{"id":27488,"date":"2026-09-14T16:16:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T22:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/?post_type=transcript&p=27488"},"modified":"2026-09-14T16:16:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T22:16:07","slug":"just-one-question-geneen-roth-how-do-i-work-with-my-hateful-voice","status":"publish","type":"transcript","link":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/transcript\/just-one-question-geneen-roth-how-do-i-work-with-my-hateful-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My Hateful Voice?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image_print\"Print Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/div>

Chris:<\/b> Hello and welcome to <\/span>Just One Question<\/span><\/i> from <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>. I’m Chris Rock.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i> to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Thus the name, <\/span>Just One Question<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> We hope you’ll enjoy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hey, Mallory. Do you want to talk about time machines?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Uh, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> Of course the answer is yes. Of course. So we’re going back to the very first <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i> ever, and that is from 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> It’s wild that <\/span>Insights<\/span><\/i> has been going on that long.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> It is wild. Seventeen years, back when podcasts were kind of a new thing. And Tami’s first guest on the show was Geneen Roth, who’s also been on as recently as this year. So what a legacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Yeah. She was really sweet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> The other thing that’s like a time machine here is that in this conversation, Geneen is talking about how badly she felt about herself after losing a lot of her life savings in the Bernie Madoff scandal. Now, have you heard of Bernie Madoff?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> I know the name, but that’s it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> Yeah, I think that’s pretty true for a lot of people. He was this big financier, and in 2008 he was arrested for running what turned out to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history. He defrauded thousands of people out of billions of dollars, and Geneen was one of them. And in this conversation with Tami, she talks about how she handled the self-loathing that she felt after that. She felt like, how could I be so dumb? All of these really negative, self-abusive feelings. And she talks about how to handle that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Yeah. And how to handle that inner voice that’s maybe not so nice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> Yeah, the not-so-nice voice. Exactly. So let’s hop in our little time machine here.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Okay.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> And we’ll go back to the early aughts, when our interviews were over the phone and losing billions of dollars was actually considered a scandal at the time. True fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mallory:<\/b> Okay. So here are Tami and Geneen Roth answering the question: how do I work with my hateful voice?<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> Stay with us.<\/span><\/p>\n

[Ad insertion point]<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> I guess the question I’m asking is \u2014 in my own experience, and I can imagine listeners having this experience, whatever it is in their life, it might not be around money, it might be around something else, where they get to that moment of just this feeling of, I feel so terrible about myself. And as you say, it’s not a voice that’s particularly constructive. So what have you learned about how to work with times when that’s the voice you’re hearing in your head?<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> Well, the first thing \u2014 I just want to make a distinction here between blaming yourself and feeling terrible. Because feeling terrible in those weeks after Madoff was, I think, a natural thing to feel. I don’t think there was any way of feeling anything but devastated.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I learned in that time \u2014 and I learned that also after the death of my father, I mean, I keep learning that in the most extreme circumstances \u2014 is that that voice, that raging voice, has got to be cut off immediately. I do not believe that there’s any value in listening to that raging voice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, this is not to say that I haven’t asked myself again and again: what is it about me that is so susceptible, that so wants to be taken care of by somebody who seems to have the answers, that I’m willing to throw what I know away? That’s a different voice than “you idiot.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> “You good for nothing. You dumb thing. How could you?” Give me a break. I mean, that’s a different voice. The actual voice of curiosity, the actual voice of wanting to know \u2014 well, what happened there? What really happened? What block, what obstacle, what quality, what tendency of mine is operating that allows me to just throw myself overboard like that?<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> That’s different. Because when that voice is raging, what I’ve discovered is that there’s no way that I can answer that question. I can’t really get to the bottom of that, because all I feel when that voice is raging is horrible about myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> Ashamed. I feel collapsed and paralyzed and diminished.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> And in that condition, I have never discovered that what’s actually going on has the space to reveal itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> Because all I want to do is hide. I’m not interested in finding out the truth then. I’m just interested in hiding. Because it’s like being whipped. When a kid gets beaten, when you’re getting whipped, all you want is for the whipping to stop. You don’t want to figure out what you’re getting whipped about. You just want the pain to stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

So have I asked myself what it is, what goes on? Have I been incredibly mindful of that since then? Yes. Was I vigilant, and have I become extraordinarily vigilant about stopping that voice dead in its tracks when it starts revving itself up?<\/span><\/p>\n

I’ll tell you what works for me. The first thing that works for me is awareness. I have to realize that that voice is operating. For the first many times that it happened \u2014 I’m not talking about Madoff, I’m talking about the first hundred thousand times it happened while I was trying to be aware of it before Madoff \u2014 because I think if I had just started becoming aware of it when Madoff happened, it would have been really hard to stop it. I think this is the kind of thing you have to be aware of pretty much daily.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> So I think the first thing that had to happen for me is that I had to become aware that the voice was operating. That voice sounded so much like my voice. And also, because it had co-opted the truth \u2014 it was using something that actually had happened to make me feel awful about what happened \u2014 I had to be aware when the voice was revving up.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so I had to begin understanding the difference between my voice, or the voice that really wanted to know what was going on, and that voice. Which, you know, that voice is called by so many names. The superego, the inner critic, the inner parent, the judge. I mean, call it anything, but that’s basically what it is. It’s the voice that thinks it knows what you’re supposed to be doing and how you’re supposed to be doing it, and basically it says that you are not doing it the right way. That’s what I found \u2014 at least, that’s my version of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the first thing that happens is that I’m either aware of it speaking to me, or I’m aware that I suddenly feel collapsed. I wasn’t collapsed five minutes ago, or two minutes ago, but I’m suddenly collapsed and ashamed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> And if I have enough presence, I realize, wow, something just happened there. I was feeling fine, and now I feel collapsed. Now I feel humiliated, and now I feel ashamed. What happened? What am I saying to myself?<\/span><\/p>\n

It takes a lot of attention and some degree of consciousness to realize, okay, I’m in it. I’m on it. I’m on myself. I’m raging against myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I do at that point \u2014 if being aware of it, simply naming it, isn’t enough to help me disengage and kind of dissolve it \u2014 I’ll go the next step, and I will either write down, or I’ll say out loud if I’m alone, what that voice is saying to me. And this took a lot of practice. So that I can actually hear the cruelty in it. It’s cruel. I mean, it’s just cruel and vicious. So once I hear the way that I’m speaking to myself \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> \u2014 but I’ll put it in the “you” terms. Like, “You are a piece of shit.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> “You are so unbelievably dumb. You are doomed. You are a failure.” If I say it in the “you” form \u2014 and this doesn’t work for everybody, but for me it does, because then there’s a “you” and an “I.” Then there’s actually somebody. There’s some voice that’s talking to me. It is a superego voice. Then I can just feel the cruelty of it. And then at that point, at least for me, it can stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the beginning, when I became aware of what I was saying to myself and how I was saying it, I would also just say, “Stop. Enough. Go away.”<\/span><\/p>\n

You know, there are some schools of thought that believe that it’s really important to be vehement with that voice, to be aggressive with that voice, to mobilize some kind of aggression that you were never allowed to have as a kid if you were one of those kids who was never supposed to talk back to your parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> So one school of thought says you need to mobilize your own aggressiveness simply to separate from the voice, as an act of separation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> Mm-hmm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Geneen Roth:<\/b> So that you can then see what’s true. That has never really truly worked for me. But becoming aware of the cruelty of it \u2014 becoming aware of it, and the cruelty of it, and that I’m locked in a death grip with it, and that it won’t lead to any good \u2014 that helps. But it’s a practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris:<\/b> This has been <\/span>Just One Question<\/span><\/i>. If you want to get in your own time machine and go all the way back to 2009 to hear the full <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i> episode with Geneen, called “No Situation Is Unworkable,” you can find that anywhere you find podcasts, or at soundstrue.com. And we’ll put a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami:<\/b> The Sounds True Podcast Network.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"class_list":["post-27488","transcript","type-transcript","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nJust One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My Hateful Voice? | Sounds True<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Just One Question | Geneen Roth: How Do I Work With My Hateful Voice? | Sounds True\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock. Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. 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