Way Back No. 4
The Introduction
You don’t need
ten days of silence.
You need one honest introduction.
Next time the voice starts up,
the one that catastrophizes,
compares,
sells you escapes
you don’t even want,
do the strangest thing in this book.
Don’t argue with it.
Don’t obey it.
Greet it.
Hi.
I now see you.
Say it the way you’d say it
to a scared animal.
Because that’s what it is.
Yours has been waiting
a long time
to be seen.
From chapter four
What usually happens
It feels ridiculous the first time. Greeting a voice in your own head. Do it anyway, silently is fine.
And notice what the voice does when it is seen instead of fought. It quiets, the way anything scared quiets when it stops being chased.
One line to carry
Hi. I now see you.
If someone came to mind
Some people read this page and think of one person the whole way through.
If that happened, send them back to themselves. It costs them nothing.
The other Ways Back are in their chapters, one per chapter, all of them free. This one is yours whenever you need it.