Using a supportive voice to yourself

Sometimes I tune in to what I am saying to myself and am absolutely horrified. ‘What’s wrong with you – why can’t you pull yourself together?’ or ‘you’re so stupid, you made a mess of that’ or ‘you just can’t get it right can you?’ Hearing these words stops me dead. They are the words I grew up hearing, but this time they’re coming from inside me. I’ve spent decades seeing therapists and taking part in personal growth groups, reading self-help books, filling journals with my thoughts, doing self-esteem exercises and still I think like this! Not nearly as much as I used to, but even so it shows how deep these comments cut when decades after first hearing them they can still ambush me.

What I do when I realise I’m giving myself a hard time is switch to a self-nurturing voice. There are a number of options:

1/ the caring friend who says ‘you’re tired. Have a lie down. When did you last eat? It could be that you’re hungry. You’ll feel better after a meal. Just look after yourself.’

2/ the wise advisor who helps me solve my problems and says things like ‘it looks like you’re a bit overloaded with stuff at the moment. How about you try and offload some of it? It’s not going to be the end of the world if you don’t get some of it done.’

3/ the voice of my strong, courageous self who says things like ‘you can do it – you’ve done much harder things than this’, and

4/ the voice of the part of me who admires and likes me, and sees me in a positive way, who encourages and praises me with words like ‘you are really good at that’ or ‘you did a great job of handling that difficult situation’.

I actually have a poster on my wall with the name of each type of supportive voice inside a different shape in a different bright colour. So when I get tired or stressed or something goes wrong and I start to fall into the habit of trash talking to myself I can take a quick look at it and be reminded of how to speak to myself in a nurturing, supportive way. I find that as soon as I do this I feel a lot better.

Count what counts - noticing achievements

Just now I found myself thinking ‘I did nothing yesterday – what a slack day I had.’ Long experience of how my thoughts quietly lie to me alerted me to a wrongful assumption about to slip past the internal radar.
‘Hang on,’ I said to myself. ‘Is that really true? What did I actually do yesterday?’

The list went something like this:

• brought firewood in
• tidied the bedroom
• did my asthma breathing exercises
• put a wash through
• dried firewood
• made a fire
• hung out the wash
• did some dishes
• spent time playing with the dog and training him
• put out the ingredients for the soup I’m planning to make
• finished my tax calculations and filled in the form
• typed up ideas for future blog entries
• posted a blog entry
• found pictures for it.

When I stopped and looked at it this was hardly ‘nothing’, especially for someone with a chronic illness having a bad day. The mistake I was making was focusing on what I’d planned to do and hadn’t got done (yet). Like: make the new soup recipe, cook a roast, make spaghetti Bolognese, make cottage pies, write new blog entries, add pictures to old blog entries, do some writing. When I looked at it I realised this was quite a daunting list, even for someone with good health. In paying attention to all the things I hadn’t done I’d overlooked all the things I had done and ended up thinking I’d done ‘nothing’.

I know why I do this – I was brought up by adults who pointed out to me what I hadn’t done, or what I could have done better. I don’t think they meant to be cruel or destructive (although there was a certain amount of, shall we say, ego enhancement in it for them). It was more how they saw the world. So my job is to overcome this childhood conditioning and remember to notice all the things I achieved, rather than getting fixated on everything I didn’t manage to do today.