inner dialogue – Just the Tarot

Creating a Counter-Dialogue: A Gentle Approach to Healing Emotional Patterns

A look at emotional set-points and using guided meditations to counter a critical inner dialogue.

THE INNER BASTARD

Many people who grew up in dysfunctional or abusive families carry an invisible burden: a harsh, critical inner voice that tells them they’re not good enough. This voice operates just below the surface of awareness, subtly shaping thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Even highly successful, capable adults may find themselves struggling with a persistent sense of inadequacy—and not really know why.

If you were raised in one of those families, you know precisely what I’m talking about. It’s that Inner Bastard that’s always dropping discouraging nuggets into our thought streams. Things like:

I can’t believe you did something that stupid.

And

What in the hell is wrong with you?

And

You can’t get anything right.

And

If you were any dumber, they’d have to water you twice a week.

This poisonous internal narrative, formed in childhood, becomes the emotional background music of a person’s life. And because it’s so familiar, we may not even question it.

OUR EMOTIONAL SET-POINT

If that kind of a powerfully negative inner dialogue goes on long enough, it can become the emotional vibration that we default to. This is what Esther Hicks and Abraham refer to as our, “emotional set-point.”

The basic idea is that people live in an habitual emotional vibration for most of their lives and they tend to stay there. You may know someone who has a naturally sunny disposition and they’re happy 90% of the time. They may occasionally experience grief and pain, like we all do, but they quickly return to their default state of happiness. Likewise, we all know people who are dark, cynical and unhappy. They may occasionally feel great joy or contentment, but then they go right back to being dark.

If we have an Inner Bastard who’s always whispering that we’re not good enough – that we’re incompetent, stupid, or ugly – we become sad, depressed, and helpless. That becomes our set-point and we stay stuck in it. We have to somehow find a way to root out that inner dialogue if we ever want to be happy.

THE POWER OF COUNTER-DIALOGUE

But what if there were a gentle, practical way to begin shifting that dialogue without needing to confront it head-on?

Rather than trying to root out the negative inner voice through sheer willpower, we can begin to introduce a counter-dialogue—a deliberate stream of positive, nurturing messages designed to soothe and balance the old patterns.

Tibetan Buddhists refer to this as, “antidoting,” negative emotions. In their view, negative emotions are just like poisons that make us sick. So, if we’ve taken a poison, we need to take an antidote to it, right? If we become extremely angry, we can antidote it with a loving/compassion meditation. If we’re really jealous of someone, we antidote it by meditating on their good fortune and try to be happy for them.

For those of us who aren’t Buddhist monks, an easy way to do this is through guided meditations focused on happiness, compassion, or self-acceptance. You can find these for free all over the internet. My personal favorite is, “Great Meditation,” on YouTube but there are many alternatives.

These short recordings, listened to daily (especially at emotionally receptive times like morning or bedtime), can act as emotional antidotes to that negative inner dialogue. Instead of a nasty assed voice telling us how terrible we are, we substitute a calm, peaceful voice telling us how wonderful we are. With regular exposure, these meditative states begin to form different emotional grooves in the brain and happiness gradually becomes our new emotional set point..

EMOTIONAL HOMEOSTASIS: WHY CHANGE CAN FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE

But here’s where it gets tricky.

Humans operate by a principle called, “homeostasis,” and the, “stasis,” in that word tells you what it does. Homeostasis tries to make sure that everything stays just the way that it is. In the body, it maintains a normal blood pressure, makes sure our hearts beat a certain number of times a minute, keeps our blood sugar in a normal range, etc. etc. etc.

All in all, that’s a very good thing because it keeps our heads from exploding and our hearts from stopping and we live much better lives without exploding heads. Where it can be troublesome, though, is when we’re trying to change something.

For instance, people who are trying to lose weight may lose 5 or 10 pounds at first and then they suddenly start gaining weight, even though they’re still on a diet. The reason is that the brain is saying, “Uh, oh . . . we’re obviously starving to death. Slow down the metabolism. Retain fluids. We need to get fat again.”

In other words, our brains have come to view being overweight as, “normal,” and they try to keep everything the way it is. That’s homeostasis.

Just as the body maintains physical homeostasis, the subconscious mind seems to maintain emotional homeostasis. That is, it resists sudden emotional changes, even positive ones.

If your emotional “set-point” has been sadness or self-doubt for many years, your system may view happiness or self-worth as unfamiliar—even dangerous. This can trigger a rebound effect: you’re sitting there trying to rewire your brain by listening to guided meditations and your Inner Bastard responds by cranking up the volume of self-criticism. You may feel happy and light one day and then find that you’re in a deep depression the next. That’s your brain trying to maintain what’s, “normal,” even if what’s normal sucks.

At that point we have to remind ourselves that this isn’t failure. It’s the subconscious trying to return to what it sees as safe territory. Knowing this can help us respond with compassion rather than frustration.

HEALING THROUGH GENTLE PERSISTENCE

The key is to approach change with patience and consistency. You’re not trying to overpower the old patterns, but gradually retrain your system to accept a new emotional baseline. You’re building new neural pathways—ones that support self-kindness, resilience, and inner calm.

Over time, the emotional set-point begins to shift. The system adapts. The counter-dialogue becomes part of your inner landscape. And the old voice, while perhaps never fully gone, loses its grip.

In essence: you don’t have to fight the pain directly. You can begin to antidote it—with gentleness, repetition, and trust that healing happens not in one grand moment, but in small, quiet steps.

My new e-book, “The Alchemy of the Mind: Transforming Your Life With the 7 Principles of The Kybalion,” is now available on Amazon.

Doing Justice to Our Beliefs With Byron Katie’s The Work

A look at how to change our core beliefs using the methods from Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”

The Justice card in the Tarot is, at its most basic level, about society judging us, but there are few harsher judgements than those which we make about ourselves. And most of them are horribly unjust.

As Cynthia Kane points out in, “Talk to Yourself Like a Buddhist,” we say things to ourselves that we would never, ever, in a million years, say to our friends and family. When we really start listening to our inner dialogue, we may find little poisoned pellets like:

You’re so stupid.

I can’t believe that you fucked that up . . . again.

What in the hell is wrong with you?

Why can’t you ever get anything right?

Your problem is that you’re just lazy.

And on and on and on. The more dysfunctional that our family of origin was, the more likely we are to have that harsh inner critic constantly deriding us. Constantly telling us that we don’t measure up and we’re never quite good enough, no matter how hard we try.

Now, there’s a basic formula in New Age Thought that goes like this:

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create our lives.

When we break that down, it just means that every single thought we have has an emotion attached to it, either positive or negative. When we think of puppies or cookies, we feel good. When we think of dentists and written tests, we feel bad. Our feelings about those thoughts add up to create our overall vibration. If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us sad or scared, we end up with negative vibrations. If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us happy, we end up with positive vibrations. And, eventually, our overall vibrations will draw similar vibrations into our lives. If we have really negative vibrations, we’ll draw in negative people and failures. If we have really positive vibrations, we’ll draw in positive people and abundance.

It’s really cool when we figure that out because it empowers us to make changes. We can jump in at any one of those three points and start to transform our lives. Most of the self-help guides advocate one approach or another. If we change our thoughts, we’ll change our emotions. Or if we work on feeling happier about life, that will change our thoughts. Or if we meditate on raising our vibrations, that will change what we attract. Pull on any one of those three strings and our lives will start to change.

There’s one element that’s frequently left out of that equation, though, and that element is beliefs. We can change our thoughts, our emotions, and our vibrations but if we don’t change our underlying beliefs, we’re not going to get anywhere.

The classic example of that is the person who wins the lottery and two years later he’s bankrupt. Maybe he spent hundreds of hours visualizing getting that winning ticket and wrote out a kazillion affirmations and did vision boards and all of that helped him to win. But he didn’t change that underlying belief, which was, “I’m poor,” so the money floated away. It wasn’t a vibrational match for his basic beliefs about himself.

To put it in a nutshell, our beliefs create our thoughts which create our emotions which create our vibrations which create our lives.

Which begs the question, “What IS a belief?”

A belief is nothing more than a thought that we repeat over and over until we think it’s true. Sometime they ARE true, but frequently they aren’t. If we want to know what our real beliefs are, all we have to do is to listen to that inner dialogue. If we’re constantly degrading and belittling ourselves, then those are beliefs that we need to change before we can effect permanent changes in our lives.

So how do we change our basic, underlying beliefs? We actually pull them out and look at them.

One of the most powerful tools for doing that is Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”

To use The Work method, we take a, “work sheet,” (download one here) and focus on four areas:

1- What’s the belief that I need to change?

2- Is it true?

3 – What kind of a person would I be without that belief?

4 – What are some opposite turn arounds that I can substitute for that belief?

Here’s an example of a negative belief that a lot of us carry around: “I’ll never have enough money.”

IS IT TRUE? For most of us, it’s not true at all, at least for most of our lives. There are very few of us who have been homeless or starving. That doesn’t mean that we haven’t gone through some bitchy, bad times. There may very well have been times when paying our bills or even just buying groceries was a struggle. Still, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us, most of the time, manage to pull it together even through the occasional hard times.

Of course, one of the questions that we need to look at there is, “What do I mean by, ‘enough money.’ “ If we put together a vision board that’s covered with pictures of sports cars, McMansions, and private jets, we’ll probably feel like we don’t have, “enough.” If we think in terms of food, clothing, shelter, a car that runs, and a job, though, we realize that we’ve usually had plenty.

WHO WOULD I BE WITHOUT THAT BELIEF? Well, for one thing, we’d probably be a lot more grateful. When we actually focus on the fact that we have always had enough money to eat, enough money for a warm place to live in the winter, enough money to pay our bills, then we can start to see how very lucky we’ve actually been.

For another thing, we can start feeling a lot less anxious about the future. If we’re able to look at our past and see that there’s always, somehow, been enough, then we can see that there’s absolutely no empirical evidence for the idea that we won’t have enough in the future. It’s just a movie playing in our heads that’s based on a bad fantasy.

WHAT ARE SOME OPPOSITE TURN AROUNDS TO THIS BELIEF? The obvious one, of course, is, “I always have enough money.” Some others might be, “I manifest what I need as I go along,” or “The Universe always provides for my needs.”

Once we’re able to flip that basic belief, then some miracles start to happen. Our thoughts begin to be more positive (“I always have enough money.”). Since our thoughts have changed, our emotions start to change (“I really don’t have anything to worry about financially and I’m happy about that.”). Since our emotions have changed, our vibrations start to change (“I feel really secure, relaxed and positive about life.”). And when our vibrations change, then we start to create the life that we always wanted.

It’s a really good and relatively simple method for changing our basic beliefs. Of course, Byron Katie probably named it, “The Work,” for a reason, because it does take some work. It’s not just a matter of sitting down and filling out a sheet of paper. It’s actually taking the time to listen to our own thought stream, write down those negative beliefs, and then meditate on them as we fill out the sheets.

And changing negative beliefs is work on a whole different level, as well. We tend to cling to beliefs about ourselves and the world around us simply because they’re comfortable and they’re what we’re used to. When we adopt the very opposite of those beliefs, it can initially feel very strange and foreign. The negatives will keep popping up in our thought streams for a while, but we now have the consciousness to stop and say, “Nope. It’s not true, it doesn’t make me feel good, and it’s not who I am.”

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