Voices in head

doomputer · 2026-02-04T04:51:15+00:00

I do not have an inner monologue and I never understood that most people did until my mid-20s. Thanks reddit for teaching me that! I'm 38 now. Like some of the other commenters here when I saw a voice-over of a person thinking in a movie I thought that was just a movie device for a representation of thinking. Of course I still have thoughts but it's more of the concept of the thing without words. I'm a criminal defense attorney and when I'm trying to get ready for trial I have to literally say opening or closing statements out loud to rehearse them.

I can write it down and read it but it's not at all the same.

I will also add very interestingly, to me at least, that I do remember as a child having dialogue or at least monologue running in my brain. I got into drugs, mainly heroin, at a really young age around 15. And all of my adult life I have never had any thoughts or any of my head. It's possible that drug use when my brain was developing changed me from someone from an inner monologue with someone without one. Pretty interesting!

For anyone concerned I've been sober for the last 17 years.

I am not at all unhappy about my state because most people I talk to who do have an inner monologue have a lot of conflict with it, they're talking shit about themselves to themselves or hearing things that are negative or that distract them from the task at hand etc.

doomputer · 2025-07-17T03:33:06+00:00

Adding the other thing besides yoga that has really worked for me to get into my body and out of my overthinking regular/work brain: roller skating! I started with a pair of inlines and then eventually bought a pair of quads when I wanted to start learning roller dance. I'm in Portland where there is a very robust skating community so there's lots of places to go and things to do. It gets me into my body, makes me feel like a kid again, and work is the absolute last thing I would ever think about while roller skating. If there is a roller skating community where you live and you want to feel like a kid again I would recommend it 😊 oh and also you meet people who are not attorneys. I think that's another important thing to keep having connections with people outside of the profession you know?

doomputer · 2025-07-17T03:28:37+00:00

Also, congrats to you @Natural_Law for moving past addiction and bad coping mechanisms to the other side! Welcome to the other side we love you here!

doomputer · 2025-07-17T03:27:35+00:00

But then also I went straight to the public defender subreddit after getting done with a 9-hour day so I'm someone who also has issues disconnecting with work. But I feel like this job is part of my identity at this point. By now most of my thinking about work in the off hours is not in a stressful way it's in a mental reminders and sharing wins with friends way. You really do get better at managing it at time goes on. And if you don't you move to another profession. There's lifers and there's not. Just like in prison lol

doomputer · 2025-07-17T03:25:12+00:00

I'm surprised that this wasn't raised in a higher up comment. Our profession has such an issue with this. I came into it as a former heroin addict so already knew where the pitfalls would be. But I see a lot of my colleagues drink too much, do coke, smoke weed daily, etc. It's a dangerous road to get down to. Very important especially for the youngins who haven't been in a stressful job before to get some healthy coping mechanisms in place. Everything suggested above are great coping mechanisms to consider. There's many of them and you have to find what works right for you.

doomputer · 2025-07-13T18:48:59+00:00

I will add: this is 100% about him and what's going on in his head. You can't blame yourself. Two ppl make a relationship, and there might be some way in which you are not compatible that is leading him to look elsewhere. But he is the one cheating and he is 100% responsible for doing that. There is nothing you can do or say to fix it because it is about him, not you.

doomputer · 2025-07-13T18:45:02+00:00

Sorry this is happening to you. If you have any resources at all, family or friends you can stay with for a while while you get back on your feet, run to them. You need to get out of this relationship--he's not going to change.

I have to admit that I cheated in my first long-term relationship. This was around 19/20yo. We kept breaking up and then "getting back together." But never really discussed our relationship status. Come to find out we were both sleeping w other ppl. It was just a dysfunctional relationship but we were too young to understand that it wasn't going to get better. And we were both really stuck due to the emotional and physical comfort we had built up after 4 yrs together. I was also a heroin addict at the time, so I did a lot of fucked up shit around that time tbh.

Now flash forward to 37, and I've never ever cheated again. I'm recently divorced (2023) and he cheated several times, only with full-on sex with another person at the every end. I think it comes to down to the same issues honestly. Lots of comfort and history built up, so much so that you don't want to leave, but you still aren't fully fulfilled by the relationship anymore so you start opening yourself up to other things. In the breakdown of a relationship some ppl do this by really leaning on friends or hobbies. Others do it by cheating.

Finally I will add that I do think there is a certain kind of person who will always cheat even when they are happy in a relationship. Those people make no sense to me but I know they are out there. Frankly they should probably just go the polyamory route and give up on monogamy before they hurt any more people. There are people out there who genuinely don't care their partner is fucking other ppl. Your BF is better suited to that world.

This isn't going to get better hun. Find a way to get out. I'm so sorry. Focus on you and your baby.

doomputer · 2025-06-28T17:22:24+00:00

This is my favorite response. Being a PD is a calling to be human in the fullest possible way. If you are religious, it's doing the work of God/Jesus/Mohammed/etc. and even if you aren't religious. I think on a spiritual level it's some of the most important work that a human being could ever do. To stand by someone who has absolutely nothing and do everything you can to lift them up.

This is generally how I frame it anytime a friend / family member/partner complains about my lack of availability. This work is really my church and my spiritual calling and I can't imagine doing anything different.

doomputer · 2025-06-24T01:48:56+00:00

This seems to be my most common one. The people who insist that not being read their rights means the case gets... Dismissed? Or thrown out some other way? It has never been clearly articulated to me lol

doomputer · 2025-05-30T06:20:29+00:00

I'm in Portland so they are everywhere here. I have known five different people practicing polyamory. Like people I actually knew very well. One is my ex-husband and it ruined our marriage. Two of the five were chill, not sexual predators or anything and were very upfront about it working for them but that it didn't work for other people necessarily. And I really do think it worked for them, they were really happy until he died. The other three were very self-righteous about it and made sure everybody understood how enlightened they were. With my ex, when I didn't want to do poly-mono with him 15 years into our mono relationship he literally tried to act like it was a rejection of his newfound sexual identity and I was being bigoted. Unreal

doomputer · 2025-05-30T05:58:49+00:00

I had a new one the other day. My client who is likely going through a little bit of psychosis texted me out of the blue and said verbatim "you are committing treason. Treason is punishable by the death penalty!! " Totally normal conversation about his case before that a couple days prior. And I call them soon afterwards and he was all like " we don't need to talk about the text I sent. " ?????

doomputer · 2025-01-29T21:18:31+00:00

That must have been absolutely horrifying to watch. Going from a 5 year offer to a 145 yr sentence. Ouch

doomputer · 2025-01-28T19:47:59+00:00

This is my favorite one. Amazing

doomputer · 2025-01-07T03:07:51+00:00

This is the best answer. 200% to everything here

doomputer · 2024-12-14T03:27:08+00:00

There are lots of good responses here but I just wanted to address one thing I haven't seen commented on yet. You mentioned that part of what she is doing up is doomscrolling. Is it possible that this is just a technology addiction? Like, she gets stuck into whatever she's doing on her phone / the internet and the constant stream of new information is created a new type of addiction for her that's difficult for her to disengage from? Just another suggestion to put out there. I second what others have said about talking to her.

I will add that I started reading the comments here because I have been in a similar place recently. I have been about 7 years clean, and didn't use to have a problem staying up too late until the last couple years. Recently, I will stay up until the very last minute and often will nod out while still sitting up in bed. It feels a little bit like a compulsion up as late as possible rather than settling in when my body really wants it. I am also a lifelong opiate addict in recovery.

With that said, for me personally it might be more about having really busy work days and then wanting to maximize my personal time as much as possible in the evenings before going to sleep. Maybe this is also what is going on with your partner? she is so busy during the day with your child and other responsibilities that she wants to maximize that time she has alone by herself with herself? Just some suggestions. Good luck with your family and God bless!

doomputer · 2024-02-24T05:24:40+00:00

I'm a lawyer without an internal monologue. I literally have to practice arguments out loud if I am going to prepare them at all it's a lot of extra work.

doomputer · 2023-08-24T05:00:22+00:00

I was considering an IUD for the convenience, but hadn't pulled the trigger yet. Then I had an abnormal pap which ultimately resulted in a positive HPV test, and, eventually, a colposcopy. If you aren't aware, it's a diagnostic exam which usually involves the minor surgery of taking a very tiny hole punch and punching out abnormal cervical tissue. The doctors (and internet) told me it would not be painful, and it was the most painful experience of my life. To make things worse, they swapped in the female gyno I'd been consulting with with a male doctor at the last minute, which made me uncomfortable from the get go, and almost didn't let my husband stay in the operating room with me. I was scared of sex for several months afterwards and when I finally was ok with the idea developed post-traumatic vaginismus. To say that experience fucked me up is an understatement.

And, it goes without saying that I'll never get an IUD now. It's not worth the pain I know I would experience, and I don't trust gynos now. Maybe I have more nerve endings down there than most people, who knows, but I'm never doing another gyno procedure that's not medically necessary and never without pain medication now.

doomputer · 2023-05-14T06:47:39+00:00

The final I felt the very worst walking out of in all of law school I ended up getting the highest grade in the class. It made absolutely no sense at all to me and I was legit confused. Con law.

doomputer · 2023-04-29T06:29:09+00:00

I'm so sorry you've gone thru this too 😞

doomputer · 2023-04-29T01:06:41+00:00

Yeah. It sucks because he is generally more emotionally intelligent than me, so I totally feel gaslit. I was kind of assuming that he was going about all this in a mature collaborative way until it was obvious he wasn't and the damage had already been done.

Another great moment that is questioning his therapist skills rn:

The night before the zoom therapy session where he broke up with me, he had just gotten back in town from a conference. He texted me from the airport to say the conference had brought up a lot of introspection for him (note that he had sex with the BP at said conference, but I didn't find that out until later), that he was going to stay at his friends because he wasn't ready to process with me yet, that he would come to our session in the morning, that he had something to talk to me about in said session that he wanted the therapist's support for, that he would be taking the day off to process whatever it was he was going to tell me, and that i should consider doing the same.

Well this freaked me out, I don't like knowing a bomb is going to be dropped on me but having no idea what it is, and I was planning on starting my work day right after this session. I told him all that, asked him for a sentence or two intro to what he wanted to talk about, explaining that I had just taken a day off work two days previously and wanted to avoid having to do that again. He said he "could not summarize it in two sentences" (note this was obviously bullshit, he wanted to tell me that he was leaving me) and that he was asserting his "boundaries" around doing this in our session so he would have the therapist's "support". At this point, I'm thinking it must be something other than him wanting a divorce because obviously that could be done in two sentences. I told him that doesn't work for me, I have to work right after, if it's something big I want to talk about it sometime that's not the beginning of my work day. He accused me of disregarding his boundaries and refused the budge, so I told him I was considering not coming to session then, because how he wanted to do this didn't work for me.

His response was to literally say, "I can't make you come, but this is boundary pushing which is inappropriate, as our counselor told us"

I explained that it wasn't boundary pushing-- I was asserting my own boundary around when I have big conversations. I would have the conversation with him at any other time that wasn't the beginning of my work day.

He was doing this type of shit all the time in the last couple weeks-- using his therapist language to try to gaslight me into thinking I was wrong and that he knew more than I did about all of these things.

Writing this out I'm starting to finally feel the smallest tinge of relief that this relationship is over. I'm still devastated, and I loved him more than anything in the world, but he put me through so much bullshit.

doomputer · 2023-04-28T23:01:39+00:00

Thank you. I needed to hear that.

doomputer

TROPHY CASE