Recently there’s been a lot of talk about “internal monologues”, also called internal dialogues, inner monologues, the inner voice, and so on. Apparently the idea that not everyone has any such thing has surfaced recently and caused quite a stir. It seems people are freaked out that other people could be walking around without one. The thing is, though, I don’t have one. Well, I did, for a long time, and it was terrible, but I don’t naturally have one.
When I was a kid I did a lot of thinking. That’s what it was, thinking. I would become lost in thought and eventually someone – a classmate, a teacher, a parent – would say, “What’s so interesting in that corner?” or, “What do you see out the window that has you so occupied?” or, “Why are you staring at me?” My memories of this go back as far as preschool. I don’t remember it happening before that but admittedly, I don’t remember much at all from before that. At the preschool I attended when I was 4, the same place I sustained my first concussion when a bully pushed me head-first into a marble bathtub which lay in the bushes there for some reason and was treated as a piece of playground equipment, I remember noticing this happening.
My eyes would focus, I would realize I had been addressed, I would reply. The answer to all of these questions was always, “I’m not looking at that/you. I’m thinking.” That’s where it almost always went wrong. They would ask what I was thinking about. Sometimes I would have a ready answer: “I’m thinking about those birds over there”, “I’m thinking about lunch”. When I was younger this would be enough; nobody goes on to ask a kid, “What are you thinking about those birds over there?” Usually, however, all I could say was, “Nothing, I’m just thinking.” Things would escalate rapidly to deep mutual frustration because I didn’t know how to describe what thinking while not thinking “out loud” about anything in particular was like – because, like all children with something different going on, it had never occurred to me to question whether this might be something everyone else did or not. Even though I was highly verbal to the point of being criticized for it, I developed a reputation for being belligerent about sharing my thoughts and feelings before I even understood what a reputation was. With adults, it was very bad – they couldn’t comprehend that I was thinking in some kind of gestalt process and not in words, and I didn’t understand that they were expecting, and looking for, words. The comprehension gap was never identified and I was punished for being stubborn and withholding. I learned to do my thinking-zoning-out while pointed at books instead of windows or walls or just the air in front of me. It worked for a while.
I think it was when I was eleven that it got figured out, sort of. I wish it never had been, but I’m mostly healed again now. The adult who raised me came upon me in the house, staring out the window. I had been watching some squirrels in the trees outside, and after they left I just stood there thinking for a while. Like I said, I thought a lot as a kid. Now, said adult had undiagnosed problems and one of the more common symptoms was manifest that day. Basically, if someone said or did something this person didn’t understand, it must be aggressively investigated. “What does that mean? Why did you say that to me? No, seriously, you must have meant something by that. What are you trying to say? Tell me what yo meant by that!” I don’t know if the idea was that there might be hidden meanings, or if maybe the perception was that the other was being mocking, or if it was just a slightly psychotic obsession, but whatever was going on, it was strong. The problem was, if the answers were unsatisfactory, it became an ugly grilling as unto trying to uncover a lie, and ended in verbal abuse for showing such disrespect.
So of course this time I wasn’t prepared; I was caught out thinking, and badly startled by being suddenly addressed from directly behind me.
“What are you staring at?”
“Nothing; I’m just thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Listen to me! What are you thinking about?”
“Really nothing! Nothing in particular! I’m just thinking!”
“That doesn’t make any sense! Are you stupid? Just tell me what you were thinking about!”
“I can’t! I was just thinking! Not about anything!”
“Oh for the love of… TELL ME THE WORDS YOU WERE THINKING!”
“Words?”
“Yes! What the hell is wrong with you? Tell me the words you were thinking!”
“I wasn’t using any words!”
“What are you talking about? You said you were thinking!"
“I don’t think with words!”
“That’s impossible. Don’t tell me such stupid things. Nobody can think without words. You’re crazy. Now for the last time, tell me what you were thinking!”
Me, desperately trying to quantify any of the things that had been sloshing a-linguistically around my brain and babbling until the point of satisfaction was reached, “Ummm… There were some squirrels. They were playing. They were over there. One of them kind of fell but it caught a branch. They were cute. I thought they were funny.”
“There! Jeez, was that so hard? Why do you even care if I know you were thinking about squirrels? Why would you try to hide that? Stop trying so hard to be so weird all the time!”
And that, my friends, is why and when I taught myself to think in words all the time, so I’d have something to say when confronted. I do so wish I hadn’t made that call, but I was a kid and didn’t know any better. It snowballed, you see, and eventually I couldn’t stop. All my thinking was happening in words. One word after the other, slowing my thinking down, turning everything linear and funneled and blinkered. It was awful. Sure, I always had something to say to avoid a dressing-down, but it wasn’t worth this turgid, graphed-out world map. Mind you, I didn’t even think about it in those terms yet. I was just glad it was working, glad to have something I could use to defend myself without seeming defensive or desperate, both things swiftly attacked if perceived. It was years before I started to realize how much I’d lost.
Now that intense, continual self-work and constant practice has restored most of my thinking to its better, more fluid form, and especially now that this debate about internal monologues has sprung up, I’ve been doing some research about it. It seems that every one of my wildly-conceived ideas of what it would be like to have a “real” one (as opposed to the artificially-generated drone of words I armored myself with) is actually true for someone! I would run scenarios in my head about the kinds of things it might say or sound like, and the more testimonials I read, the more of them turn out to be true for somebody out there.
It should come as no surprise that these internal verbalisations are as varied among humans as are tastes, preferences, forms of personal expression, and attractions.
Some people really do describe – as I did – what is happening around them. “I’m walking to the store. There’s a curb ahead; I’d better step down carefully. Now I am doing that. There is a car coming. I will stop and wait. Now I can walk again. There is the store. I am going to buy bread.” Other people might do the same thing, but expand on it into other levels: “I am walking to the store. This store is better than the one I used to use. I like that chick who sells the cigarettes. I should quit smoking. There’s a curb ahead. It has a crack in it. I wish the city would get a repair crew out and fix things up around here.”
It turns out that there are people who really do have a dialogue with themselves. “Where are you going? To the store. Why have you decided to walk? It’s nice out and it’s not far. Do you see any hazards you should be alert to? Yes, there’s a curb ahead. Well, step down carefully, then! OK, I will.”
There are those who have a narrator, or several: “Our hero is now walking toward the curb; will he step down carefully or will he fall? Success! Look, a car is approaching! Will our hero see it? He does! In an amazing display of insight, he waits! He waits for it, and then he walks on.” Others seem to be dealing with straight up someone else, talking at them, and that one seems to come in the mean version and the narcissism-encouraging type. The former says things like, “Hey loser, why do you even think you deserve to see a movie tonight? Don’t you think you should spend that on groceries? Fine, ignore me, but don’t come whining back when you’re starving next week!” and the second goes, “Wow, look how much better you did at that than all those people over there. Isn’t it great how awesome you look today? I’ll bet they’re jealous! Maybe you can get one of them to buy you something. You deserve it.”
There are, I have learned, so many, many more as well. Choruses, storytellers, diatribes and harangues, singers and poets, minds whispering and minds shouting, and all of it words, words, words, words, words.
Amazing.
So how do I think instead? Well, it is and it isn’t without words. I'm just taking in what’s around me, how it’s changing, what actions and pauses are happening,
how things (colors, scents, animals, staplers, air) are interacting. It’s a gestalt experience. The things I know about each element exist there, just being knowledge; I don’t have to
DESCRIBE them to know them. I can feel conclusions forming and world-views constructing themselves based on the logical building blocks of reality but I don’t tell myself, in words, what these
connections and conclusions are. Across this do drift words; if I see an animal, its Latin name will flit across my consciousness, but so will an assemblage of non-verbal, only-sometimes-visual
memories associated with this animal type, such as others I’ve encountered and books I’ve read about them. Ideas might occur such as to include one in my next story, something like that. Other
words happen, fragments of things I’m writing, parts of conversations I’ve had or am planning to have. Often I “re-read” parts of books, “re-watch” favorite scenes from movies. I usually have a
song going in there somewhere. But I don’t need to talk to myself about it. Not about that. I do talk to myself, like everyone else I know, and often out loud: "Now, where did I
put my glasses?" "Oops, meant to go that way!", "Wow that's hot!" and I'll mutter the steps of a complex process, or repeat something objectively verbal I need to remember, like
a shopping list or directions to someone's house.
I know I'm not unique in this. But am I rare? I don't think there's been enough research yet to answer that question.