You can’t hate yourself into someone you love
‘You can’t hate yourself into someone you love’
‘If being hard on yourself worked it would’ve worked by now’
Both these things are true, and might even give you a moment of pause if you’ve not heard them before. Maybe it gives you an insight into how you talk to or treat yourself, maybe it’s a point for reflection, but really, where do you go after that?
I’ve had CBT a couple of times and I think both my CBT practioners asked me if I would speak to a friend the way I spoke to myself, and the answer was no, I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t tell me how to change how I speak to myself. Just knowing that doesn’t help. I can catch myself, but at the time those mean throughts felt true and deserved, so doing anything else felt like lying to myself.
So where do we go, fron knowing we’re being mean to ourselves, to making acutal change?
Knowing that you’re being meaner to yourself than you aree to others is a good start, to be fair. If you can acknolwdge that, you at least can start to notice when you’re doing that, and catch yourself.
Cultivating positivity is one way to help. Things like practising gratitude and being kind to others (who deserve your kindness!) can help push back the general tide of negativity in your brain. Learning to look for the positive can help you be more neutral to yourself.
Find stillness. This isn’t necessarily formal meditation, but something you find relaxing and restorative. Most of the time this is something that quiets your mind a little bit, or at least gives it something to focus on. I’ve spoken about mindfulness before, and the different ways you can engage with it, but things like walking, gentle crafting, exercise, etc.
You can also find stillness in the shower or bath. In waiting for a kettle to boil or a coffee machine to run. Doing the washing up, making the bed. Anything that will occupy but not take all your focus. Bonus points if you can do this while doing housework because then you have clean dishes or a freshly made bed afterwards.
Feel all your feelings, positive and negative. Our feelings exist for a reason, they tell us things, just like physical feelings tell us things about our environment or body.
But Gem, you ask, how does this help with negative self-talk?
Because this is about being open with yourself, and carving out time for you. It’s hard to spend time on you, you might have responsibilities or goals that take up a lot of your time. You might feel guilty, or that you’re lagging behind and every second not spent on something is a second wasted.
The secret here is: getting to know yourself can be joyful. Spending time with yourself, treating yourself to stillness and gentle kindness can be wondrous. The more you do this, the kinder you’ll be to yourself.
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