Nothing to do. Many of us experience what we Buddhist call an inner tyrant or an inner

taskmaster which is a voice that constantly harrains and narrates our shortcomings, how we're not keeping up, how we're falling behind, how much left there

is to be done, and despite how much suffering and stress is associated with this voice that

never approves and always tells us we're walking on the wrong path or we're not attaining enough,

it's, it can maintain itself despite all our attempts to ignore it or to push it

believes that our happiness in the world is never available to us right here and right now

but is something that we have to accumulate and is waiting for us way down the line in the future.

And so the question is why do we have this given how it can misdirect us. It can cause a sense of never living up to some kind of imaginary standards, the sense of falling short.

So fortunately we actually have now a very good idea of where the inner tyrants starts.

Fascinatingly enough, somewhat now well known, although he was originally quite obscure Russian

child psychologist named Lev Vigotsky spent years following around two and a half year old, three year olds and a clinical setting with assistance and just observing how children make the transition to developing inner

chatter, that inner speech that we hear mind. And what they revealed in this study is that children internalize the voices that they hear from their caregivers telling them not to do something.

So in other words, we feel our impulses to run in the hallway to eat the cookies to

run across the street to jump on the bed. We feel our desires. We know them in the mind without having to put them into language.

But a crucial stage of our development occurs when the parents starts connecting and starts interacting with the child largely

through words, don't eat the cookies, don't run across the street when it's red. Don't jump on the bed. So when

Vaidotsky followed the kids around and recorded what they were saying when they thought they were alone.

He heard the kids simply repeating exactly what their mothers or fathers had told them the demands not to do this, not to do that.

So it creates in the mind a split between the things we want which are felt and the social

prohibitions, the regulating voice of the caregiver that tells us no you can't have that right now.

Children internalize or the word is also known as interject this voice as a kind of what we could call security blanket or in psychiatric terms transitional object.

As the child goes off increasingly alone

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