Geneen Roth On "How To Disengage From The Voice"

It doesn’t just take one book to make it last. Or, one time of hearing the message. It takes a lifelong commitment to learning about and caring for ourselves. Every moment of every day requires more and more consciousness and curiosity to not just get the message, but to live the message.

What is the message: That it’s truly important to listen to our feelings, to be conscious of The Voice (self-critic), to understand its origin and to question whether we believe what it says. If we don’t, we’ll continue to try to fix, rather than understand and be kind to, ourselves. We’ll continue to strive for perfection rather than settle into acceptance.

Geneen Roth, the author of Women, Food, And God, writes and teaches about using food as a gateway to foster a closer relationship with our true selves. Regardless of your drug of choice – food, shopping, TV or even spirituality (many of mine) – we try to numb ourselves from who we really are, from our feelings and experiences.

And while numbing ourselves from self-criticism, due to our lack of unattainable perfection, we don’t see our wholeness – beauty, strengths, failures, flaws, etc. We ignore the very thing that can help us disengage from The Voice, often because we think it’s too unbearable to face our imperfect selves with our imperfect feelings day after day.

As Geneen suggests, in addition to the original feelings or problems we want to avoid, we create a new set of issues by over-eating, impulse shopping or watching too much TV, which we can then obsess over fixing.

And what happens after a lifetime of trying to fix ourselves, when in our souls we know there is nothing to be fixed? Geneen suggests…rebellion. It’s why we fail every diet, every resolution, every attempt to fix the surface issue we have created to façade our deeper pain.

Exit stage: Feelings and Compassion. Enter stage: The Voice. The Voice – our supergo – has been strengthened by all the insane criticism we have begun to believe over the years.

The Voice isn’t even who we are. It’s an amalgam of the critics we have encountered throughout our lives. It’s society’s rules. It’s someone else’s sh#$, really. Well, I guess it’s ours now for as long as we believe it.

The Voice can permeate our every fiber. It becomes so loud and so prominent that we begin to mistake it as our true selves. What’s the point of even talking about The Voice? The sooner we learn how to disengage from it, the closer we get to our true nature. And begin to cultivate wholeness vs. perfection.

Once we actually allow our feelings to unfold and to move through the pain, we’d know that there is nothing to fix or change. No surface problems to create or obsess over. There is only “inquiry” – understanding our pain, unraveling its roots, accepting what we feel, etc.

Here, Geneen talks about how to begin to disengage from The Voice on Oprah.com…

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Q&A

Is this an experience you relate to in any part of your life? Thoughts, questions, comments? I’d love to hear how this article landed for you.