How to Evict Someone Living Rent-Free in Your Head

Have you ever heard someone’s voice in your head questioning your decisions, always disagreeing with you, planting seeds of doubt? You might know this person, someone you no longer associate with, but their doubting essence still lives rent-free in your head. Their voice appears in moments when you dare to try something new, attempting to change yourself in some fundamental way. The voice has one aim: to keep you from changing.

A cruel consequence of dealing with gaslighting sociopaths, political moralizers, socially naive sensemakers, or overtly controlling partners and friends—whether intentional on their part or not—is that their voice can linger in your mind. To be fair, it’s not always their fault; an implicit conspiracy often emerges, an unspoken outsourcing of what is good and true to people who are, or seem, smarter or wiser than you.

The two main forms of outsourcing are: