Blog Short #207: How to Tame Your “Mean Girl” Voice
Photo by fizkes, Courtesy of iStock Photo
How loud is the “mean girl “ voice in your head? And when and how does she make herself known?
You may not like the analogy of “mean girl,” but bear with me. You can refer to her simply as your “inner critic” if that feels better.
There are many ways the mean girl comes to life and gives you a hard time, but let’s talk about a particular scenario. You’ll recognize it because it’s so common, and you’ll find it helpful to know how to handle it.
It’s called neurotic looping. That’s the clinical name for it, but it’s pretty simple. I’ll walk you through it and tell you how to bypass it.
How Neurotic Looping Works
The Initiation
You have a negative experience of some kind, like arguing with a friend, leaving your keys in the car and locking it, or arriving late to work and getting an icy stare from your boss.
This is the initial phase.
The Reaction
You react to the experience, usually emotionally, accompanied by self-talk about what happened.
Let’s use the last scenario as an example. You’re late to work, and you get the icy look from your boss.
You might initially feel shame because of that look, followed by anger and anxiety. Your thoughts are coming fast to justify the situation.
Why is my boss so rigid? Really? Is it that bad to be late once in a while? I work hard. He’s being ridiculous.
Besides, the traffic was horrible this morning, and my kids took FOREVER to get ready for school. Am I supposed to be perfect?
This flurry of thoughts usually focuses on blaming yourself, someone else, or other circumstances. It’s an attempt to alleviate your discomfort with your feelings.
The Reaction to the Reaction
The third phase comes later, after you’ve settled down.
You’re back home, the workday’s over, and you’ve plopped down on the couch. You’re ruminating about what happened.
Only this time, you’re having a different type of reaction. You’re globalizing your emotions.
You’re thinking something like,
I’m a screwup. Why can’t I be more responsible?
Or maybe ,
My life’s a train wreck. I have too much to do, and I can’t seem to get out from under it. It’s like this every day.
You end the evening feeling tired, depressed, and unhappy with yourself.
Your “mean girl” voice has taken up residence.
The Trajectory of the Process
Now, let’s examine the trajectory of this three-part process.
Step 1: Something negative and stressful happens.
Step 2: You have an emotional reaction and a barrage of thoughts. Your thoughts are attempts to find a place for the feelings so you don’t have to feel them. This is where the process goes awry. You’re fighting the discomfort and looking for a way to project it elsewhere.
Step 3: Finally, you react again to your initial reaction by unleashing your inner critic – your “mean girl” voice – who pelts you with criticism, self-doubt, shame, hopelessness, or resistance.
Regardless of the shape that voice takes, you feel depressed, helpless, or anxious.
That’s the neurotic loop:
- A negative event
- An attempt to avoid the feelings via blame
- Internalize the situation by exaggerating and inflating your lack of worth or life circumstances.
Neurotic looping doesn’t happen every time there’s a negative experience. It depends on how you’re feeling at the time and whether you have tendencies toward critical self-talk, but it can happen to anyone.
It can also become a regular pattern that takes up much of your energy.
Let’s talk about how you can stop the process.
How to Stop Neurotic Looping
The First Intervention
The first two parts of neurotic looping run together, and you can intervene as soon as you begin reacting to what’s happened.
Your initial reaction is an attempt to avoid feeling the full brunt of your emotions, so the strategy is to allow yourself to feel your reaction fully until it begins to subside.
To do that successfully, you need to dispense with creating a narrative about what it means. This is the difficult step.
Returning to our example, if you arrived late and your boss gave you that icy stare, you would react emotionally. That’s natural.
And you’d probably have several different feelings like we mentioned above – shame, anger, stress, anxiety.
Allow yourself to feel them without trying to get away. Lean in.
That’s not easy, especially if shame or anger is involved.
The strategy is to feel and watch your emotions simultaneously while telling yourself it’s okay to let them wind out without trying to categorize or explain them.
Shame is especially tough to weather, but you can do it.
Don’t suppress your feelings, but also do not overreact to them.
The Second Intervention
When your emotions have calmed, and you don’t have the impulse to explain them away, it’s time to problem-solve.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Can I prevent this situation from occurring again?
- Are there any actions I need to take to repair it?
- And if other people are involved, can you look at what happened from the other person’s point of view?
Consider these questions without beating yourself up. Focus on using what happened to learn and make changes if needed.
I recently did something without thinking that caused someone else some distress. I felt horrible about it, but I made myself sit with that feeling for a while without allowing the mean girl to get in my head.
My self-talk consisted of only one sentence: “Yep, you did that.” I was uncomfortable, but I made myself admit and accept what I’d done. That cleared the way to decide how to make amends without sinking into extended self-recrimination.
When you use this approach, you eliminate the third step in neurotic looping.
You don’t allow yourself to loop back and continue ruminating and overreacting.
One of the most demanding challenges we all face is admitting to making mistakes and dealing with their repercussions without inflicting more punishment or blaming something or someone else.
You feel like that person sitting in a dark room with a spotlight on you, and everyone’s looking at you from the shadows. It makes you squirm.
But you don’t have to squirm. You can offer yourself acceptance and then make improvements.
You must allow yourself to feel your way through without the “mean girl” stepping in.
The Repercussions of Neurotic Looping
If you use a lot of thought looping, you’ll likely be chronically depressed or anxious.
That’s what the term neurosis refers to. It’s a repetitive pattern used to deal ineffectively with negative emotions.
Part of the problem is that we filter all our experiences through the lens of stories we create about them. Something happens, and then you construct a story about it and react based on it.
Everything you experience is funneled through your narration of that experience.
You do that even with your internal experiences. You tell stories about how you feel and what you think about things.
You create scenarios with entire conversations and then react to them as though they’re real.
It’s no wonder we love novels. We are novels to some degree, and we’re the authors.
The creativity aspect is good because it’s through imagination that we evolve. However, the downside is that the stories you tell yourself to avoid emotions, situations, and change can be damaging.
The task is to give your creativity full range, but in circumstances where that’s helpful and productive.
When it comes to your inner critic, being tuned into what’s most accurate is beneficial.
That requires keeping an eye on cognitive distortions while allowing your emotions to arise with an eye toward mindfulness.
You’re the feeler, narrator, and observer. Make sure your stories don’t take you on a neurotic tailspin.
That’s all for today.
Have a great week!
All my best,
Barbara