Welcome to the Selves Inside series.
This time I want to talk about the voice inside,
The part of us that says or feels that nothing matters.
Nothing matters.
So this voice sees life in terms of its meaningful or it's not meaningful.
So right away we know that this is a part of us that is desiring meaning.
It feels that there should be meaning and it's not there.
And so it has a certain suffering about this absence of meaning.
And often for the part of us that feels nothing matters there's like a feeling of hollowness or a disinterested feeling about life and that feeling is interpreted as a truth about life itself.
We feel a certain quality of emptiness and rather than that simply being a feeling of emptiness that is moving through it's interpreted as a statement about the way life is.
I feel this hollowness and therefore there must not be any meaning in life because life would fill this if there was meaning.
The nothing matters voice can arise as a buffer against emotional experience.
You can think about a time when let's say there is a conflict with a friend or a family member and that results in maybe a temporary or longer-term break in the relationship.
And there is some heartache that is arising in us because we care about this person.
The nothing matters voice comes in and says well it doesn't matter anyway.
It doesn't matter.
I don't really I don't really need them or they didn't really bring that much into my life or they never really cared about me in the first place.
And the nothing matters voice tends to have its own particular kind of flatness to it.
Maybe a flatness with a little bit of sadness or melancholy to it.
And in some ways it can be like a wet blanket that falls over the actual pain in the heart.
The actual deeper sadness of the loss.
So sometimes nothing matters is a blanket over particular kinds of emotional experience.
Another possible origin story for the nothing matters voice is that there may have been a time when our loss or grief or shock of change in our lives was too much to process.
It overwhelmed the system and so the nothing matters voice came in as a way to manage or dial down the pain of that experience.
The problem being that it can because life is challenging and because life does involve ongoing change and regular semi-regular times of loss nothing matters can become an ongoing strategy in order to manage pain which actually deadens our whole experience and enjoyment of life.
Something to listen for with the nothing matters voice is how old is this part of me?
The nothing matters voice can sometimes have like a teenage energy.
Maybe it arose when we are 13 or 17 in that time of great confusion and became a strategy for navigating life's heartaches at that time.
So we listen to its age,
How old it feels,
The feeling of its maturity and in this way we can understand that that's what we're looking at life through.
We're looking through some young eyes that are under resourced in dealing with life's challenge.
Like all the different parts,
All the different selves that can animate us whenever they are taking center stage their view will seem like the truth and they will screen out other information.
Someone may challenge our nothing matters self and say well actually you know your life is very meaningful you have this going on and you have that talent and you make this contribution and the nothing matters will say yeah but none of that really matters and it believes that it feels that and so our finding space with this voice is not to tell it it's wrong or not to argue with it but to recognize that we need to invite a larger view that we have this part of us that feels that nothing matters but with the very same situations in life with awareness we may be able to access another view on the whole situation and thereby bring in some kind of balance or even deeper an alternative way of being with the pain that nothing matters is trying to in its limited way help us with.
So I hope you can find some awareness and some wisdom with this part that is fairly common in many of us and realize that you are not the nothing matters voice there is much more perspective available to you
