Talk to Yourself: The Lonely Know Something
--- There is a woman I know — not a client, a friend — who mutters constantly.
Talk to Yourself: The Lonely Know Something
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There is a woman I know — not a client, a friend — who mutters constantly. Shopping lists, parking confirmations, the occasional full rehearsal of a difficult conversation she hasn't had yet. Her ex used to mock her for it. *You're losing the plot*, he'd say, with that particular smile that men like him use to make you feel small while keeping their hands clean. She stopped doing it around him. Stopped doing a lot of things around him. When she finally left, the first thing that came back — before the appetite, before the sleep, before anything resembling herself — was the talking. She walked into her quiet flat and narrated every single thing she did. *Put the keys on the hook. Kettle on. You're okay.*
I think about her every time someone apologises to me for talking to themselves.
Psychology has known for a while that self-directed speech — talking aloud when you're alone, rehearsing things, narrating your own actions — is not a sign of eccentricity or early decline. It is, in fact, a cognitive tool. When you say a thing out loud, you are activating a second processing channel. The brain hears it as input *and* generates it as output. You catch errors. You slow yourself down. You make the abstract — the feeling, the plan, the fear — concrete enough to be examined. This is not madness. This is exactly what a therapist helps you do in a room, except you've learned to do it yourself.
The people who do it regularly tend to share something. Not low intelligence — quite the opposite. People who talk themselves through problems aloud have often developed a strong observing ego: the capacity to watch their own mind at work without being entirely swept away by it. It is, in therapeutic language, a form of self-witnessing. The internal narrator externalised. You are, in that moment, both speaker and listener — and the listener is calm enough to hear.
There is also the rehearsal dimension, which I find professionally interesting. When my clients prepare for a hard conversation — telling a partner they feel abandoned, asking a parent for acknowledgment they never gave — I sometimes suggest they say it out loud, alone, before they say it to the person. Not to script it. Scripts fail. But to hear themselves say *I felt invisible in this marriage* and discover that their voice doesn't break on the word *invisible* the way they feared it would. The rehearsal isn't about performance. It is about desensitisation. By the time you say it to the person who needs to hear it, it no longer feels like stepping off a cliff.
There's something else, too — something nobody quite admits. Talking to yourself is, at its root, an act of self-companionship. It is choosing your own presence when no one else is there. My friend, when her marriage was suffocating, went silent inside it. When she left, she got herself back. The talking wasn't a symptom of loneliness. It was the evidence of wholeness. She had enough interior life to fill a room, and she'd been keeping it quiet for a man who found it inconvenient.
The people who mock you for talking to yourself are, almost without exception, the people who cannot bear to be alone in a room with their own thoughts. Silence, for them, is not peace — it is exposure. They need the television on, the phone in hand, another voice to fill the space where self-knowledge would otherwise have to live. They call you eccentric. What they mean is that you have something they haven't built.
So talk to yourself. Rehearse the hard things. Say your own name when you need steadying — research suggests that third-person self-talk, using your own name, creates just enough psychological distance to regulate emotion without dissociating from it. *Elena, what are you actually afraid of?* works better than *why am I so afraid?* because it shifts you from inside the feeling to alongside it.
And if someone in your life finds this embarrassing — if they roll their eyes at the muttering, the narrating, the quiet rehearsals of your own becoming — I want you to notice that. Not because it is a dealbreaker. But because a person who is uncomfortable with your inner life will eventually ask you to make it smaller.
And you know, by now, what happens when you agree to that.
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*The loneliest people I have ever sat across from were not the ones who lived alone. They were the ones who had learned to go very, very quiet — and mist
