Why it feels like it's happening again. The Story We Tell Ourselves

Silence can be loud. A delayed text, a cooler tone, a missing reply and suddenly your mind is writing a whole script about what it means and what it says about you. We talk about how that script forms, why it lands with so much weight, and how quickly “it could be nothing” turns into “I knew something was wrong.” If you’ve ever felt your body react before you have any real information, you’re not imagining it, you’re watching your brain chase certainty.

We walk through the idea of emotional logic: the stories we create are rarely random, they follow the pathways that once helped us survive disconnection, withdrawal, or loss. Drawing on psychodynamic psychotherapy, we explore Melanie Klein’s concept of internal objects, the emotional impressions of early relationships that can get activated in the present. We also look at Peter Fonagy’s work on mentalizing and what happens when reflective space collapses, leaving us with a narrow, convincing certainty that is driven by feeling rather than facts.

From there we make it practical. Instead of trying to stop the story, we practice spotting it: “This is a story my mind is telling.” We then reintroduce uncertainty and widen the frame, so we can wait, gather information, and choose a response. We also connect this mechanism to grief and trauma, including the common trap of “getting over it” versus the more truthful work of getting through it, processing loss in manageable pieces.

If this helped you put words to something you’ve been living, subscribe, share the episode with someone who overthinks in silence, and leave a review so more people can find it. What story does your mind reach for first when things go quiet?

Transcript

Welcome And Is It Again

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Inside the Consulting Room podcasts. And in this next episode from the current series, I want to talk about the way in which the idea of is it happening again leads us into creating the most incredible stories for ourselves. So in the last episode, we explored how sometimes small changes can trigger really quite powerful emotional responses. And what I want to do is to move into what happens next because the silence or the change in behavior that we witness isn't what unsettles us most. It's what the mind does with the silence. And this can be highly destructive. The mind doesn't tolerate empty spaces. It asks many questions. It seeks to try and fill the gaps that have been created. So when something is unclear or incomplete, there's a natural movement towards resolution, towards explaining and trying to find meaning. And this happens automatically, not deliberately, and in a way the mechanisms which underpin it aren't conscious. So when there is no explanation, no response, or no clear signal, the mind begins to generate its own. So it moves from possibility to some type of certainty, no matter how flimsy that may be. So at the beginning, there's some kind of space, which we can't explain, but many possibilities exist. They're not feeling okay, there's something wrong that I don't know about, or they'll reply later, or they'll talk about it later, or it's just nothing. But as time passes, something begins to narrow because one interpretation becomes more prominent, and then gradually it becomes dominant. And at a certain point, something subtle but important happens. You're no longer thinking this could mean something. You are feeling this means something. And once meaning has settled, everything else begins to organize around it. I talked about R. D. Lang in his book Knots and Knotted Thinking. Well, this is how it starts. Now here's the important point. The story your mind creates is not random, it follows an emotional logic. And I use the term emotional logic rather than cognitive or thought or objective logic. Because if at some point in your life silence or inconsistency or a shift in connection was followed by withdrawal, distance, emotional absence or loss, then the story your mind constructs now will tend towards that direction. Not because it's accurate, but because it's familiar. You may find yourself thinking, this is like when such and such happened. On the other hand, you probably won't, because you'll be focused on the now, what you're experiencing now. And in moments of uncertainty, familiarity feels like the truth. So this is where we move into something more deeply psychodynamic. Now the work of Melanie Klein helps us understand this because she described how we carry within us internal representations of others, almost like some kind of composite image and experience of significant people who helped us to form our identity in early childhood. Now there won't be exact memories, but it's like they're emotional impressions. So when we've had experiences of being held in mind, that's great, but what about being forgotten? Or if we've had experiences of being responded to because we're held in mind, that's good. But what about if we're left? These become what Klein called internal objects. And when something uncertain happens in the present, we don't respond only to the person in front of us. We begin to respond to these internal objects. In a sense, we're no longer entirely in the present. We're relating to something older and it's projected into the current moment. And this is where the narrative becomes more personal because the silence is no longer just about the other person, it becomes about you. I've done something wrong. I've misunderstood something. I'm not as important as I thought. And once the story turns inward, the emotional impact deepens because now it's not just explaining the situation, it's explaining your place within it. At this point, something really important begins to narrow. We call it the collapse of reflective space, your capacity to reflect, and your ability to hold multiple possibilities in mind. To say, I don't know what this means. This is what Peter Foneggy describes as a reduction in mentalizing capacity. Your ability to think about your own mind and the other person begins to contract. And in its place, certainty emerges. Not accurate certainty, but emotionally driven certainty. Once the story is in place, you begin to respond to it. Not consciously, but in small subtle ways. You may check your phone more frequently, reread previous messages, alter your tone, become more cautious, or withdraw slightly. You may experience a very wide range of feelings. And from the outside, this may look like a shift, but it it's not a response to what has actually happened. It's a response to what has been imagined. And here is where something particularly important occurs. Once you begin to respond to the story, the interaction itself may begin to change. And the other person may sense that there is something different. They might feel a shift in your tone, become less certain themselves. And this then can feel like confirmation. I knew something was wrong. When in reality the change began internally. So it arrives quite often with considerable weight, with a sense of coherence, with a sense of inevitability. And that's that is why it's so difficult to question it. So what do we do? What helps? Not trying to stop the story, that probably won't help, because by the time you notice it, you're already in it. What helps is something more subtle. The ability to recognize this is a story my mind is telling, not this is what is happening. That distinction changes everything. And then gently to reintroduce uncertainty, to say there are other possibilities here. I do not yet have enough information and I can wait. Because when you can hold that space, even briefly, something shifts, the story loosens, and the sense of unhelpful certainty might begin to soften. And your your capacity to respond rather than react returns. Sometimes I work with people who are emotionally stuck with events that have taken place in their lives. And very often things in the present which have no factual relationship with the past will trigger that stuckness. And they will find themselves experiencing it happening again. And this isn't a decision so much, it's an automatic reaction. And so I talk often with people about that was then, this is now. When we can see what's going on, we we put a line between what is happening now and what happened then and how those two things have become confused. Now, this doesn't invalidate what the person is experiencing, and neither is it a kind of, well, that happened a long time ago. Psychotherapists tend not to say that sort of thing. But what we do is we make that distinction. Now, when the person can make it for themselves, they shift from the limbic system, the feeling part of the brain, into the cognitive thinking part of the brain. Now that shift alone makes a massive difference because it's the beginning of separation of the two things. It's almost like standing to one side of what you're experiencing and looking at it and saying, What is that? Not why, as I say so often, what is that? And quite often what people find is, oh, it's that thing again. When we see that, something changes in what we're experiencing now. It's almost like, I mean, I I very often refer to how this is a major mechanism in PTSD, that people will experience the past in the present. Now, I'm not talking specifically about that condition, I'm talking about the mechanism. And what matters here is that recovery from the past is what really matters. In its own curious way, when people are having flashbacks, it's almost as if the mind is trying to process something, as if it's trying to recover. The problem is that the power of the flashbacks is disabling, and individuals feel less inclined to consciously visit the event again. They find it difficult, really difficult to do it because it's painful. But in fact, it is that kind of careful examining of what's happening, allowing oneself to recognize, to experience what has happened in the past in a manageable kind of way, doing it in bits that enables the processing and the recovery. So, for example, people who are experiencing loss, or whether that's loss of a relationship or you know, loss of a the death of somebody, what follows on is uh considerable and it can be very painful. And I have great sympathy for people who enter this phase because it it can go on for a while, and quite often they will say, I'm stuck, I just can't get over it. I can't get over what happened, how he or she did what they did. And the most important word in that sentence is over. I can't get over. Actually, it isn't about getting over, it's about getting through. Getting through means allowing oneself to have the experience because that's the processing. So quite often I've said to patients, I'm not sure that you are necessarily stuck. I think you're processing what's happened, which is why you're having the thought, the feelings, the memories, why it why they feel so present, because you're processing them. It's okay. And then I say, look, every time that comes to you, just remind yourself I'm processing, it's normal. I'm working my way through it. I'm quite sure that this comment alone will uh that observation alone is something that many, many people will resonate with because, or it will resonate with because it's a it's an experience that none of us are protected from in one way or another. So next time you find yourself in that moment where silence begins to fill with meaning. Notice it. Not critically, not urgently, but with awareness. Because the silence is real, but the story that forms within it is not always the truth. Learning to tell the difference may make all the difference, it may change everything. I hope this has been helpful and I look forward to coming back with the final episode shortly.