Almost every woman has a sentence that was said out loud once and has been sounding inside her ever since. It shows up at the moment of a decision, at the mirror, in the second before she has to say something in front of people. How that inner voice from the past is built, and how it loses its hold, was explained by Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
Her own case
Peruquois talks about this through her own example and does not skip the uncomfortable part.
At seventeen she heard from her mother: “you will never sing, you do not have that talent.” She fought with that sentence for years. When she asked her mother about it later, her mother answered: “I did not say that.” And then repeated it: “I would not have said that. I did not say that.”
So there was a girl who heard it, took it in and was wounded. There was a grown woman who fought it for years and came out the other side. And there was a mother in whose memory none of it had happened.
The sentence lived separately from the person who said it. It shaped a career choice, an attitude toward her own voice and dozens of small decisions, and all that time it had no support from the outside at all.
Why the source remembers nothing
Peruquois explains this without putting blame anywhere.
The person who said those words said them out of their own pain, out of their own state in that period. For them it was a throwaway line on a difficult day. For the child standing there it was a message about who she was.
Part of what adults say has nothing to do with the child at all. Their own fears and insecurities get spoken out loud and happen to land near a girl at the wrong minute.
Peruquois also notes that the person from the past has changed. Your mother today and your mother thirty years ago are two different women. Some of it she genuinely never worked through and still says, and some of it is long gone, while inside her daughter the voice of a version that no longer exists keeps talking.
The body renews, the sentence stays
“Your body renews itself every six years. Every six years you are amazingly new,” says Peruquois.
And she names the mismatch right away: with a fully renewed body, a woman goes on thinking with the same thought she had at five, or ten, or fifteen.
A decision made by a frightened, disoriented child keeps operating in adult life as a working rule. It comes out of the past, makes today's decision on the woman's behalf and goes back into the past.
Peruquois compares that voice to a small ghost that always says the same thing. It does not develop, does not learn anything new and does not change its wording, because thirty years ago it was issued one line.
How you catch it
The first thing she suggests is noticing the sentence in its working form, in daylight, in ordinary life.
The voice may have a sound and an intonation, or it may be almost silent, a faint little thing that simply states the words. Before a woman learns to catch it, it floated somewhere in the background and held considerable power: it made her speak a certain way and make choices that were not hers.
Peruquois advises checking yourself twice: in the morning, and in the evening before sleep, reviewing the day. Almost always the count comes out higher than expected. A woman thought the sentence showed up occasionally, and across one day it ran six or ten times.
That underestimate, in her observation, happens constantly in self-analysis. Which is why she insists on a real count rather than a general impression.
The antidote
The second step Peruquois calls creating an antidote.
It is a new sentence to replace the old one, and it is composed by the mature woman who has grown up inside. She sees where the old voice came from and formulates a new understanding in the same place.
She describes her own antidote through the thought about her weight that she lived with. Working it through, she recognized her own build for what it naturally is: curves, roundness, a romantic shape. After that she stopped arguing with an outside world that declares a particular thinness and particular measurements to be the ideal.
A practical consequence followed. Looking at the world of fashion and image, she tells herself that her nature is curved and romantic, and her clothing should reflect that.
An antidote works when it is true. General statements about how wonderful you are do not hold, because the woman does not believe them. What holds is an accurate observation about yourself that cannot be argued with.
What this is for
Every such sentence takes life force. It steers a woman away from what interests her and suggests the decisions that suit her old fear.
Peruquois treats this as a chain that can be broken. First a woman sees who said it and when, how often the sentence comes and in which situations. Then she creates the new understanding and lives from that instead.
The story with her mother ends with Peruquois singing in halls around the world. The sentence about having no talent lived inside her for a good many years and did not survive her work with her own voice.
If you want to map the voices that speak inside you instead of you and take your own back, take the Peruquois course Your Solar System, available on her website under Courses.
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