Many popular current therapies, including mindfulness-based and cognitive approaches, encourage us to become aware of the constant conversations inside our brains. But few locate the source of these often self-defeating, critical, and exhausting stories anywhere but in early family life. This workshop will introduce a way of investigating the hidden political, familial, and institutional inferences behind our "private" internal conversations. Via a live therapy demonstration and videotaped client interviews, you'll learn how to ask questions that get clients curious about how they got seduced into doing the biddings of a culture based on striving and consumption. Once this is accomplished, such voices can lose much of their power. You'll leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of how our internalized conversations are shaped by unquestioned public messages that change our view of our own lives.