Self Talk: The Key to Changing How we Feel

There are a lot of stressors we all face on a daily basis, but there is also an ongoing stress that doesn't necessarily come from the environment.  It comes from inside our minds and the internal pressure we put on ourselves with expectations, poor self-talk and lack of self-compassion.  But we can work on this problem and change the way the internal dialogue plays out from hour to hour.

Self-talk is the internal messages we give ourselves (or say to ourselves) throughout the day.  These messages can be internalized from many sources.  We get them from parents, teachers, friends, and just about anywhere there has been an interaction and information taken inside and felt deeply enough to be held in our memory.

If the messages were negative, abusive, inappropriate, or just misinformed, they are still there regardless of their poor content and they can rise up and repeat at any time.  Many people have a running self-dialogue throughout the day that is quite abusive and unsupportive.  When asked, many of my clients will let me know that their internal self-belief system is one of self-hatred, self-beratement, and self-judgment.  These kinds of internalized messages can trigger anxiety and depression, as well as self-hatred unless the thoughts are stopped and replaced with kinder and more compassionate ideas of self-acceptance.

The way we talk to ourselves can be changed and identifying the internal beliefs about ourselves, intercepting them with strong disputation and logical reasoning, and replacing them with supportive, loving, and self-soothing internal dialogue can result in new feelings that are positive and encouraging.  But it takes practice, repetition, devoted work, and conscious awareness to do this.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is designed to help with this process.  First, by recognizing the beliefs you use to interpret events.  Then, by rationalizing your way through these beliefs to see if they hold any sense of truth, connection to reality, or even form logical conclusions in the end.  By disputing false beliefs, you can begin to snuff them out and return to a more realistic way of looking at the world and yourself.  Where the false beliefs might have been leading to anxiety and depression, the new and more realistic beliefs alter the outcome of how you feel.

Here is a link to a list of 15 styles of distorted thinking (or beliefs) psychcentral most of us use to convince ourselves we're just no good, incapable, or somehow unworthy.  Find the ones that you use the most, and begin the journey of challenging the false beliefs that have tripped you up the most.  Using the ABCDE Model developed by Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy , you can practice every day to unravel some of this cognitive training that has convinced you that you deserve to be spoken to poorly (by yourself and others). 

"A" is the Activating Event, or what happened in any given situation, "B" is the false belief you are using to process or filter that event in your mind, "C" is the Consequence or Feeling you end up with by doing that (typically anxiety or depression), "D" is the use of Disputations to begin arguing against these false beliefs in your head, and "E" is the new and more positive Emotion you will feel by using more realistic and logic-oriented beliefs to process events in your life.

The way we speak to ourselves makes a big difference in how we feel on an ongoing basis.  Talk to yourself as if you were your own best friend.  No one wants a best friend that berates them and criticizes all day and has very little belief in them.  We want a best friend that is supportive, loving, and wants the best for us.  Be your own best friend!

Thanks to bm for the great abstract art piece, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/