Help with Negative Self-talk
Negative self-talk makes people feel bad, and these bad feelings are the trigger for a huge variety of problems and difficulties. These include most eating disorders, alcohol and other substance abuse, anxiety and panic disorder, anger and violence, depression—the list goes on and on. Often the people who suffer from these problems don’t realize that they are caused by troublesome voices, because they are so focused on the horrible feelings that result from them, and the need to escape from these feelings.
Most books about negative self-talk make one or more of three major mistakes:
1. The first mistake is to focus narrowly on negative self-talk, ignoring all the wonderful things that our internal voices do for us. Besides being the basis for communicating with others, internal voices make it possible to for us to plan, and dream, remember treasured memories from the past, create a better future, and organize our activities in a multitude of other useful ways. If you have ever seen someone who has lost their ability to use language because of a stroke or some other kind of brain damage, you know how devastating that is.
If you focus only on the negative self-talk, it is easy to conclude that all self-talk is bad, and want to completely eliminate internal voices. Silencing the “chattering monkey” voices have been the goal of a wide variety of paths to “enlightenment,” some of them thousands of years old. Eliminating a voice is very difficult—if not impossible—but changing a troublesome voice into something more useful and pleasant is surprisingly easy.
2. The second major mistake is to argue with a voice that talks to you in a negative way. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and many other approaches advocate arguing with internal negative self-talk as a way to make it less impactful and destructive. Arguing with another person typically creates conflict. Usually the other person argues back even louder and longer, and arguing very rarely leads to any resolution. Arguing with an internal voice has the same result; that doesn’t solve the original problem; it only adds another one.
3. The third mistake is to focus entirely on the words, and ignore the impact of tonality on the message—the volume and tone of voice, the tempo and timbre, hesitations, and all the other nonverbal aspects that carry the meaning of the words. By changing these tonal aspects of what a voice says you can easily change the meaning, and that will change your feeling response to what it says. There are many ways to change tonality, and they are surprisingly easy to do.
For instance, think of a critical voice that you have had at some time, and notice both the words that it says, and the volume and tone of voice that it uses . . .
Now hear the exact same set of words in a very soft volume, like a very quiet whisper, and notice how that changes your response to it . . .
Now hear the exact same set of words in a very slow (or very fast) tempo . . .
Now hear the exact same set of words in the tonality of someone who loves you, and notice how that changes your response . . .
Now think of a favorite piece of uplifting music, and hear that as a background to that critical voice, and notice how that changes your response . . .
That is only a tiny sample of the kind of instant change that is possible by altering how an internal voice speaks to you. This book offers a multitude of ways to alter what a voice does, often in small ways that are easy to do, yet which often have profound results.
Read the short excerpts from Adding a Song, Starting the Day, Adding a Voice, Talking to Yourself Positively and Contents to get some brief samples of what you can learn to do. You can also read some reviews of the book to see if it’s right for you.
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