Learning to Listen to Helpful Inner Voices

This week, we continue our series with guest blogger Patricia Eagle. She talks about learning to listen to helpful inner voices that tell us we have value, are worthy of love and can trust ourselves.

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Learning to listen to that tiny voice inside can save a person’s life, even when it is barely a whisper. A survivor of child sexual abuse pushes that voice down so often that it can become barely discernible. Sometimes we find imaginative ways for helpful inner voices to surface.

As a small child, I heard this voice through my stuffed animals. I would talk to my animals out loud, giving them voices and words as I lined them up around my room to assure they would be present when I went to bed. These voices often told me they loved me and would be with me when I felt scared. Later, I could talk to them in my head when my dad crawled into bed with me, helping me to feel distracted from what felt confusing or painful. 

I also created a fairy godmother, whom I called Wendy––I think from having read Peter Pan. (My fairy godmother was a combination of Wendy and Tinker Bell.) She would help me slip out of the bed when Daddy was there and hover with me while I talked to my stuffed animals. In this comforting magic we floated above it all until it was safe for me to go back to bed. Wendy soothed me, patting my back, stroking my hair, and singing softly in my ears. With the comfort of Wendy and my stuffed animals, I developed a way to survive that helped me feel stronger, in charge, and like someone who was valued.

Around age eight, I got a real dog. I talked to “Dabb” constantly and even talked back to me for him. Through Dabb my inner voice strengthened, encouraged by real licks, adoring eyes and the warmth of his body. I began to recognize doubts and shame, confusion and anger. Nature became our playground, most often wandering beside the creek behind our house. I gave voices to the water, the mud, the trees, the birds, and even bugs. The innermost secrets I shared with Dabb were now overheard by nature, and she encouraged us both with promises that I would feel better someday and to not give up. 

Despite an insistent damaged voice that surfaced often as I grew older––telling me I was worthless––the small, promising voices inside persisted. It always helped when I had a dog; their behaviors helping me realize that if I felt sad, they seemed to feel bad too. Nature was also consistent in being a supportive presence around me, whether I was looking out a classroom or car window, planting a garden, or listening to a bird trill a melody. 

In one story from my book during a particularly challenging time of my life, I describe what happens while cycling on a road near my home when “I stop for a sip of water and suddenly a hundred cedar waxwings take off from what looked like empty branches of a gigantic tree. I gasp and with that sound another flock takes off. How did they do that? My heart whirs from its numbed state. Nature has put on a magic show, and I’m in the front row.” 

Nature could calm me when I found myself in places where sounds, smells, images, or something tangible like a feather wafting from the sky or a hundred birds taking flight gifted me. I just had to learn to keep listening, to keep looking, recognizing that a voice or experience that comforts doesn’t always have a sound. 

My dad doesn’t come into my room any longer, but memories of him in locations where he sexually abused me occasionally surface. Decades of developing my inner voices guide me now to gently caress my dog’s head, ask my beloved partner for a warm embrace, tickle the toes of a few stuffed animals I’ve collected, stroke the ear of my stuffed dog of 67 years, listen to a breeze and imagine the encouraging words it is carrying, or promise myself I may soon find the gift of a feather.


In the next blog post I’ll be writing about my experience of learning to create space for a healing heart.


Read Part 1: Damaged by Childhood Sexual Abuse

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Patricia Eagle is the author of Being Mean: A Memoir of Sexual Abuse and Survival. She discovered language with her first word, “bird,” and later found great solace in nature. Six decades of journaling also served as a life buoy – tangible evidence of a life explored in earnest while being tossed by the confounding experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Her experience as a high school teacher informed her master’s research on the use of “professional reflective journaling,” a method to help educators better understand themselves and their students. A story gatherer, Eagle maintains an unyielding commitment to excavating and acknowledging what is resilient about her life and the lives of others, as an author and a Life- Cycle Celebrant®. Eagle lives amidst mountains and hot springs in the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, where she watches the Milky Way splash across the night skies. Visit her online at https://patriciaeagle.com/ to learn more about her upcoming speaking engagements in Houston, Austin, Sacramento, Dunsmuir, Pacifica, Novato, and Santa Barbara.