My headmates can send me intrusive thoughts, usually with verbal content, but sometimes visual. They use this means to talk to me. I can talk to them in the same way, by injecting intrusive thoughts of my own back over to their side, and sometimes they answer, but sometimes they don't. It's really up to them.
Therapists used to tell me that voice was “automatic negative thoughts” or an “inner critic,” but that never did sit right with me. There are several reasons that explanation failed to account for what I was experiencing:
The
first headmate I ever heard from, or at least the first I was ever able to
recognize internal communication from, told me she was my four-year-old self and also my abusive father. That's not something an inner critic would typically say. It barely even makes
sense. I learned a technique in therapy for dealing with these intrusive thoughts, called cognitive restructuring. It didn't work. If I tried to override the thoughts with a more affirming or beneficial narrative, they would hear me, and argue with me, and their arguments were coherent, and featured emotional content, from their side of the argument. If I tried to state my position authoritatively, they would become upset. Plain old automatic negative thoughts don't become upset.
They told me facts about my
trauma that I didn't know before hearing them. This is also not something an inner critic typically does. Automatic negative thoughts usually don't include…
fact-like information. It's supposed to all be things like
fears and
desires and
insecurities, not like, “hey, you were raped, this is the only way I can tell you, here's how it happened, here's how I felt about it.”
When my mother died, I asked the one voice I knew about at the time why it had shut up and wasn't being mean to me anymore. It told me it just didn't have the energy after what had happened. It told me it was depressed. Not just that I was depressed. It was depressed. Inner critics don't get depressed. They get stronger when you're depressed. Then I reached out to that voice. Comforted it. Made it my friend. We had a whole complicated and coherent relationship that's really not possible with ordinary run-of-the-mill intrusive thoughts.
That was just how I first learned something more was going on than just what therapists were telling me. A lot more internal communication has happened since.