The "meta" voice...

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I explained this to the psychologist, who told me it made sense to her.

Basically, I "brute force" social situations. I'm constantly analysing the situation and pulling from my "experience library" or "topic library", examining body language, looking for cues and clues.

It's exhausting.

But then there's what I call the "meta" voice. Which is like a separate process that's constantly analysing my analyses, critiquing my responses to situations, and the "bad" choices I've made.

The meta voice... that's tough. I feel like I can almost never just "be", because it's constantly on and chattering away. It's not like I'm "hearing voices", it's just like my own voice, but a separate part of my brain that's a supervisor to everything else going on.

The only way I've found to shut it up is... alcohol. Alcohol tends to mute it, and I can relax and just "be".

I'm pretty sure this is not a good long-term solution. So...

1. Is this something that other people experience, or am I just super-weird?
2. If you do experience this, does alcohol have the same effect?
3. Got any alternative solutions to (ab)using alcohol?

I am interested in your brute forcing of social situations. Do you mean that you are always consciously thinking about what people are thinking and what you should be doing during social interactions?

The meta voice thing, I have heard about it as common phenomenon, the analyzing situations usually in critical ways, and people have described it as chattering that won't shut up.

I don't know how to make it go away, as I don't have the brute force or the meta voice, but maybe your brute forcing habit makes the meta voice verry merry berry strong even when you are not in social interactions.

No you're not alone.


I personally described what you call your "meta" voice as "the other me". That was one of the reasons I began to drink frequently.
The other symptoms I was having trouble coping with (anxiety, depression, obsessiveness) also led me to it.

I became an alcoholic.

I'm in recovery now. (Been sober for 9 months), but I still remember the reasons that drew me to both alcohol and weed in the first place.

Meditation has been my non-chemical salvation. Meditation and Tai Qi.

You are not alone. Marijuana was my drug of choice. It made me non-functional so I had to quit. Alcohol was a substitute when I couldn't smoke weed. Cigarettes and other addictions took the edge off although they didn't shut the voice down. Right now I use mindfulness, thought-stopping, and anti-anxiety medication. I am also using my diagnosis to figure out which situations are best for me, because up until now, I have made really poor decisions for an Aspie, putting myself in situations where I am bound to fail and be stressed out. I just signed up for Voc. Rehab. to see if they can help me with getting an education or finding a job that is less social than the ones I am trained for.

Btw, my gluten sensitivity made alcohol intolerable for me. I always got violently ill (still didn't stop me from consuming massive amounts of it when I was drinking though). But that's why I liked weed. It shut down that voice temporarily and took me to another world for a while.

Also, a psychologist would say that that voice is due to chronic anxiety. I recently got diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and it has helped me a lot. I knew I was high strung but the anxiety has been with me my whole life so I didn't really notice it until I started getting treatment for it and it went away.

Brute Force? Yes. As others have said, I've been doing it for decades. The good news is that it is now second nature - but that is also the bad news. As I get older and experience the normal age-related cognitive decline, the mental and emotional cost of automatically brute-forcing my way through social situations consumes more and more of my available resources. As I age (now 59) these costs have begun to take toll on my physical health as well, so I am now needing to allow myself to just be more of myself.

Meta-Voice? Yes. In fact I find I have two of them: (1) Critical Parent and (2) Nurturing Parent. I learned about these as part of studying Eric Berne's classic work on Transactional Analysis, or TA. Berne's work has helped me enormously. For me I can not just turn off a harmful inner voice; I must replace it with a helpful one. TA gave me a framework for understanding and accomplishing that.

Alcohol? Oh heck yes. I was an active alcoholic for 15 years. At first alcohol worked great to shut down my inner Critical Parent meta-voice. But as with many substance dependencies it eventually stopped helping and started destroying me. I have now been sober for over 20 years, and that journey of recovery has provided the groundwork for healing in other parts of my life, including AS.

Best wishes.

I refer to it as 'The Executive'.
Generally speaking it keeps me out of trouble, but it can be an awful stick in the mud sometimes.
I wish it wasn't quite so loud and insistant when I was younger.
I would have had a lot more fun.
The Executive doesn't talk all the time, but no amount of intoxication seems capable of shutting it down.

The contant stream of analysis that won't stop, though, comes from my subconscious which just never shuts the hell up.
I guess most people have an unconscious mind and a conscious mind.
I have a subcobscious mind that sort of sits between the two, constantly nattering on about this analysis or that one, and occasionally offreing up gems gleaned from my unconscious mind.
Marijuana can help make its constant chattering quieter and easier to ignore/deal with, but nothing else seems to have much effect on it.

Actually, to some large extent that's what makes me as intelligent as I seem to be.
My conscious mind is a bit above average, sure, but my subcobscious is a friggin' genius.
Unfortunately, I can't control when I get the information I'm looking for and when I don't from it.
I can only control the inputs and hope that my subconscious can and will along with my unconscious mind, make the necessary connections for the understanding I need.
Fortunately it usually manages it, but sometimes it takes so long that the insight gained is only useful if a similar situation presents itself in the future.

Thanks everyone for the feedback (happy to get more).

1. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

2. I suspected that using alcohol to shut the metavoice down was probably a bad idea.

For those of you that have been there, how do you know when you've crossed the line to "alcoholic"?

I so get this "meta-voice" phenomenon.

I used alcohol and cannabis pretty heavily too, for a couple of quite long periods, and loved the way it stopped that constantly analysing background comment on everything, or muted it or something. Ref: playing with young child/son ; a housemate once said to me that he liked me much more when I was drunk because I actually looked *at* him/his face properly, because apparently the way I looked at him normally/soberly he had the feeling that I looked straight through his head to a point somewhere just behind him. Something about the way I "saw"/"looked" at him changed from a "point in space" to a person, when I drank/smoked.

Have found that exercise helps, to some extent, yoga too, singing, some kinds of diet ( eg. gluten free, and dairy free too, sometimes a lo-carbo diet, seem to slow the "rapid thinking" element of it down a *lot*! ) ; things which make me aware of being a body *inside* the world and not someone/thing looking at the/a world inside their head.

And the "brute force" socialising; how much of my energy and attention goes/went on interacting with other people in jobs, "calculating and constructing/building each one of my "moves"/responses to others' actions, speech etc, such that I had very little left over for doing the job properly, for really engaging with it, for being in any way a "professional" about it. I only seemed to be able to be a "sheep"-like employee ... which didn't fit with my intelligence/abstract intellectual capacities which were then terribly frustrated.
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