In a recent session, a young woman shared a persistent thought: “whatever I start, I’ll give up on it.” As we explored that phrase, she discovered that it was not hers. It was the echo of her mother’s voice, who on many occasions had criticised her for leaving something unfinished. Although she herself recognised that there were external factors involved, over time she had adopted her mother’s voice as a characteristic of her own.
Often, if we trace back the history of our automatic and repetitive thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, we will encounter the voices and attitudes of significant people in our lives (parents, teachers and other adults) that over time turned into personal convictions. We will find voices like the ones that told us off or criticised us for what we did not manage to do. Voices we heard so many times that we gradually internalised them, believing them to be our own. From the perspective of existential psychotherapy, this internalisation can distance a person from authentic communication with their own voice.
A very interesting and classic experiment connected with all this concerns the self-fulfilling prophecy. A psychologist, wanting to study this phenomenon, visited a school and measured the children’s intelligence with a series of tests. He then pointed out to a class teacher certain pupils who had a high IQ. Trusting the psychologist’s words, the teacher behaved accordingly, and at the end of the year the researcher returned to the school to measure the children’s intelligence again. What this experiment shows us very clearly and simply is that the teacher’s expectations about the more intelligent children were confirmed: the children the psychologist had identified had indeed improved on the repeated intelligence tests. The detail that overturns this otherwise expected outcome, however, is that the psychologist had chosen the children at random. The ones he singled out as more intelligent were no more intelligent than the rest, nor had they shown any particular talent or aptitude. This experiment shows us that when someone gives us opportunities, space, time and belief in us, we can develop and succeed.
Other people’s expectations are gradually internalised, and what others expect of us often turns into an inner conviction. So when we have no external support along with the belief that we can manage, we often struggle to take risks. If we think we will not manage, or that we will give up, then we are more likely not to start something at all — and so to stay exactly where we are. We sabotage our effort before it has even begun, and in this way confirm our thoughts, perhaps because no one believed in us or encouraged us adequately.
Moreover, when our brain identifies something negative, it tends to notice and collect the evidence that confirms that position and to ignore any evidence that contradicts it. This is what is known as negativity bias, which works against alternative experiences and shows that negative experiences and information often have a greater psychological impact than positive ones. From an evolutionary perspective, this tendency appears to be connected with the human organism’s need to identify possible threats in the environment quickly, in order to ensure survival.
None of this, of course, is deterministic. Given neuroplasticity, we have the capacity to recognise and change everything that was formed in ways that limit our possibilities. From an existential perspective, a person is not a static object but a continuous possibility. As Sartre put it, what matters is not so much what was done to us, but what we do with what was done to us. Recognising where all the different voices we hear internally come from is the first step towards beginning to distinguish our own.
