I’ve been meaning to bring this up with a therapist or something for several years, and I don’t remember having gotten to it. Ever since I can remember, my internal narrative rarely uses the first person singular. It usually says “you” or “we” instead. When I first went off to college, the voice that said “you” (note that this is an internal voice, not an external voice) was especially mean, and constantly screamed at me that I was the most evil thing that had ever lived and should definitely self-injure and/or kill myself, not that it would exactly solve the problem but it would be the least I could do. Everything was an emergency. If I got the slightest bit behind in class or made any kind of social mistake, there was no coming back from it ever and no hope that it could eventually be made right. It was also the most verbose of the voices.
The voice that said “I” was crushed by this, and begged the “you” voice to please not kill us and make us hurt ourselves. It was like a little kid that just wanted to be nice to themselves and probably eat apple-flavored jolly ranchers or something. Not necessarily the most productive in terms of school, but it was hard to say what it would do if it could have been separated from the “you” voice that absolutely hated her.
Then, every once in a while, there was a brief moment of relief. A really, really beat-down “we” voice would come in and sigh that maybe it wasn’t that bad, and it’s not like we were a good person but maybe we could relax just enough to get through what we had to get through first and then go back to hating ourselves.
As an adolescent, I was exposed to some weird content because my mom gave me textbooks for homeschool. She never proofread any of them, and she definitely didn’t have any background as a school counselor so I wasn’t taking normal high school classes. So, for example, I was “in a Child Psychology class” AKA my mom bought me a college textbook on eBay. There was actually some excellent content in that book. I found out that teenagers don’t usually have imaginary friends, which was highly alarming. I found out that gender roles were a result of socialization rather than innate. There was a whole section on the Calvinists and how they were really mean to their kids. (My parents the Calvinists would have been especially horrified to find out that was in there.) I didn’t understand why the textbook never mentioned what caused me to stare blankly into the void for like 14 hours/day. But one day I got to to the section on Freud and found out about Id, Ego, and Superego. This made complete sense, and still is kind of the way I view my internal trialogue.
However, at some point after starting therapy in my 20s, I kind of figured out what the actual characters were. The “I” voice/Id was me, which makes sense because the “I” voice always seemed to have the final say in what we did. My therapist once was like, “You need to be in charge,” as though she assumed that the “adult” in the picture was the real me.
But the “you” voice, AKA the adult voice, AKA Superego, which desperately wanted all of us to die immediately and would do whatever it took for us to go out and do so in the most painful way possible–was never me. It was (and this will be a surprise to few but it was a surprise to me)… it was my mother. She was permanently throwing a hissyfit and everything was always the end of the world. There was never a way to solve problems or correct mistakes, and my implication that maybe we should try to do so just made her go that much more into orbit, because she swore up and down that I wasn’t taking the problem seriously. Indeed, according to “Superego,” I didn’t take life seriously in general and I just went about carelessly and recklessly, never giving a thought to how my lackadaisical tendencies would have been my downfall if it weren’t for my mother alerting me to problems. She does not believe that I have an anxiety disorder. She does not believe that she has an anxiety disorder. She thinks that she is the only one who is rational and I’m just going around all gumdrops and rainbows without a care in the world.
Occasionally as a kid, though, my father would actually be present. This was rare because–for whatever reason–he found excuses to be away a lot. He got up in the middle of the night and went jogging, then left for work at like 5am (he was an engineer so he could show up and leave whenever he wanted as long as he did the work). When he came home, we were forced to have dinner as a family and it was highly uncomfortable because we all had a lifetime’s worth of interpersonal conflicts with each other and we were strictly forbidden from trying to resolve any of them. If I tried, I would be SCREAMED at so loud that I wanted to curl up and die immediately. So we kids were silent at dinner, mom would say a few things to pretend that everything was fine and she wasn’t seriously traumatizing all of us, and Dad had a few pre-memorized conversations that he would repeat verbatim. I occasionally tried to change the script because a lot of them were creepy as hell, but if I did that, then I was the reason we weren’t going to be on the cover of The Teaching Home, which was a magazine full of perfect homeschooling families. After dinner was finally over (15-20 minutes that felt like an eternity), Dad would either go lie down in his bed with his cat and read Reformed Theology books (which would have definitely fallen in the category of “Very Fucked Up” by my covert textbook), or go down to the basement and watch war documentaries while drinking beer. I preferred the latter because then he would chill out a bit and we didn’t have to be quite so quiet. He went to bed at 6:30 and he had insomnia, so if my siblings and I laughed or anything, Mom would come stage whisper to us about what horrible kids were were because “Your father. Is trying. To sleep.” This was an issue when he was drinking in the basement as well because sound traveled through the vents, but slightly less awful and we could get away with a bit of giggling.
So, anyway, if Dad happened to be around while Mom was having a straight-up apocalyptic hissyfit, sometimes he would help me calm her down. Usually I was her permanent appeaser so we wouldn’t all die, but if Dad was home and awake and I wasn’t able to get through, sometimes he would do me a solid and help me out. He agreed that the situation was horrible and life/reality was awful and ever feeling a shred of happiness or optimism was a character defect so severe that it would constitute an immediate emergency. However he would bring Mom (and thus the rest of us) from the absolute center of Hell to a couple of rings out. Sometimes he allowed for the possibility that there were action steps that could be taken to mitigate the horribleness of whatever I had done. So, Dad was “Ego”/the “we” voice.
I feel like the problem is that my brain outsourced Superego and Ego, which means that they aren’t part of me. They’re unusually cruel, which often leaves me paralyzed. But I also spent so much of my time as a kid trying to calm Mom down a bit, that I obviously wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire and I didn’t develop a superego that was part of me. So these mean figures push me to do things, and I’m not able to find my own voice that wants to do things because I want to do them. Instead, I do things so I don’t have to listen to the internalized voices of my parents telling me that I should definitely commit suicide immediately. Meanwhile, I’m nine years old and the one and only thing I want in life is for a caretaker to affirm that it’s okay for me to exist.
IDK, I should probably get that checked out.
