Tales from the Dark Side

William R. Colagrande, MS

Have you ever noticed how often, as a part of daily living, we experience hearing critical and often very unkind thoughts in our heads, such as Oh, he’ll never ask you out or They’ll never offer you that promotion. While some of us experience them more than others, it does not alter the fact that these thoughts are discouraging at best and we often struggle to not come too much under their influence. Understanding and learning to master them is a critical skill we need to learn in order to be basically happy and healthy.

Hypercritical thoughts such as these have two very poorly understood qualities that are crucial to managing them. The first is that while we experience ourselves as hearing (receiving) these thoughts, we don’t really experience ourselves as saying (sending) them. It’s as if someone else were in our heads speaking to us rather than the usual way in which we experience our thinking. If you listen carefully you’ll notice the syntax is different: comments are directed to the second person singular, not emanating from the first.

The other characteristic is that they have an awful protective quality about them. By protective, I mean the basis of these thoughts is essentially protective, intended to keep us from further harm, pain or disappointment: She’d rather die than go out with you is a distorted way of saying: Take your hat and go home now before you expose yourself to further rejection, pain and humiliation. By awful I mean they seek to accomplish this end in an awful way: there is a benign element but it comes wrapped in a package intended to belittle, shame and humiliate you into accepting it. For example, the extension of the original statement might be something like this: Who do you think you are anyway?!? You think a cute girl like that would want to go out with a big jerk like you?!? Give me a break! You are so stupid! I can’t believe what an idiot you are! Sound familiar?

The reason why these comments sound harsh is because their original content came from something we picked up in our early environment that had a stinging, caustic, harsh quality to it. This is known in the trade as an introject. An introject is a quality or pattern of thoughts or ideas that we take into our psychological selves whole, that is, without having assimilated it into our unique psychological makeup. Think of the difference between chewing up (assimilating) an apple or having a whole apple surgically implanted (introjected) into your stomach. In both instances the introject will make you sick. It possesses a harsh quality now because that was how we experienced it in our childhood. It began as a crude self-regulating system we developed in childhood that has managed to remain with us unchanged into adulthood.

This brings me back to my earlier point about our experiencing hearing these statements but not saying them. The task here for us is that in order to bring this harsh internal element under control, we must begin to establish a sense of identification with, if not having actually authored these statements, at least as having perpetuated them via repetition.

Should you want to work with these statements, try this. Think of a time when you were conscious of hearing these types of critical statements. Try to remember one or two of them. Find a place where you can be alone and uninterrupted for fifteen or twenty minutes. Take a pillow or other inanimate object and place it on a chair. Think of that pillow as representing the you who receives these messages and begin initiating statements to “you” like Who do you think you are? What kind of jerk are you? You think she’d go out with you/he’d ask you out? You are really stupid. You are the worst, etc, etc. Lay it on thick, being repetitious if necessary, but as sarcastic, mocking and demeaning as possible. You needn’t raise your voice, but if circumstances permit, so much the better. Soon you’ll discover your unique formula: just what to say and just how to say it. The difference is that now you are beginning to experience the power and authority of saying it and not the shame and humiliation of hearing it and that is a big difference indeed. The pillow can’t be hurt by what you are saying and you are undergoing an important cathartic and transformational process.

Most people struggle mightily with this exercise, at least initially. It brings up a lot of shame and humiliation to recognize the level of contempt to which we normally expose ourselves. You are probably familiar with the expression He can dish it out, but he can’t take it. In struggling with this exercise, the expression can be altered to read He can take it, but he can’t dish it out. If you struggle, be persistent. Even baby steps are going in the right direction. If you find yourself becoming self-critical during the process, employ those very words consciously and with venom against your pillow self, You’re so pathetic you can’t even do this exercise, etc.

The power exposed through this exercise was always within you, but as long as these notions remained introjected their power was not available to you. I have often compared it with the Dracula legend, a powerful, selfish and harmful force in the dark, but helpless and impotent when exposed to the light of day. Through working this exercise you can begin to dismantle what was previously introjected and incorporate it into your psychological makeup. In so doing you can discharge the harshness that surrounded the admonitions and gradually replace the entire mechanism with more timely and constructive statements commonly referred to as positive affirmations. That people want to go directly to the positive affirmations without having done their interior “renovation” work goes along way to explaining why folks often have such poor results when applying affirmations alone.

By ridding ourselves of these noxious introjects, we liberate their energy as well as the energy we had to divert to countering their effects. We emerge from an archaic bind and free up a lot of psychological energy to be turned to the pursuit of more conscious and more productive goals. It is potentially a very powerful tool in transforming our lives and our personal energy systems. Give it a try and you’ll see what I mean.

2007

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I’m always interested in hearing your comments and feedback on my essays. You can send them to be by e-mailing bill@i4hd.com