(Three dots […] indicates a pause for you to actually do the instruction, and notice what you experience. You will only really learn from this book if you pause for a few moments to try each little experiment.)

Now hear the voice of your other parent, …

And then recall the voices of several other important people in your past, …

And then some good friends of yours in the present… .

Notice how each voice has a distinct tonality. Unless you are musically trained, it might be very hard for you to describe exactly how those voices differ, but you can still hear the differences clearly. Now listen to each voice that you just heard, in turn, and notice how your feelings change in response to each voice… .

Those feelings are partly in response to the words that you heard. But they are also in response to the unique tonality of each voice, and to the experiences that you associate with each of those people.

If we were fortunate, our parents were usually kind, nurturing, and understanding, and through imitation we learned to have inner voices that sound kind and understanding. If we were less lucky, we may have learned to talk to ourselves in a tone that is usually critical, distant, gloomy, dismissive, or even abusive.

And since even the most wonderful parents are sometimes tired, frustrated, irritable, limited, or out of choices, all of us also have memories of times when our parents communicated in ways that were less than ideal. Since this often occurred in situations that stirred strong emotions in us, these may have become strong "imprint" experiences that affect us throughout our later life — even if most of the time our parents spoke in more caring and reasonable ways.