Happy Friday, everybody.

Now then, jumping straight into it, because this is just a short five-minute bonus episode

today.

So let me ask you something.

When you make a mistake, whose voice do you hear in your head?

Is it your own?

Or does it sound like someone else?

Maybe it says things like, you should know better,

or don't be so dramatic, or what will people think? And it feels true, doesn't it? It feels like common sense, like morality, like reality. But what if it isn't actually you? Last month on

Patreon, I made an episode about something called introjects and intradicted values. And I don't

know they sound like big psychological words, but they're very simple ideas once you strip them

down. An introject is basically a voice or a belief that you've

absorbed from someone else. Usually when you were young, you swallowed it whole and you didn't

question it, didn't even realize that you were doing it in fact. because children absorb and respond to everything that they

experience, which sounds quite poetic, and it's more than that, it's survival. When we're young,

we learn very quickly what keeps us safe, what earns approval, what avoids conflict, and we build a version of ourselves around that.

So if you were praised for achieving, you might have internalised the idea that your worth

equals your output. If you were criticised for being emotional, you might have internalised the

belief that feelings are weakness.

If you grow up around anxiety, you might have internalised hypervigilance as normal.

And then, given enough repetition, we grow up and we call those patterns personality.

We say, that's just how I am. But is it? Or is it something you

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