In search of querencia

Being your own therapist

The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Salvador Dalí)

Several months ago I started voice journaling for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate. It happened around the same time as my breakup. Of course, should one note a correlation, it would be entirely their own doing, not at all guided by my hand — purely coincidental and, dare I say, serendipitous.

Every morning I would wake up and go for a walk. My AirPods dutifully listened to breathy rants about everything from how much I admired Princess Rhaenyra’s character in House of the Dragon to the importance of being yourself in a relationship. These monologues provided instant relief. The type of release I imagine you get from therapy.

It wasn’t just release though. Through these voice recordings, I could go back and listen to my past self. And when I finally did work up the courage to do so, revisiting old entries didn’t feel like listening to a previous version of me. It felt like listening to an entirely different person. So much so that I would feel this urge to keep checking over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t get caught eavesdropping on these deep monologues.

As I continued to listen, I had these palpable empathetic reactions to what I was hearing.

Anytime I heard an entry infused with sadness, I reacted the way I would with a close friend. I wanted to be there for him, providing comfort and advice.

Anytime I heard an entry infused with anger, I reacted with calmness, wordlessly assuring my past self: this too shall pass.

Anytime I heard an entry infused with happiness, I reacted in kind, letting the smile spread across my face and warmth spread through my body.

But what I was soon realizing was that this was something much different than empathy. Where empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, here I was understanding and sharing the feelings of myself with myself. This seemed to be drawing me ever closer to a more honest understanding of some past versions of me. And although these past versions weren’t me as I understood myself in the present, I could see with surprising clarity ways these versions still lived inside me. Things I was holding on to. Things I was repeating. Patterns of behavior and thought.

That sounds strangely similar to things I’ve heard about therapy. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Part of the reason for therapy is because we can’t have honest conversations with our past selves. We need someone else to play the active listener, drawing the words and emotions out of us and reflecting them back so we can hear them aloud. Our own words spoken by another take on a different meaning. In that act of hearing what you’ve said reflected back at you, you’re able to see what other people see. You’re able to look in the mirror and see how you look from someone else’s perspective, free of your own internal distortions.

The exploration of this inner dialogue reminded me of a term I heard from bullfighting of all things:

“It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.”

— Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha)

Just as Brach uses querencia to illustrate a pivotal moment of transformation, voice journaling was my own version of this concept — a mental and emotional sanctuary where I confronted and comforted my past self, building an intimate bridge between who I was and who I am. It's within this newfound querencia that my journaling became more than just a venting exercise — it became a practice of radical acceptance.

This type of perspective shift of sitting in the therapist’s chair opened a new set of eyes and ears that could be pointed inward. I could give myself the compassionate seeing and thoughtful advice I love to give to close friends. Doing this made me realize just how callously we often treat ourselves. I’ve always wondered why it is that, without effort, I seem to have no problem being there for my friends. I think now I have the answer or at least a solution. It’s that it is painful to listen to ourselves with that same level of care. And normally when we begin to bear the weight of our own emotions, we change course without second thought. When instead you force yourself to listen to that voice that no longer resides in your head but comes from outside of you, to not listen would be to press the stop button on the voice recording. An act of commission rather than omission.

The power of this self-empathy should be self-evident. After all, you’ve seen it in the way your friends react when you’re there for them. I could spend time elaborating on how it has helped me already and maybe I will in another essay. But for now, I would like to point, yet again, to psychologist and Buddhist mediation expert Tara Brach and her concept of radical acceptance:

“Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.”

— Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha