Although most of us would label anyone who claims to hear voices in their head as needing psychiatric care, the truth is we all have voices in our head.  It may be the voice of your long gone mother telling you that you need to clean the house.  It might be the voice of the slightly deranged nun who use to bat your around in second grade saying, “Jesus doesn’t like you because you talk back” or it might be that 7^th Grade Gym Teacher who told you that you were gutless because you didn’t want to climb the rope to the ceiling of the gymnasium.   These voices are not audible and that is where most would draw the psychosis line.  But though the voices aren’t out loud and others can’t hear them, they can sound pretty loud to us. May God help you if your parents were the overly critical type who thought their duty was to chastise you for the one “B” you got on your report card instead of praising your for the five “A”s.

The generation that went through the depression were understandably  a pretty negative lot  and the generation that Tom Brokaw called the greatest because they fought and won the terrible war developed as their motto the phrase “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”. In some cases that is translated as “expect the worse”.  While “Be Prepared “was the boy scout motto it doesn’t do much for creating a positive mindset.  Indeed,  Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar and a host of other positive thinkers would say that expecting the worse assures that you will get it. 

These authors all agree that the human mind is a powerhouse but much of its power lies in the subcon-scious mind.  The subconscious can attract good and it can attract evil.  It must be programmed to help you.  The truth is that it has already been programmed by the world in which you were raised.  If your parents were negative thinkers than the odds are that they taught you to think that way as well.  They might have been wonderful people (as mine were) but they still passed on to you all the negativity that had been passed on to them by their parents and so on.  I was raised blue-collar Irish Catholic which carried with it a strong negative outlook and a healthy dose of guilt as well.

There are many theories of how a person can overcome their natural bent toward negativity.  One method is by repeating positive statements called aphorisms over and over, thereby using your conscious mind to program your subconscious.  Saying things like “I succeed at everything I do” a hundred times every morning will eventually help you feel better about your chances of success.  For people of faith a much quicker path is to find positive bible verses and say them as prayers.  Once again, you are using the conscious mind to program the subconscious but, depending on your beliefs, you may also be connecting with the Creator who can make anything happen at anytime.

There are many good books on this subject by the three already mentioned authors but a very easy to read primer to the subject is The Game of Life by Florence Scovel Shinn.

But before you can reprogram your mind to be positive you have to recognize its current programming.  For this I suggest reading,  Crash The Chatterbox by  Steven Furtick.  Furtick, 37, is the Lead Pastor of Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina and he explains in detail what he calls the “chatterbox”, the conglomeration of the voices we hear in our head.  It is very important to realize two things.

• The “voices” do not speak the truth.
• They are not the voice of God.

They are the voices of your past.  It is important to recognize and silence them.  God speaks to us in “a still, small voice”.  God speaks encouragement and love.  He recognizes our weaknesses but he doesn’t identify us by them.  It is the chatterbox that says you are a loser, that you are no good and identifies you by your weakness.  The Devil condemns and labels you by your sin and he will use the voices of your past to argue his point.  It is important that you don’t listen to that shouting so that you can hear the quiet voice that speaks love to you.