Issue 80: Terminology Tuesday: Introjection
When the voice in my head isn't mine...and what to do about it.
In This Issue
Recent Issues
Terminology Tuesday: Introjection
Updates: On the Serial Memoir: Introduction
Food for Thought: Is Griffin an Introject?
Recent Issues
Fact-Check Friday: The Nonjudgmental Thing
This week's Fact-Check Friday is about the nonjudgmental thing—you know, the mindfulness concept that sounds simple until you actually try to do it. Turns out I had it misattributed. The exhaustion most of us feel isn't really a nonjudgmental problem. It's a negativity bias problem. We get into what that actually means, where it comes from, and what a brain trained by parentification, caregiving, or addiction recovery does with it.Terminology Tuesday: Episodic Future Thinking
In this issue, we look at episodic future thinking—the brain's ability to mentally pre-experience a future event, not just know it as a concept. My dad toured an assisted living facility, and the way he talked about it afterward sent me looking for a framework that actually fit what I was seeing. We get into how the brain builds future scenes, why walking through a place changes how we feel about it, and where the process can quietly mislead us.
Terminology Tuesday: Introjection
After a former workplace surfaced this week, the people and places I hadn’t thought about in years suddenly barged back into my life. The conversations I’ve had since then revealed the fear so many of us still carry—the lingering PTSD of working for someone I’ll just describe as mercurial: predictable in their unpredictability.
My nervous system remembered, for over twenty-four hours, the beliefs I had to carry forward just to maintain the vision of their company. I did it for seven years. And barely seven years after departing, I still have fight-or-flight impulses when I think about it. Back then, I didn’t have the language to know there’s also freeze and fawn, but we did all of them to go along and get along for our employment. I had taken that job after the 2008 recession wiped out my role in the architecture and building industry. I was desperate. And while I loved what I was doing, I abhorred the conditions under which I was doing it.
After I got my job at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, I shared with my new supervisor—one of my favorite people—what things were like and what I was trying to get out of my system. That I was coming from a place of scarcity in many ways. I told her how the small business world felt like the Wild, Wild West, and how much I was ready to embrace the rules and structure of a large organization. She made it so much easier. Slowly, my system got to relearn and re-trust authority. At least to a realistic point.
But that mercurial voice in my head remained for way too long.
It makes me think of the stories of religious trauma I’ve been hearing lately, or the strict, black-and-white thinking I was raised under—not even about religion, but just how to live a rigid, rule-governed life. Like when I reach for a shirt with loud patterns on it, I still hear the exact voice of my mother telling me that large people shouldn’t wear large patterns or we’ll look, heaven forbid, larger. Lately, I’m even catching myself saying things back to my dad that he would have said to me back when he was the one caring for me.
It’s wild. So what the heck is it? It’s something more than an inner critic, because an inner critic would be me. That would be an integration. This is different.
What Is Introjection?
In psychology, introjection is the unconscious process of absorbing another person’s beliefs, rules, attitudes, and judgments until they become a permanent fixture in our own minds.
Here’s a sticky way to remember it, because it’s something that’ll fall out of my head without a little crutch here. Think of the word introspect. To introspect is to look inward to examine our own thoughts, feelings, and motives. To introject is to take someone else’s thoughts and judgments and throw them inward (inject them!), letting them set up camp. When I introspect, I am exploring myself. When I introject, I am carrying around the ghost of someone else’s worldview.
If any of this sounds familiar, it might be because you've come across Internal Family Systems therapy—IFS—which has been everywhere lately, and which I'll be honest is still pretty new to me. I’m not sure how prevalent IFS is, either, but it’s fascinating. IFS treats introjects as exactly what they feel like: characters. It calls them "parts"—distinct internal presences with their own voices, rules, and emotional agendas that operate somewhat independently inside us. The idea of literally living with an introject isn't a metaphor in IFS. It's the whole point. And while IFS feels new to me right now, researchers have been documenting the neural basis of these internalized presences for decades. I’m listening.
And, I should note, introject is both a verb and a noun. To introject is to do all of what we’re talking about here. An introject is the one (or more) who lives rent-free in my head.
How It Gets In
We don’t introject just anyone’s voice. I didn’t take on the core beliefs of a random stranger in the grocery store. And it’s not about the small stuff—most of us don’t sweat that years later. The voices that persist tend to belong to people who once had power over us. Parents, bosses, religious leaders, partners, siblings.
We absorbed their rules because, at the time, it was required for our belonging, our safety, or our employment. When we are desperate or dependent on an authority figure, our brains do something incredibly efficient: they download that person’s worldview directly into our operating system. Freezing and fawning to keep the boss happy was an adaptation to keep me safe in that specific environment. But when the environment changes—even seven years later—the software keeps running.
How It Affects Us
The most jarring part about an introject is that it doesn’t sound like our own thinking. It sounds exactly like the person who created it. I hear my former boss’s exact tone. I feel my mother’s exact judgment. We internalize it to the point that it dictates our actions and shapes our boundaries, but it is not actually in line with our own values and beliefs. Or, we don’t know if it is, yet, since many are introduced as we’re still forming them.
When we carry those rules into our present lives, they clash with who we actually are. This is where the out-of-character reactions come from.
When an introjected voice flares up, we might suddenly act defensive, shut down, over-explain, or panic. From the outside, the reaction looks disproportionate. From the inside, it is a moment of cognitive triage. Our nervous system isn’t responding to the present reality; it is responding to the internalized authority of someone from our past. We are operating under a set of rules we didn’t write and don’t actually believe in, and that friction is exhausting. It drains our executive bandwidth because we are constantly negotiating with a ghost.
Where Else We Experience It
We don’t just face this in our workplaces or our families of origin; it shows up everywhere. We sit down to write, paint, or just try a new hobby, and suddenly a former teacher’s voice is right there, telling us we aren’t doing it the “right” way. We set a perfectly reasonable boundary with a friend, but a wave of guilt crashes over us because we hear a parent’s voice calling us selfish.
It happens in relationships, too. We go to make a decision about our own money and hear an ex-partner criticizing the purchase before we’ve even reached the register. Even in caregiving or recovery, we might finally try to take an hour of rest, only to hear the internalized hum of a culture that told us our worth is measured entirely by our self-sacrifice. In every one of these moments, the friction is the same. We are trying to live our actual lives, but someone else is holding the microphone.
How We Maladaptively Cope
Living with an introject causes deep cognitive friction. We want one thing, but the ghost demands another. And because that friction is so uncomfortable, we often develop maladaptive ways to cope with the noise.
Right as I was wrapping up this piece, I watched a wonderful Substack Live with Jenny Skoog and Dr. Deborah Cox. They hit the nail on the head regarding this exact kind of cognitive overload. They were discussing Jenny’s June’s book club pick, Wife Material: A Novel of Misbehavior and Freedom, which is Cox’s autobiographical fiction about growing up in the Church of Christ. They talked about the religious trauma so many survive and how, when the introjected voices of a rigid, shame-based system become too loud and the friction feels impossible to resolve, our nervous systems just power down. We freeze. We dissociate. It is a survival mechanism for when we can’t fight or flee the authority living inside our own minds.
Dr. Cox, who is a trauma psychologist and EMDR therapist, spoke about the therapeutic methods she uses in her practice to help people recover from religious and spiritual trauma. Interventions like EMDR help process those stuck, traumatic memories so that the nervous system can finally recognize that the threat has passed. It was a timely discussion to watch last night and I recommend taking a look at it if you have the interest.
Regardless of how, if we don’t process more of our experiences that bring the introjects as hitchhikers, we might try to cope by numbing the conflict. We might turn to old coping mechanisms—isolating ourselves, overworking, overeating, or relying on substances—just to turn the volume down. We try to sedate the nervous system because holding two competing realities feels impossible. Or, we swing the other way and over-accommodate the ghost, completely abandoning our own needs to perfectly execute someone else’s rules, hoping it will finally bring us peace. But it never does, because it’s not our peace we’re working for.
Remapping the Echo
Introjection isn’t just taking in someone else’s beliefs. It’s being remapped by them—without our knowledge, and without our consent. The work is reclaiming the map.
Think about what that actually means. The whole premise of what we do here is that our neural pathways can be reshaped through intentional practice—that the trails we walk most often become the trails our brains default to. Introjection is that same process, but it happened in reverse. Someone else’s voice walked those trails for us, over and over, until the path was worn so deep we stopped noticing it was theirs. We just kept following it.
That’s not a small thing. It means that some of the most automatic, unquestioned beliefs we carry about our worth, our bodies, our ambitions, our right to take up space—those trails may have been laid down by someone who had power over us, not by who we actually are. We didn’t remap ourselves. We were remapped.
That distinction matters enormously, because it changes what the work actually is.
When we realize we’re carrying these voices, our first instinct is usually to banish them. But remapping neural pathways doesn’t always mean erasing the old trails immediately. The work is not necessarily getting rid of the voice. The work is differentiating it from our own. Instead of treating the voice as intuition or absolute truth, we can pause and recognize it for what it is: a recording. We stop asking, Is this true? and we start asking, Who taught me this?
Here’s the thing nobody warns us about: that question can feel awful. Gross. Gross, gross, gross. When we trace a belief back to its origin and realize it came from someone who hurt us, controlled us, or simply had no business having that much influence over how we see ourselves, the feeling that surfaces isn’t always relief. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes it’s something harder to name—a queasy mix of recognition and betrayal, like finding out a rule we’ve lived by our whole lives was never actually ours to follow. That feeling is real, and it deserves acknowledgment before we move on to the next step. We don’t have to rush past it.
And we also don’t have to stay there. Once the voice is detectable, it becomes something we can examine, challenge, revise, or discard. It’s walking a new trail—deliberately, repeatedly, in the direction of our actual values—until that path becomes the one our brain reaches for first. And in that space we start to find our own voices again and remap on our own terms.
Exercise: Differentiating and Fact-Checking the Voice
If this resonates, here’s a way to work with it this week—without turning it into another task to manage.
The next time you feel that sudden friction, or catch yourself hesitating because a familiar, critical voice speaks up in your head, pause and ask yourself these questions:
Whose voice is this, exactly? Name the person.
What was the original context? Acknowledge that this rule belonged to a specific time, place, or relationship where that person had authority over you.
Does this align with my actual values today?
What are the actual facts? This is where we bring in our fact-checking practice. The ghost voice will often threaten us with a catastrophe if we don’t obey—you’ll be rejected, you’ll fail, you’ll be fired. Check the facts. Is there actual, present-day evidence that this outcome will happen, or is the ghost just recycling an old threat?
If the rule doesn’t align with your values and the facts don’t support the fear, see what happens if you make that explicit. Say it out loud or write it down: “That is [Name]’s rule, but it is not my value. And it is not a fact.”
In my case, this was incredibly therapeutic the other day. I calmed down. My confidence returned. It didn’t return immediately but, when it did, it was overwhelming. I’ve got this.
The goal isn’t to force the voice into silence. It’s to get accurate about what belongs to us and what belongs to someone else. And then, to practice leaving their baggage exactly where it belongs.
After a bit, the silence just happens.
Updates
On the Serial Memoir: Introduction
This week’s installment of my serial memoir, Fat & Drunk is the introduction to the whole journey. Or maybe the first part of the introduction. How will I be viewing my past? Though what lenses? How do weight and addiction fit into it? Tune in tomorrow. (PAID subscription)
Start at the beginning. (PAID subscription) The prologue to Fat & Drunk is now online.
Food for Thought
Is Griffin an Introject?
As with most of the things I write, I end up noodling on how it relates to me in other ways. So, I’ve been noodling on a question that is either very insightful or very silly. Possibly both. Is my dog a ghost in my head?
My dog Griffin has separation anxiety. We don’t leave him alone. He can open doors, so we swapped all the lever handles for knobs. He barks at anything moving within a quarter mile of our driveway, so I’ve started scanning for incoming cars before he does. Yesterday, in sweltering heat, he locked me out of the house while trying to work the doorknob with his nose. And I laughed so hard. Eventually.
I did a quick dive: has Griffin introjected himself into me?
Probably not—at least not clinically. What he’s done is closer to owner conditioning, where the pet inadvertently trains the human through consistent, consequences-laden behavior. He didn’t share his worldview with me. I didn’t get an employee handbook. He just made the outcomes of certain choices very clear, very repeatedly, until I reorganized my life around them. That’s operant conditioning running in reverse. I didn’t absorb his beliefs. I adapted to his patterns.
If anything, it probably says more about my parentification background—how much I still try to keep everything quiet and orderly, even when the chaos is just one very loved dog being himself. In every way.
But maybe I should start charging him rent.
Charge him rent. Frankie needs a job too.