The Five Voices In Our Heads
One of the most helpful tools I’ve found in the Christian life—and in human life more broadly—is the practice of talking back to yourself. I first encountered this idea explicitly in the preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Commenting on Psalm 42, he writes: “Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they are talking to you; they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you?” This insight—that the voice in our head is not the whole of us, and that we have agency in our inner lives as well as our outer ones—is one I return to again and again. It is foundational to how I think about faithfulness, resisting temptation, and prayer. It also has striking parallels with more modern, secular ideas in cognitive-behavioral therapy. And it names a realit...
