35 | Why Do You Replay Conversations in Your Head?

Why Your Brain Replays Past Conversations Welcome to The Messy Middle, the podcast for women navigating the raw, confusing, lonely aftermath of narcissistic abuse and emotional control. I'm Erica Leon, trauma informed abuse recovery coach, mom of five, and creator of The Six Keys to Unfuck Withable. If you're picking up the pieces, questioning everything and trying to remember who the fuck you were before you were so carefully erased, you're in the right place. Welcome back everybody, to the messy middle. It's so lovely to have you with me again. This episode is rather long title. Why do you replay conversations in your head? Subheading self policing and other mind fox. So let's dive in. Have you ever been halfway through cooking dinner or driving somewhere or standing in the shower and suddenly you're back in a conversation that happened three days ago? You're not really remembering it. You're replaying it word for word, like you're some kind of AI machine. You hear what they said, then what you said, then what you wish you'd said, then what you should have said, then you imagine what you'll say if it ever happens again. And sometimes the other person isn't even there anymore. The relationship might have ended years ago. They might have moved on. You might have moved on. And yet, somehow, your brain just keeps reopening the file. Like your mind has its own little Netflix subscription. And it never seems to replay anything good. It only ever seems to replay the conversations that hurt, never the lovely ones. Have you noticed that you don't suddenly find yourself standing in the kitchen thinking, oh, remember that really kind of thing my friend said three months ago? No, it's always why did I say that? Why am I such an idiot? Why didn't I challenge them? Oh God, I sounded so dumb. I should have stood up for myself. I bet they think I'm ridiculous. And over it goes. Your Brain's Exhausting Protection Strategy For years I thought this was overthinking. Back in the day, I thought it was anxiety. I thought some people were just why this way. Now I don't believe that anymore. I think something as usual, you're probably bored of me saying this, but I think something much more interesting is happening. I don't necessarily think you're replaying conversations because your brain enjoys torturing you. I just think your nervous system, again, is trying to protect you. It just happens to have chosen a really exhausting strategy. It's trying to mitigate harm, is trying to smooth out any way you could have unwittingly started a wave of comeback on yourself. The question I've started to ask women is not what are you replaying, but what are you hoping the replay will achieve? And if you just sit with that for a second, just do that. Because I don't know if anyone has ever asked you that before, but for me it was an eye opener. I asked it to myself. If you replay it enough, what's the hoped for outcome? Will you finally find the perfect answer or will you stop feeling embarrassed? Will you prevent it ever happening again? Will you somehow become so prepared that no one will ever catch you off guard again? Because if that's what your nervous system is trying to do, it suddenly makes perfect sense. It's not obsessing really. It's more kind of rehearsing, and it isn't rehearsing like for a play. It's not a performance, but it's a bit of protection for you and something else. I notice the conversations we replay, they usually have something in common. They left us feeling judged or misunderstood or ashamed or embarrassed or dismissed or not good enough or just somehow wrong. And that is fascinating because your brain isn't replaying the versation, is replaying that feeling. I know if I think of some of the most awful cringe moments in my existence, I can still feel your whole system getting hot and your cheeks going red. I can, I can actually just bring that back very quickly and easily. So it's replaying the feeling. It's trying to solve something that already happened. Almost as though if it could just edit the script, your nervous system might be able to relax. You might be able to have a rewrite of what happened and how that changed something, because it changed how you felt about you in that moment, and it kind of lived on. And your nervous system doesn't really ever relax when you find that you've replayed this 300 times and you don't have any more of an anesthetic to it than you did before because there isn't actually a version of that conversation that changes the past. There really isn't, no matter how many times you can replay it. We do a lot with my more advanced post abuse kind of recovery clients. When we get into the longer term, we do do a lot of the neurolinguistic techniques and the soft hypnosis where we can overwrite timelines like timeline regression. But that is another conversation. Is Your Inner Critic Really Your Voice? And I stumbled across something that completely changed the way I understand this. Because most of us grow up believing that that voice inside our head is US. And it's that internal dialogue. That's what we're born with. Maybe we call it our personality or common sense or conscience. And we never stop to question it. Why would we? It's always been there. It feels like it has. It feels familiar. So we assume, well, this must be me, right? It's inside my head. But what if it isn't? What if the voice you spent years calling my thoughts is actually just a collection of every person who taught you it wasn't safe to get things wrong? You were going to made be made to feel stupid or small or like you shouldn't have spoken up like you are taking up too much space. When I first started doing this work, I honestly thought the goal was to quieten that voice in your head because most people I meet have it. It's that voice, you know, the 10 gosh, the one that's constantly analysing you. It second guesses everything. It's always criticizing, questioning. And I thought the goal was somehow to make that disappear. And I do not think that anymore because I have tried every way until Sunday. With all of this, I have experimented on myself. I have experimented on willing clients and more than 20 years this has been a very interesting and very emotive topic that I have tried to get data, as I say, and data as most of you say on. And I don't think the problem is that there's a voice. I don't. The problem is most of us have never questioned whose voice it is. You think about it as your internal dialogue and it is not. Just think about it for a second. You wake up 1 morning, you're halfway through brushing your teeth and that voice says you sounded stupid yesterday, or why did you say that? Or I bet someone says annoyed with you because you're such a fucking idiot and because you've heard that voice for as long as you could remember. You don't even question it. You don't stop and ask. Hang on, who exactly is this talking? You just simply assume, well, it's me, why wouldn't you? It's inside your head, right? It happens when you're not doing anything particularly demanding of your consciousness. You will just be doing something regular like chopping vegetables, driving your car, doing laundry, folding. That's when I have a lot of that when I'm folding laundry. And it's not entirely you for sure. And most of us have spent our lives collecting these voices. Some of them were loving, some of them are encouraging, some protective. But if you've grown up around criticism or emotional unpredictability or perfectionism, people that shamed you or systems that taught you obedience mattered more than your curiosity, you have collected those voices too. That teacher who made you feel stupid for getting an answer wrong, or getting you wrong as a person when you were really young. Or the parent that sighed and raised their eyes every time you made a mistake or actually got angry with you if you spilled milk, The people around you called you dramatic. The church that might have taught you questioning was disrespectful. The workplace maybe worth speaking up, made you a difficult person or maybe a bitch. The abusive partner who convinced you that everything was somehow your fault. None of these voices disappeared. They just moved in. They stack up on each other. It is likely your earliest critic and then some. And eventually I came to understand and it genuinely was like a bolt out of the blue. I can remember exactly where I was sitting and I have no idea if out there in the wider world people have been talking about this or not, because when it was happening to me, the Internet didn't really exist in its current form. It is not your voice and making it be quiet is only a part of the story. Because after long enough, those voices, they just stayed put. They started talking, they stayed talking and sometimes using exactly the same words, sometimes carrying the same energy as the people who I hope you will be able to pull out. I'll tell you about an exercise later when we get to that part where you can hopefully try to dissociate this inner critic from your actual intuitive feelings which give you messages. So when you've had all of these voices, just whenever you're doing something unconscious, I don't know what research it is, but say that we operate mostly on a daily basis, 70% unconsciously. So we know how to do things so well that we just do them on rote, like driving and cooking and chatting and using the phone and doing our job or whatever. And so if you think about it, that is a heck of a lot of time, if that statistic is accurate, where you will be open to having the critics that lurk in your mind come to the forefront when you don't even realise that they're there. It is a biggie. How the Inner Critic Affects Your Physiology And so with all of these voices comes all that energy. It actually changes your Physiology. And this is something I will talk to you about a bit later because yes, you can reverse engineer some of those feelings to a degree by changing the way you're carrying your body. So I will talk about that too. But if you have all this running around in your system and now somebody disagrees with you at work, suddenly there's a massive chorus inside your head. Maybe I ever reacted. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe I need to apologise. And have you ever noticed how quickly that happens? It's like a torrent of ideas, one a little bit more panicky than the next, and almost before you've had a chance to even think for yourself cognitively. That's because it's not really thinking, it's just conditioning. And I think one of the coolest things about emotional abuse is that eventually the abuse no longer needs another person. It's almost like they've installed a malware where you really don't need them criticizing you anymore. You do it all by yourself. And it isn't necessarily that you hate yourself either, by the way. It's just because your nervous system learned that if it criticized you first, maybe you would get there before them, and maybe nobody else would have to. And if you could catch your mistakes before somebody else did, maybe you could avoid the shame, maybe you could avoid the punishment, and maybe you could stay safe. And can you see how intelligent that adaptation actually is? It's not madness at all. It's not self punishment really like everybody thinks. Most of these things are an adaptation to keep you safe. And one day it probably did. You are not crazy. It is a strategy. It's an exhausting strategy for sure, but it's a strategy nonetheless. And if you add perfectionism into the mix, I can't even count the amount of people every week who show up to me and my client roster with the perfectionism. See, and I'm one of them, but it's not really healthy standards. I'm not talking about just taking pride in your work and doing the best job you can do. I'm talking more about that belief that getting something wrong somehow says something about who you are. It's not I made a mistake, but it's I am the mistake. That is just a horrible burden to carry because every conversation then really becomes a performance review. And even if it's not outwardly happening with your mouth, it's happening in your mind. So every e-mail, I mean, think about the amount of communication we have in this life right now. Every e-mail, every text, every opinion, every boundary or awkward silence, everything's getting marked or graded and it gets filed away as like evidence. Evidence that you're a shitty person or a dummy. And no wonder you are replaying conversations because somewhere along the line there, you've accidentally just appointed yourself head of internal affairs. Always scanning. And then there's authority. And this one really fascinates me. Again, sorry, because so many of us were raised not to question. Don't question your parents. Just respect your elders. No matter what adults do, you have to suck it up. And you don't question them. You don't question the pastor, the doctor. You don't question your husband or your boss or tradition or the system. Nice girls don't do this. Good girls don't do this. And they have to comply and they have to smile and good girls keep the peace. So what happens when you're 45 and you finally disagree with someone? Your body doesn't experience it as, oh, I've got a different opinion and that's absolutely fine. It's going to experience it as I'm about to get in trouble. I'm about to essentially your nervous systems equating it with death. Because if you peel back all the onion layers to it, if in its primal sense, if you get ejected from the tribe of people that you were dependent on way back when caveman days, you would die. Extradition would mean death. So like my kids say, it ain't that deep, Mum. But actually this is, it really is. And it is an enormous difference because suddenly you're not just replaying that conversation because of what happened, you're replaying it because your body's still waiting for the punishment that I don't know when the other shoe's going to drop thing. And even if the punishment never comes, it doesn't really stop your body doing the things it doesn't. It doesn't stop it releasing all those chemicals for tensing everything up, for going into a bit of survival mode that probably should have only lasted about 15 to 20 seconds back when you were hunting for your dinner and all living in one place together. But now we're in it for much longer. It's very hard on our bodies and it's very hard on our mind. Shifting from Self-Policing to Curious Observation I do think it's a sad kind of invisible adaptation. Not that women have an inner critic, but that they've mistaken it for their own wisdom. They often genuinely believe, I know I did, that this relentless self monitoring, self policing, self editing is simply what being responsible looks like or a responsible adult or a good person or a good girl. It isn't. It's fucking survival and survival's been wearing this name badge for so long, I think that we forget that it was actually something that was hired in. It did not come with us. It's not a hardware and often my lovely peeps say to me, I just need to be less hard on myself. And yes, absolutely they do. I understand why they say that. But I don't necessarily think that's the first step either. It's not becoming kinder. The first step is becoming curious because before you can change that voice, you have to recognize who it is. And I have been teaching this now for almost a decade. You have to catch it first. You have to really isolate it. I often describe it to them as slowing down time, like they did at that Matrix movie years ago. I'm really showing my age here on time, where you have to almost bring your unconscious thoughts out into the conscious light and track back a little. Track back to what did I just say in my head that's made me feel like this? That sentence doesn't actually sound like me, but that phrase feels familiar. I've heard those words before. I often say to people that if you track this for two weeks, which is what I ask everybody who comes on board with me to do, to get a special notebook where they track these moments. So I'll give you an example. You could just be chopping vegetables or driving a car and there's nothing really wrong. You know, you're not in high state of stress or anxiety. You're just doing things on road like you do and all of a sudden you almost like skip a little bit of time. This happens to be a lot when unfolding and I've got 5 kids. You can imagine how many freaking loads of laundry I do a day, right? So that's probably the first problem we have. But you could be doing something like that and suddenly a little bit of time will have elapsed and suddenly you feel like shit. And if you notice your Physiology may have changed also for seemingly no reason. I really want you to pay attention to this. What happens? Your shoulders will slump, likely your head will go down. You'll be breathing maybe a little bit shallower or just breathing less. Your eyes will feel maybe quite heavy. And for some reason you just feel a big pressure on you, like a dark cloud. And you won't believe this. But what's led to that from nothing to that is somewhere between. I've read so many different statistics that my head hurts somewhere between 50 to 350 thoughts, Unconscious thoughts where you're likely shit talking yourself using the voice of your first critic and all the others building upon them, doing that until you Physiology and mood reflected it. And that can take mere seconds, maybe a minute for you to have all of those thoughts. Even if we take the middle number, say 150 thoughts that were unconscious talking shit about yourself, it could sound something like. And when I've asked my clients to isolate this, a lot of them do come out with a similar pattern. It's you know you're going to mess this up. You know all these dreams and hopes you have in your future, it's not going to happen because it's you. You can't do anything right. You're not enough. This, you're too much of that. I told you this would happen. You just can't seem to get it together. You're nothing without me. I'll tell you I'm the best you're ever going to get. And if you've ever dated or grown up with or had interactions with a narcissist, you will have had that said to you many times, almost like you're this charity case and they are so desirable and that stuff sticks in your head. So how on earth are you supposed to deal with that? Anytime you're doing something unconscious, you've got hundreds of thoughts just popping up like popcorn in your mind to actually have an impact on your chemical behaviour and your Physiology. This is something that I think is mind blowingly transformative if you can get a grip of it. So the first thing I ask people to do is while they feel like this, to very much notice their Physiology every time. And then this takes a lot of practice. Please don't think you're awful and hopeless if you don't get this the first time, but to really notice what is happening with your body, if you can just notice one of those incidents a day where you've caught yourself just feeling crappy for no reason really, and it changed without you really knowing what was in that space. This is that. If you can just notice one and then track back like a matrix hit, slow time down and think about what you heard. You might hear it in your tummy, in your heart, like as a feeling, and it might translate to words. You might hear it audibly in your ear. I guarantee you if you pay attention to this voice, within a week you will know who it is who's the main perpetrator because they have a vernacular like the person who taught this to you. This is incredible and it never ceases to amaze me. I love it. But you will easily be able to tell who it is. Some people know right away. I host workshops sometimes with hundreds of people on the call and so many of them write in the chat instantly who it was. And if that's you then great because you can definitely use that as a springboard to work on a bunch of things with it. But that is going to be your homework. It's just to notice where your Physiology changes, why you feel like crap out of nowhere, and then try and track back what you heard, what you felt. Maybe if you're very visual and that's how you imagined things in your mind, then what you saw. But if you can grasp this, it is a life changer. How to Disengage from Your Inner Critic So we do have to catch it. We do have to notice. And the moment you do notice, something does begin to shift. The voice doesn't just automatically disappear, but for the first time you really understand that you've been listening to someone else's opinion through your own ears and maybe then out of your own mouth, which I think is revelationary. And for me, one of those biggest moments in this journey is it's a bit of a quiet one. Again, they're stealthy, these ones. It's not this giant leaving the relationship and all of that. It's instead of believing what you're hearing in your mind from your inner critic, you've just become curious about it. It's a really different relationship, and in the end you want to disengage it and separate it away and speak about it to it like it's a separate being. You take away a lot of its power when you say my inner critic and a lot of my clients give their inner critic names. Maybe the names are related to the person whose voice they're hearing. Maybe there are a name which makes them laugh about the person. I've heard everything in my client roster, from Demon Pig to the Dark Lord. I'm just thinking of my client has Demon Pig and she is fucking hilarious. You know who you are, but once you have understanding that it's not you, you can say my inner critic or demon pig is saying that I'm worthless and I'll never amount to anything and I can't do this on my own. That is very different to hearing it and taking it in as the first person. You're really internalizing it then, whereas when you separate it out, it doesn't have the same sting. And that's just a first step, but it's a really good one. And remember, for years that voice has been narrating your life. And often that's why it feels so good to have somebody love bomb you in the first stages of these abusive relationships, because it might overwrite this bitchy voice that you've had forever. Maybe you've just never questioned it. Like why would you? It's been there for as long as you can remember. And if it says you're being ridiculous, you believe it. You think it's trying to help you be more socially acceptable. And that can only be good, right? And that's how we get taught stay in the lines. And if it says you shouldn't have said that, you believe it. If it says everybody probably thinks you're difficult or a bitch or a dummy, you believe it. And maybe you even examine the evidence because you, again, you've been conditioned to think that way and you may have mistaken familiarity for the truth because you've been hearing it for so long and they aren't the same thing. Just because you've heard something 1000 times, it doesn't make it true. It just makes it familiar. And we really need to question all of that, by the way, It's so hard, but worth it and absolutely entrancing to me. It's my favorite thing to just deconstruct all the bullshit rules we learned about ourselves, about society, about everything. Question all of it and think, do I need this? I'm going to throw it in the fucking trash, as that Lady says. Does it spark joy and familiarity? As I've said a million times, has a funny way of disguising itself as wisdom. It really does Think about it. Just think about all the things that because they're familiar, you just think there's something wise. I remember years ago when I first started noticing my inner critic. It wasn't subtle at all, by the way. It had opinions about absolutely everything. How I looked, what I said, whether I was good enough, whether I made a fool of myself, whether people secretly hated me or I was fucking up. And it was exhausting. But I did notice something one day that it just didn't really sound like me. I did not understand why at the time. It kind of didn't. It didn't because if one of my friends had walked into the room, I would never have spoken to her the way that voice spoke to me, ever. So why on earth had I accepted that as my own internal dialogue when it was doing nothing but shit talking? And actually, that is the kind of childhood I had too, so it felt seamless. There was no difference. That changeover from the voice in my head, which were my parents, to the voice in relationships felt exactly the same. And familiarity really did feel like safety. And once I noticed that and pulled it apart a little bit, separated them, everything did start to change. And again, it was not because the voice instantly disappeared. It just lost its authority. I knew it wasn't something that I needed anymore. It was really a rewrite override to whatever you want to call it. Process. I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It didn't stop talking. I simply stopped treating it like it was an expert. But Can you imagine if you had somebody following you around all day saying don't wear that? You sounded really stupid. Everyone's judging you. Oh my God, you're such an idiot. You're too much. Shut the fuck up. You'd probably think, wow, what a miserable motherfucker. You certainly wouldn't ask them to make your life decisions for you, would you? You've been like, Oh yes, that's awesome, sound advice, please come here. And you have a say in everything I do now. And that's effectively what we've been doing is letting that voice vote on everything from relationship to careers to bodies, the boundaries. And if you couple that with all the societal bullshit we get taught, I mean, what it's almost like, how do any women make it out of this? I really don't know. How are we all out there so awesome. It could be time we politely removed its voting rights, don't you think? And I don't mean we're pretending it doesn't exist because it's really more like it doesn't have our best interests at heart right now. It did Once Upon a time because it had to do things to keep us safe. And if that is what you grew up hearing, that is what you confused with safety and familiarity. But we don't need it now, at our grown age and the fact that older women are just most badass creatures on this planet. We don't need it. Also, there's another question I find myself asking people a lot. Questioning the Usefulness of Your Inner Voice It's not is the voice true? But is the voice useful? Sometimes I think people do get stuck trying to prove the critic wrong. And you do not have to at all. You don't have to stand in your kitchen. You're arguing with your own thoughts in the mirror. But you can just notice really, that's an interesting option in carry on making your cup of tea. Or you can have a little giggle at it and just be like, OK, move along. There is something really freeing about it. I think this is one of my favorite stages, actually, one of my favorite things to do with clients and one of my favorite things that I ever went through. It felt like walking through a door and seeing all of the sunlight was like, whoa, because you're not really trying to win an argument inside your own head anymore. And imagine what you can do with all that space. You're just deciding really who gets access to the steering. You have all of that energy to use somewhere else. And you know, I hate the healing word lately, but I really don't think healing is about becoming somebody who has never had self critical thoughts or doesn't, because I don't really know anyone like that. To you, it's not really about that. It's about recognizing that you have the thoughts and then you have choices also. Just like when you realize that you can be heartbroken, you can be all of these things and you can move at the same time, you can also change things and they are different. The thought arrives and that's an automatic thing. But whether you build a house around it, you can affect that change. And as we always talk about self trust, but this is a lovely place where it can really start to bloom. Just one tiny little moment where you hear the familiar voice say you're going to make a fool of yourself. And instead of shrinking, you just smile to yourself and think, oh, my inner critic or demon pig is talking, but oh, that he's not going to get his way. And that tiny little gap between the thought and your belief in the thought might be one of the most important pieces of freedom you'll have because it's where your own voice is just actually speaking. It's getting a chance to yap and do after years of freaking surviving what it wants to. And I love that separation of it. A Simple Exercise to Unmask Your Inner Critic And you know, I love a little exercise. So before you go and head off, I'd love you to try something. It's really simple, I promise. The next time you catch yourself replaying a conversation, don't try and stop it. And don't force yourself to think positively, don't argue with the voice. Just pause and write down the very first sentence your mind says word for word, no editing or softening. And then just look at the sentence and ask yourself who does that sound like? Not who am I blaming or who caused this, but who have I heard speak like this before to me? And you might notice a parent or an ex partner or a boss even, or someone back in your childhood at school. That comes up a lot. I think teachers do have a lot of impact, whether they know it or not. Well, maybe you'll just notice that doesn't actually sound like the woman that you're becoming, and that's enough. You don't try and fix it, just notice it because awareness is that beginning bit, shining the light on it, and it's off to that really good place where everything gets started. Because once you recognise that voice, you can decide how much influence going forward it gets to have over you. And if you're sitting there feeling uncomfortable and you're realising I'll I've been possessed in my brain by someone else all these years and you want to get it out, You don't have to untangle it on your own if you don't want to. This is exactly the kind of stuff I love doing with people in my one-on-one. And also, I believe yes, I have an inner critic whole section in the cymatic keys. And I don't think I am some genius who has all the answers. I just have thousands of hours sitting with survivors rebuilding their lives with them. I've become really good at spotting the voices that hide in plain sight under their pain for years. And sometimes it just takes one conversation for you to hear yourself a bit better. So if that feels like anything you would like to do, I've got all the details in the show notes. I would genuinely love to help. You can look me up there and see if any of that appeals. I'm sending you loads of love. And as always, if you have questions for me that you want me to answer in a future episode, please also leave them at the address provided. It's lovely to spend this time with you. Take care.