Sometimes I wish my inner voice could physically manifest and follow me around, just like Jiminy Cricket, so that when she’s being a real asshole, I could turn to someone and say, “Do you see what I’m dealing with here?” I don’t think the people who know me would say I’m an inherently mean person, although my sarcasm has been known to draw blood a time or two. Paper cut style, not a full-blown shank-to-the-jugular attack.
On my very first day of high school, my mom was dropping me off and we were waiting in the car line to get up to the front of the building. She told me that I was about to start school with a lot of kids who hadn’t grown up with me at my very small K-8th school. Not everyone understands my sarcasm and might take it the wrong way, so before I say something out loud, try to stop and think about whether the other person might be hurt by what I might think of as a joke. I don’t know why this moment stands out so vividly to me, right down to exactly what I was wearing. I do know that from that point on, when put into a situation like a new school, new job, new city, new relationship, any new environment I have been very careful about my word choices because the last thing I want to do is hurt anyone’s feelings.
So why in the hell didn’t my inner voice learn that same lesson?
When I decided to give up alcohol, I had to get my hands on as much research and information as I could possibly consume. One of the tools that has helped me the most comes from Rational Recovery and is called Addiction Voice Recognition Technique®, or AVRT®. This technique teaches you to recognize the addict in your head. It’s the voice that tells you it’s ok to just have one (bottle of wine), or only drink on weekends, or that you’re missing out on all of the fun everyone else is having if you don’t. Some people assign it an identity like the Beast, or the Wolf or Monster. Some people associate it with their drunk alter ego, which to be honest, I’ve always found hilarious. I was out with girlfriends for martinis one night and one of them said her alter ego is Victor, and Victor likes girls. Jennifer Lawrence’s alter ego Gail made a red-carpet appearance recently. Watching that interview made me wish my alter ego was cool and fun, but she’s anything but fun.
When I first read about that technique I thought about Victor and Gail and decided my voice needed a name. The first image that came to me was the Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” I create an exterior of smoke and mirrors so that no one knows that I drink two glasses of wine at home before I get to the restaurant or bar, or I only book hotels with mini bars so that I can make sure I have access to more wine at the end of the night, when $25 for a glass of wine seems perfectly reasonable. I blame bloodshot eyes on insomnia and shakiness on being hungry or too much coffee. But hiding behind the curtain is the truth.
The Wizard didn’t quite ring true when coming up with a name for my inner addict, though. It took me a couple of weeks of running down lists of names to realize I knew her name all along. Her name is Jennifer, and she’s not just the voice of addiction. She’s the asshole I’ve been arguing with my whole life.
I’ve always gone by the name Jenny or Jen to everyone else. I never cared to be called Jennifer because it’s what I heard my mom say when I was in trouble. If I misbehaved, she could very calmly look at me and say, “Jennifer.” That was all I needed to hear. Years later as an adult, my friend Joseph identified her, too. Whenever things weren’t going my way or I got annoyed, he would look at me and say, “Well hello, Jennifer.” Sometimes if he saw me really starting to get mad, he would grab my shoulders and say, “Come back to me Jenny, I don’t want to talk to Jennifer right now!”
The thing is, Jennifer isn’t just the voice convincing me that I can handle moderation (I can’t) or that life is better with wine every night. She’s been there my whole life, and she’s inherently mean. When I look in the mirror, she criticizes every inch of my body. When I closed my yoga studio, she told me everyone was furious with me for failing. She’s especially loud when I feel lonely or need help, and she’s screaming that no one wants to help me.
This is not a unique experience. We all have an innate ability to be so unbelievably cruel to ourselves. Imagine if we all had a Jiminy Cricket who followed us around so that everyone around us could hear what our inner voice is really saying.
Jennifer isn’t going anywhere. She’s been with me my whole life and she’ll always be there. In exploring methods to help me cope with addiction, it helped me finally recognize that it’s time Jennifer heed my mom’s advice. From now on, she needs to think before she speaks. And it’s time for me to recognize that when she’s being mean and unhelpful, I have the ability to say the same thing I say to anyone else who’s being an asshole. GTFO.
“Yep, temptations. They’re the wrong things that seem right at the time, but, uh…even though the right things may seem wrong, sometimes, or sometimes, the wrong things may be right at the wrong time, or, uh, visa versa. Understand?”
Jiminy Cricket
Mocktail Moxie 