We all have voices in our heads.
Not in a hallucinatory kind of way — I mean the one that plans conversations, narrates your life, and tells you about yourself.
But sometimes the voice in your head doesn't really know you as well as you might expect.
That inner voice and your understanding of yourself gets built from the interactions you have with your friends and family and the world around you, and sometimes the feedback you get isn't that helpful.
Psychologists call the organized understanding of all the ideas related to you your self-schema.
It can include things like whether you're friendly, if you're extroverted, or even what social groups you belong to.
And generally, people come to understand who they are through interacting with others.
Like, if people around you are always saying how kind you are or how rude you are, you'll probably start to believe those things about yourself.
As with many ideas in psychology, the idea that you build your self based on things others tell you came from... you guessed it, good ol' Freud.
He called this introjection.
