My feelings can lie about reality, but I don’t have to act on them

I haven’t been able to escape all of the dysfunctional programming from my childhood.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. It’s not that I haven’t grown emotionally and done a lot of psychological healing. It’s just that bits and pieces of the dysfunction affect me when I least expect it. I can feel like a normal and healthy adult when something randomly triggers things that I hope I’ve conquered.

“We own you!” the voice seems to hiss. “We tell you what to do. What to think. You’re not good enough. Nobody likes you. Everybody is attacking you. They’re disappointed in you. What’s wrong with you?”

Who is the voice?

It’s hard to say for sure. Whatever it is started with my narcissistic father. He was angry and critical and demanding with me. He taught me to be afraid. He taught me to doubt myself. He taught me to fear that I was being attacked and demeaned and belittled.

And even though he’s been dead for years, some remnant of his voice still lives in my head in a form I can’t quite explain or understand. But whatever it is, I can say one thing clearly.

That voice is a liar.

One of the most important lessons of life for me is that my feelings don’t necessarily reflect objective reality.

Fear makes everything worse for me. When there’s a simple disagreement that most people could handle in a rational and objective way, I can spiral into fear and inner panic. When I can’t give people what they want — or when someone else is pushing back against something I’ve said or done — my feelings can start screaming.

My feelings can tell me that this person is trying to hurt me. They can tell me that I’m under attack and that I need to strike back. They can tell me I should feel humiliated and shamed.

When this happens, I can react in one of two ways.

I can listen to the feelings and believe them. I can strike out in the ways that I wanted to as a scared little boy.

Or I can realize that I’m an adult and that I’m not under attack. I can accept that my feelings are not the same as reality. And when I can consciously do that, I often find that the humiliating personal attacks that my feelings told me about are nothing of the kind.

I can’t explain this to most people, because most people don’t understand what it means to consciously identify the different voices in their heads. Most people seem to believe there is one unified “me” inside of them which is voicing their words and feelings — and they don’t pay much attention when they occasionally act in ways that their executive function wouldn’t approve of.

It’s easy for these people to ignore their brief flare-ups, simply because those swings aren’t severe. But for some of us — who were abused in one way or another as children — the difference between the “normal voice” and the voice of extreme fear and humiliation is so strong that it’s easy to spot if we pay attention.

The truth is that I’ll probably live with this voice for the rest of my life. I used to believe that I could silence it with healing. Now, I just see it as something that I have to keep under control.

And here’s something else I’ve learned. If I do my job as a mature and healthy adult, nobody else has to be subjected to the dysfunction of this inner nonsense. I can quiet the voice and treat others as they expect adults to treat them.

But if I indulge my fears and my shame, other people will experience a side of me that’s embarrassing.

If I do that, I’ll find myself striking out against people in ways that leave them angry and hurt and confused. I’ll destroy relationships. I’ll make myself look like a fool.

Even though I’m not the one who created this dysfunctional programming, I’m the one who has to be mature enough to deal with it.

If you were the victim of similar childhood abuse — psychological or physical — there are a lot of things you can do to grow and heal. I can’t tell you how to get past whatever happened to you.

But I can tell you very clearly that your feelings don’t necessarily reflect the reality of the outer world. Learning that can often be the difference between acting like a fool and saving your relationships with others.