How to talk to yourself
What does positive self talk mean? There is a way to learn to talk to yourself positively and consistently over time.
Positive self-talk: the art of speaking to yourself
When I was younger, I journaled religiously. Every emotion, every sin, everything was documented. Most recently, I came across a journal of a 17-year-old me. The sadness I felt from the words I wrote of myself was deep. It was years away from positive self-talk.
The overall tone was anger, deep sadness, and loneliness. Some pages were filled with me begging to not be the person I am anymore, begging for freedom. But it was mostly riddled with self-sabotaging write-ups.
Specifically, I blamed myself for everything wrong happening in my life, I creatively described how ugly I thought I was and how certain I was the whole world thought the same of me too.
Looking back, I’m actually impressed with the creativity within the sadness. And looking back at that write-ups, and looking at where I am today, I’m so proud of myself. It’s not been an easy journey but it’s been an interesting one. I learned to accept life.
I’m grateful that I was able to learn to talk better to myself and teach myself to love myself the way I so desperately needed.
However, I circled about it the wrong way so many times. In trying to find real healing love from other people, to heal the fragments of myself, I have scars to show the hurt I got instead. I even hurt people, an all-around mess.
I spent my early years learning to hate myself from my immediate family. If your parents blamed you for every bad thing that happened to the family, you’d blame yourself too for every bad thing that happens in the family.
So I just repeated the same cycle with myself, till I became the very embodiment of everything I hated. And then it made me hate myself, even more, a hellish cycle.
I realized I had to help myself by myself. It obviously wasn’t coming from anyone else as I expected. I needed to make the first step else I’d keep chasing the right people away and chasing after the wrong ones.
I’m so grateful for the people before me who made content like this. It brought hope and made me feel like I could actually find a way out of my hell.
I’m grateful for everyone who offers these forms of content to encourage people who are seeking help.
What is negative self-talk?
You know what’s painful and you still say it to yourself. Verbally blaming and punishing yourself because you made a mistake, or because of what someone else did.
You’re hurting yourself. Why do you choose to do that to yourself? Why do you find pleasure in abusing yourself?
It may be considered a criminal offense if someone does it to you, so why should you do it to yourself? You’re committing a personal hate crime.
Also, your body is made up of cells and you are every part of your body. What you say to yourself purposefully affects every single inch of your body. Negative self-talk can hurt you. Your body listens, your life listens and you’ll keep going that negative way.
Further, the mode in which you talk to yourself matters. A whole lot. You can’t grow if you keep feeding yourself poisonous words.
What does positive self talk Mean?
Firstly, self-talk simply refers to what you say to yourself and the purpose behind it. Words are powerful, what makes them powerful is the purpose and the emotions behind them.
Self-talk is heavily influenced by our self-image.
Comparatively, healthline.com defines self-talk as”… your internal dialogue. It’s influenced by your subconscious mind, and it reveals your thoughts, beliefs, questions, and ideas”
We define positive self-talk simply as the act of saying honest-positive words to yourself.
How to practice positive self-talk
It is very important to be careful with what we say, to ourselves and others. It is easy to say this. However, positive self-talk may be difficult for someone who only knows how to say negative things to themselves.
If you want to change how you talk to yourself, here are a few tips on practicing positive self-talk
Identify your Genuine intentions
The genuine intentions in everything you say to yourself ripples down to everything in your being. Hence, when you say something repeatedly with the same purpose, it becomes reality.
Truth is powerful. And when your genuine purpose is to hurt yourself, you are successful. Mentally, you cripple yourself from moving farther and growing. Because evidently, the mind affects the physical.
When you feel strong emotions, there’s an honesty in those strong emotions in your heart, you may not know it but it’s there.
Hurt is a very powerful and honest emotion, and whatever you say in a moment of hurt is quite impactful.
When facing such strong emotions, it’s important to not say anything in the heat but to remember that patience is a virtue of self-love.
Say it over and over again in your head;
“patience is a virtue of love, and I love myself hence I will not say anything to hurt myself, especially in the time of weakness”.
This is positive self-talk.
Confront your emotions
Further, have honest conversations with yourself. Ask yourself questions in your alone time.
Why am I saying this thing to myself?
What does this achieve for me?
Are these feelings genuinely mine or what I’ve been accustomed to?
Never suppress emotions, always address them so they don’t compound and become more difficult to deal with or track. Unresolved conflicts are never a good idea.
Positive self-talk is addressing the real root cause of negative emotions. Subsequently, solve it from there. What’s making you angry?
Instead of blaming and cussing yourself immediately, be patient and analyze everything. The situation, how you’re feeling, why you’re feeling this way?
Be mindful of your company.
The society you grow up in affects your life and your mindset. When you’re surrounded by people who constantly encourage your bad habit of self trash talking, you can’t thrive.
Surround yourself with people who encourage your healthy life choices. Identify the companies that have nothing of value to you and set boundaries with them.
Spend more time indulging in activities that make you more productive. Positive self-talk wants you happier with yourself.
The things you say to yourself reveal how you feel about yourself and affect your interaction with others. You assume everyone thinks the worst of you because you’ve chanted so to yourself over and over.
You’re jumpy around people, you’re timid and you don’t speak up for yourself. You’ve told yourself you deserve all the bad things happening to you. Most people may notice this and try to take advantage of you or dissociate from you.
You let everyone push you over, accumulating negative feelings towards yourself and your environment. These negative emotions come spilling down one way or the other. It affects your health, your productivity, your emotions, etc.
Everything you do reflects how you think of yourself, every decision you make and actions you accept are a reflection of how you see yourself. To grow out of this cycle, clean up your associations.
Take control of what you can
When you do something wrong, don’t rush to blame yourself. Everyone makes mistakes.
I had a bad habit of falling into destructive behaviors. Self-sabotage, allowing unpleasant things to happen.
I would quietly sit through uncomfortable even, accepting actions that are hurting me. It’s like this numbness came over me when I found myself in situations I should stop.
Inside my head, the part of me that judges my whole character was screaming at me with so much hatred: why aren’t you doing anything about it? Why are you letting this happen, I’d call myself dirty names as if to prove a point. But emotional negligence had been my primary MO.
This trickled down to my emotional life. Staying in bad situations longer than I should have because of the kind of relationship I had subconsciously built with myself and my emotions.
Today isn’t perfect but I try as much as I can to remember to be patient with myself. Take my time alone and dissect my thoughts and feelings. Presently, I’m not struggling with the vicious cycle of self-hate.
Now I’m learning to be more patient with myself, to un-tell myself that I have to tolerate this bad thing. I’m not 8 or 17 anymore. I’m a grown human who should be more and more responsible for herself. Perfection doesn’t exist anywhere. Just do your own best and work consciously towards being better. Be consciously active in your life.
Verbal abuse is not self-discipline.
There is a line between self-discipline and self-abuse. Unfortunately, we often cross this line without even trying to. It is important to identify the limits of self-discipline because it could turn toxic if not reigned in.
Discipline means consciously controlling your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
Self-abuse is the self-destructive patterns, thoughts, and characters that would wound you emotionally and physically.
Personal self-talk wants you to refrain from doing things that would destroy your character and person. Instead, uplift and discipline yourself through your words, your thoughts, and your actions. Your expressions can be with faith in the light you’re trying to find.
Instead of cussing out yourself, say a beautiful thing about yourself. “I’m not undesirable, I am capable of anything I put my heart into and I deserve to hear nice things.”
Practice saying positive words of affirmation to yourself every time face the temptation to say negative things.
Practice kindness to yourself through self-love.
Say no when you don’t like a thing or when you’re not comfortable. Don’t wait for anyone to make such decisions for you, be your friend. This way you can avoid gaslighting yourself.
Give yourself the chance to Say positive things to yourself. Say positive things with an honest positive purpose to yourself.
Fight honest negative feelings with honest positive feelings. Forgive yourself when you slip, and encourage yourself to do better.