Get a Grip on Negative Self-Talk

A few weeks ago I ran a meme that quoted Brene Brown, who said, "Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love." That really struck a chord with a lot of you.

Do you hear yourself when you talk to yourself? Your tone of voice? The message that you’re constantly pounding into your mind, heart, and soul?? Are you so used to the constant abuse you don’t hear it as abuse anymore? It’s more like white noise, elevator music? Although it’s elevator music custom written to bring you down? How young were you when you started taking that self-talk ride to the basement?

A friend of mine tells the story of the time she was having a casual lunch with a neighbor at a neighborhood deli. “I don’t remember what I was saying, but I must have been talking about myself. And not in a good way,” she recalls. “What I do remember is what my neighbor said back to me: ‘You’re so hard on yourself.’”

“That was quite a revelation. And all this time, I was thinking I wasn’t hard enough on myself. I didn’t realize it until that point over our tuna salad sandwiches, but it struck me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I believed that the only way I could drive myself to perform at the level I thought was marginally acceptable was to continually hit myself with the self-talk stick. Somehow I believed that it was impossible to be too hard on myself because there was always room for improvement. Out comes the stick for another beating until morale improves, as the old joke goes. The thing is, morale never improved. And I hated the voice in my head. And since that voice in my head was my own voice, I was actually hating on myself.”

Which brings me back to the Brene Brown quote.? If you heard a parent constantly abuse a child with the same kind of brutal self-talk you subject yourself to, what would you do? Call Child Protection Services would be my guess. Don’t you deserve the same kind of protection? Let me answer that for you: Yes.

?What are the messages you constantly berate yourself with?

“Quit your complaining. It’s ungrateful.”

“You get what you deserve. Like it, lump it, or work harder to deserve better.”

“If you were more disciplined, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

“So what if that person was mean to you? Thin skin much?”

“Never rest on your laurels. Celebrating your achievement is just begging for a comeuppance.”

“Why even bother?”

“Think you’re special?”

“Whatever you’re focused on right now, it’s a stupid waste of time. Drop what you’re doing and do this other thing instead.”

“If your idea was any good, someone else would have thought of it already.”

Any of those sound familiar? Or do you have a different set of insults that run repeatedly and reliably like the Playlist from Hell? I bet you actually blame yourself for being a victim of negative self-talk.

Here’s one thing I can be pretty sure about you: Never in a million years would you speak to anyone – child or adult – as rudely as you do you. Unless, of course, you wanted to chase that person permanently out of your life. And then you’d blame yourself for that.

Psychologists will tell you that there are three distinctly different kinds of negative self-talk.? Comparing. Criticizing. Complaining. But to my mind, they all boil down to the same thing: Criticizing. The message is always: You’re not good enough. Your behavior reveals how stupid, bad, lazy you are. Everyone can see it. You don’t belong. You’re not welcome. You’re barely tolerated. If you’re not going to go away entirely, do us all a favor and play small.

Any of this sound familiar?

Pulling deep-seated negative self-talk out by the roots takes serious effort. Likely with a coach, counselor or therapist. But here’s a step you can take right now to disrupt and derail negative self-talk before it builds up so much momentum and power that it swamps your entire day.

It’s the heckler’s veto. Have you heard of it?

If you’ve ever been to a comedy club or a political rally, you’ve likely experienced the heckler’s veto. The heckler is that disruptive person planted somewhere deep inside the audience whose sole purpose in life is to derail the proceedings. In comedy clubs, hecklers object to what the comedian is saying or just wants to make a general pain in the behind of himself. In political scenarios, the heckler’s mission is to change the course of history, one election at a time.? Hence the veto part of the expression.

Whatever the purpose, the MO is the same – disrupt the focus and the forward momentum of the speaker.

So, let’s say your harsh inner critic has the stage. Maybe you’re waking up, that harsh inner critic is already filling your head with demoralizing thoughts. Or you’ve just come home from work and you’re obsessing about how the day went and how you could have done more or better. Or you’ve just come home from a party and you can’t stop thinking about the stupid thing you said. ?(It wasn’t stupid, by the way.)

Catch yourself in mid-thought and do the Heckler’s Veto. Talk over your self-talk. Make fun of the dumb things your harsh inner critic is telling you. Yes, your harsh inner critic is dumb. Laugh. Even if it’s a fake laugh. You don’t have to believe what you’re saying, you just have to make a fool of the critic.

Or simply ask yourself mentally, “Who says?” You’ll discover that no one is saying. It’s just that harsh inner critic yakking away, talking nonsense.

Or talk over your harsh inner critic. For every mean thing your inner critic wants to start saying about you, speak up. (Mentally, of course, you don’t want people to think you’ve lost your mind. You’re just trying to change it.) Overwrite the mean things your harsh inner critic wants you to believe about yourself with positive self-talk that you really do believe about yourself.

Remind yourself of all the good, smart, valuable, funny, loving, loveable things you are. Don’t let the harsh inner critic take center stage.

Seize control of that mental microphone and stand in the spotlight where you shine the brightest.

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