The Unheard Identity: Uncovering the Self Through Persistent Listening

“I can hardly hear myself think” is a phrase that is often spoken when we lose our ability to concentrate while we are in the presence of overbearing noise.

We are bombarded throughout our lives with the endless commotion of external “standards,” which have scant to do with producing excellence within us, as much as it they have to do with producing convenience for others. These “standards” that not only contain unrealistic edicts that we must aim for unattainable heights, but often contradictory and ever-changing whims that are impossible to follow. When we are repeatedly left trapped in such paralyzing double binds of intolerable humiliation, we not only lose our ability to concentrate on our thoughts, but also on our genuine needs and preferences.

In low-nurturant familial and school environments that are hostile to what we want, we comply in order to survive. So, in order to prevent each day of our childhood from becoming a new nightmare, these voices become internalized and continue to drown out the melodies of our true feelings and desires well into adulthood to keep us safe. Hence, as adults, with our sense of self still mute, we often become completely paralyzed when we are faced with opportunities and choice. Questions of what success and failure mean to us become incredibly difficult to answer.

These voices or protective alters have no sense of time, but they do respond when listened to. And over time, with persistent awareness, curiosity, and negotiation, they can learn to heed their protective layer of dissonance and produce a fine harmony of trust with the Self once again.

And once more we shall be free to ask, uninterrupted by an uproar of foreign expectations, “Am I doing everything I want at the level that I want to do it?” In being able to finally hear whatever the answer is to that question, no longer will our identity remain unheard. Once we hear it, it will never remain unexpressed.