How making a new friend and giving yourself a break can change your life.
Cut out the negative self talk and give yourself a break.
Can you imagine if some kept calling you an idiot, pathetic, hopeless fat, ugly, old and so on? It’s hard to see many relationships surviving just one dose of that and yet we are all capable of not only calling ourselves the most appalling names, but we let ourselves do it time and time again until we can start to believe it.
In many ways it’s a form of abuse – coercive control and yet we not only keep dishing it out we volunteer our precious sanity to enduring this type of intimidation.
Whilst we may have made a mistake, it is highly unlikely that we have committed some heinous crime which requires a torrent of abuse yet ,not only do we not spare ourselves when it comes to insults but our brain, which is so complex and magnificent in many ways, isn’t able to sift out the real from the unreal. So, all our self-inflicted abuse gets registered and stored ready to be brought out again the next time we are in a similar situation.
And we humans are supposed to be an intelligent species – I very much doubt that dogs and cats wonder around chastising themselves for no good reason.
Of course we all do stupid things, we make mistakes, we are human after all but instead of screaming abuse secretly (or perhaps not always secretly) we should ask ourselves –
• is there anything I need to do to rectify this?
• Is there anything I need to learn from this?
• Then move on.
Punishing ourselves is pointless.
Years ago, I met a woman who happened to mention that she didn’t do guilt. At the time I was appalled – how could she be so self-centred etc. Now though I realise that she actually was on to something, although perhaps being a little extreme, her attitude is vastly more sensible than the self-flagellation most of us so willingly succumb to.
Once we slip into the negative, punishing mindset it becomes so easy to be trapped in an ever downwards spiral. We start to believe that these labels we give ourselves are true and so we can stop seeing them for what they are, ridiculously over reactive nonsense, and , perhaps more importantly we stop seeing any evidence to the contrary.
It’s been proven that we can persuade our brain to only notice what we want it to see, which is why if we are dieting all we see are adverts for things we crave, and in just the same way we start to filter out and not notice our successes or the good things we do.
So, bearing in mind that a friend or partner would not survive an argument if they called you a fraction of the things we can call ourselves one solution is to become a better friend to ourselves and argue back when our out of control voice gets going. Ask to see the evidence we base our judgement on.
Or, pick a fabulous new imaginary friend to look after you when you are down. I know someone who is (in their imagination) friends with Michelle Obama, and apparently she is very comforting, asks why they are being so hard on themselves and then with a smile tells them to stop being so melodramatic ,that they are wrong ,and she reminds them of all the things they have got right , the kindness they have shown and tells them to be quiet, to move on and think about something positive instead. The great part is that there are so many fabulously warm and caring people we can chose to call upon as our rational rebalancing friends when we have been unnecessarily cruel on ourselves.
This is where hypnotherapy comes into its own as its quite easy to agree with this blog and to know that its right and yet still, in the moment when we are just about to berate ourselves once again we can forget ,but hypnotherapy can help by sealing into our minds that we don’t do this and it can change the way we think about ourselves so we forget that we use to be a bully to ourselves and we can learn to abandon the dreadful habit.
Thinking negatively, storing up our false beliefs is not only a waste of time but does us incalculable harm . On the other hand thinking positively has been proven again and again to build serotonin and help us cope with life. So give yourself a break and move on from mistakes as quickly as you can.