangerous. So they would rather accept that they themselves are bad. If they are the bad one, the world is still in order: the parents are good, and the child just has to try hard enough. If the parents were bad, there would be no hope anywhere.

The inner critic is therefore often an old ally. It protected the attachment to people the child needed, and it gave a sense of control: if I criticise myself enough, nobody else will catch me off guard. I wrote about this at length in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from, and you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under the inner critic.

This explains why the critic does not back down when we try to win it over with arguments. It does not sit in the part of us that weighs arguments. It sits in the part that is afraid of what will happen if it stops doing its job.

Not only the critic

It would be wrong if this post left the impression that only harsh voices live in us. We internalise good relationships too — and with surprising precision. Someone whose grandmother stroked their hair after a bad mark and said “next time, then” often carries exactly that sentence inside, even the same smile. In therapy we often go looking for these voices, because they tend to be buried under louder ones.

John Bowlby spoke of a secure base — a person the child returns to when frightened and sets off from to explore when soothed. Once the child has experienced it outside for long enough, they begin to carry it inside. An adult with an inner secure base still feels bad after a failure, but does not fall apart. They know it will pass, because someone has shown them so many times.

When an inner voice sounds as if it comes from others

Inner voices do not stay locked inside us. Very often we also hear them in other people’s words — even when those people never said them.

Your manager says “could you take another look at this?” and you hear “you’ve messed up again”. Your partner asks “have you paid the bill yet?” and you hear “you can’t be relied on”. A friend does not reply to a message for two hours and you already know she is angry. The outer word is neutral, but the inner voice instantly translates it into its own language. In psychology we call this projection: experiencing our own inner state as if it came from outside.

This is not malice, nor oversensitivity in the pejorative sense. It follows from the fact that the inner world works as a filter through which we see everything. Someone who grew up with criticism has a very finely tuned receiver for criticism — so finely tuned that it picks it up even in static. Once, that tuning was useful, because it let the child step aside in time. Today it means an adult lives in a world that seems far harsher than it really is.

That is why, when working with inner voices, we often notice something that surprises people: when the inner critic calms down a little, it suddenly seems that others have changed too. The manager is kinder, the partner less reproachful. Of course they have stayed the same. What changed is the filter.

The reverse is also true, and it matters a great deal for relationships: what we hear in others we often attribute to them — and respond as if they really had said what our inner voice said. The partner defends themselves against a reproach they never made, and out of this grows an argument in which neither knows how it started. That is what the third post in this series is about.

How this sounds in therapy

When I explore inner voices with people, I do not argue with them. I try to get to know them instead. A conversation might sound like this (a composite, not a real person):

“When you dropped the glass, what did you hear?”
“‘Of course. Who else.’ But that’s just me. That’s how I am with myself.”
“If that sentence had a voice, whose would it be?”
“…My mum’s. The sigh is hers too.”
“What do you think your mum was feeling back then?”
“Tiredness. She was on her own with the three of us.”

Something important happened in that short exchange. A sentence that used to be “that’s just how I am” acquired an origin. It is no longer the truth about her, but a memory of how things once were in that kitchen — with a tired mother who was doing what she could. Once a voice has an origin, it becomes something that can be talked about. It no longer simply has to be obeyed.

Importantly, this is not a search for someone to blame. Her mother did not become a “bad mother”. She became a real person with her own burdens, who without meaning to left her child a sentence the child no longer needs. I wrote about this distinction in Family therapy is not a search for the guilty party.

Exercise: whose voice is this?

You will need paper and fifteen minutes to yourself. Choose one sentence you often hear inside when something goes wrong.

1. Write the sentence down word for word. Not a summary, but exactly as you hear it: “Of course, who else.” “You’ve ruined everything again.” “Who do you think you are.”
2. Listen to the tone. Is the voice angry, tired, mocking, worried? Is it loud or does it whisper? The tone says more than the content.
3. Ask whose it is. Does it remind you of someone — a parent, a teacher, a coach, an older brother? The answer does not have to come straight away. Sometimes it arrives days later.
4. Ask what it was protecting you from. What would happen if this voice were not there? Often the answer is: “I’d be caught off guard when someone else criticised me.”
5. Answer it in the third person. Write the sentence you would say to a friend in the same situation, and address yourself by your own name: “Maja, you dropped a glass. It happens.”

The last step is not a gimmick. In a series of experiments, Ethan Kross and his colleagues showed that people who talk to themselves before a stressful task using their own name or “you” instead of “I” feel less anxious and perform better. A small linguistic step back creates a distance from which it is easier to be kind to yourself. You can read more about why kindness to yourself is not the same as indulgence in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism.

Where this explanation falls short

I want to be careful here, because the “voice from childhood” story is so convincing that it is easy to apply everywhere.

First: not all inner voices come from parents. We also bring them from school, from our peer group, from a culture with firm opinions about what a body should look like, how successful you should be at thirty and how much you are allowed to feel if you are a man. Part of our harshness towards ourselves is also temperament — some people are more sensitive to mistakes from the start. If we look for a parent behind every critical sentence, we may miss that someone else wrote it.

Second: an inner voice is not the same as hearing voices. Everything I write about here is the experience of one’s own thoughts, which a person recognises as their own even when they sound foreign. If you hear voices that come from outside, that comment on what you are doing or give you orders, that is something different and deserves an assessment by a psychiatrist. This is not a matter of shame but of care — I wrote about when a psychiatrist is the right first stop in When you need a psychiatrist first.

And third: knowing where a voice comes from does not silence it. A voice built over years does not step aside after one insight. It recedes slowly — with every new relationship in which a person experiences that, when they make a mistake, the thing they feared does not happen. That is why therapy is a process and not a conversation.

What happens when voices gain an origin

People who work with their inner voices for a long time often tell me the critic has not disappeared. It still speaks up when a glass falls. But something else has changed: they no longer take it at its word. They hear it, recognise its tone, sometimes even smile at it — “ah, you again” — and carry on.

And beside it, another voice has grown. Quieter, slower, often assembled from pieces of people who loved them and pieces of the relationship with their therapist. A voice that says “oops” instead of “of course”. This voice is neither naive nor indulgent. It knows mistakes happen and that they need to be put right. It simply puts them right without shame.

In the third post in this series, Why the same fight keeps coming back, I look at what happens when these inner relationships step out of us and find actors in a partner, children or colleagues.

What to remember

• Inner speech develops from outer speech: a child first repeats aloud what adults told them, then it goes quiet.
• We internalise not just words but whole relationships — along with tone and feeling.
• The inner critic is often an old ally that once protected attachment and a sense of control.
• We internalise good voices too; in therapy we often look for them beneath louder ones.
• Talking to yourself by your own name creates a distance from which it is easier to be kind.