How Do You Talk To Yourself?

Our brains are sneaky things; they talk to us all day long, telling us thoughts they think we need to know. Often, we aren’t taking a lot of notice of what our brains are telling us, yet they are still there, whispering and shouting. Sometimes doing far more damage through what they are saying than we can ever realise, as the example below shows so well.

I’ll never amount to anything
So don’t tell me that
I’m a talented and giving person
Because each and every day
I don’t believe I can achieve my dreams
And I’m not going to lie to myself and say
I am enough and that I matter
That is why I always remind myself
That I am stupid and unlovable
Nothing will make me believe
I’m worth having a great life
Because no matter what happens
I will never have self-worth and confidence
And I’m not able to believe that
There is magic inside of me
Because when I look in the mirror I always think
Am I as worthless as people say?

(Now read bottom-up) by Lewis Howes

I have struggled my whole life with low self-worth, even though I didn’t think I had low self-worth. I mistook confidence for self-worth and thought I was doing okay. My childhood programming had taught me to ‘perform’ for approval. I would make life easier for other people; I was an excellent problem solver and a ‘good girl’. I kept any difficulties I was experiencing to myself and voiced no opinions of my own. I have previously described myself as a robot, waiting for commands so I could leap into action and make life less stressful for others.

Over time I became more frustrated with how I was showing up as a person. I wanted to be different, I wanted to be like people I saw who were free, joyful and happy, but I didn’t know how to do that or where to start. I devoured podcasts, audiobooks, books and webinars. Seeking any information that would guide me to ‘fixing’ myself.

I came up with BHAGs to push myself to improve. I was, and still am in some ways, addicted to self-improvement — a love of learning is one of my highest VIA character strengths, so I’m stuck with it! For years I didn’t get to where I wanted to be in how I felt about myself, and I couldn’t understand why. I felt trapped, like nothing I tried ever made any difference, and I was still stuck.

Eventually, I started to notice my thought patterns. I had learned some neuroscience in my undergraduate degree, and therefore I knew about brain plasticity, neural pathways and how new pathways can form. It is the ability of brain plasticity that allows survivors of traumatic brain injuries to retrain parts of their bodies that have lost function. But, I had never connected my frustration in life to my thoughts, and therefore my neural pathways. I knew about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and how it works by challenging negative thought patterns, but I still didn’t make the connection.

I finally started to comprehend the significance of my thoughts when I listened to the classic Louise Hay book — You Can Heal Your Life. Affirmations are mentioned a lot in the book, I had previously viewed affirmations as something not scientific, and therefore I had never tried them before. However, now I understand that affirmations are thoughts, thoughts are repeated patterns in our brains, patterns are neural pathways, and, the most significant thing of all, neural pathways can be changed; it’s simply biology.

Our brains don’t know whether a thought is good or bad; it merely repeats what it thinks we want to hear, the thoughts we’ve heard so many times before, over and over, so much so that the neural pathway is a direct line to unhappiness. At some point in our lives, something happened to cause that thought. It may have been in the form of intentional harm towards us by another person. Or it may have been a simple misunderstanding where we incorrectly told ourselves a reason for an event as our minds tried to make sense of things.

One of the tools suggested in You Can Heal Your Life is to constantly say to yourself, “I approve of myself”, on a loop in your mind for 30 days. The idea in doing this is to introduce a new thought pattern and change how you view yourself.

I was still sceptical, but I gave it a go; at this point, I was desperate to get out of the place in my mind that I was stuck in. Whilst it didn’t change my feelings instantly, it set me off on a healing journey where I have subsequently re-built my self-worth through changing my thoughts. In doing so, I have uncovered unrecognised abuse in my past, and I am finally learning how to be the person I want to be.

You may be thinking here, that’s great, but affirmations, really? Let me explain. My thought patterns were unknowingly unhealthy. I had been brought up in a way that taught me that the psychological and emotional neglect and abuse that I suffered was love. I became someone who was always seeking that kind of toxic relationship as an adult, whether it was work relationships with colleagues, friendships or romantic relationships. I had been trained to tell myself that I was not worth anything better.

My thought patterns were keeping me stuck in a dysfunctional place in my mind that I didn’t want to be, and I didn’t even know it. Until I replaced my thought patterns with newer, healthy ones, I couldn’t understand what had been wrong. I couldn’t see things differently even though I instinctively knew deep inside that things had to be better in life.

There are two things on my path of understanding that I owe my newfound self-worth to. I had an instinctive knowing that things could be better for me, which kept driving me forward, seeking information that could change my life — a ‘knowing’ which I call hope. And the second thing is learning to understand that affirmations are simply biology.

So be careful how you talk to yourself; you might be listening.