Self-talk

I’m stupid. I don’t deserve anything good. No one loves me. What’s the point of trying and you knew you’d fail? Don’t kid yourself, he can never like someone like you. I am weak. I’ll never amount to anything. You’ll never be happy. You are meant to be a failure. You’ll always be sad. It is always your fault. I’m ugly! Look at all this fat, you are disgusting. You are a walking bag of bones. You don’t deserve to be alive. The world will be better off when you die. No one will miss you (me) when you (I) die. They live off your sadness. Everyone wants you to fail.
These are the thoughts that go through our minds when we don’t feel so good, when we feel sad, when we feel overwhelmed, when the world is on top of us. We believe these thoughts as truths, we ruminate about these thoughts, and we equate ourselves to these thoughts. Notice the generalizations and finality in the statements.
Self-talk is the inner chatter that goes on in our minds. Our very own life commentary. It can have a positive or a negative tone. Our minds are very powerful. When we tell ourselves positive things, we feel invincible, we can face the world, we can pick ourselves up and we can be motivated to do better. The reverse is true when our self-talk is negative. It can come up after a mistake, after a bad incident, when we feel down. Making us feel worse. We look for situations to prove the narrative right, we snowball the thought that begun with I’m shy and a poor communicator to I’m always a failure and even end up with I deserve to die.
As you sit with yourself, what do you tell yourself about yourself? Why is it so hard to believe you are better, worthy, deserving, enough?! Did a significant other tell you any of the statements that are in the first paragraph and you took them to be the truth? What purpose does the self-talk serve in your life? Do you think or feel that it is easier to feel sad than not sad?

You say that you are a failure at everything yet here you are successfully bringing yourself down, diminishing yourself, throwing spit at your own face. When we feel sad, negative thoughts cross our minds, and that’s pretty normal. What shouldn’t be normal to us is doing this over and over again. Here’s what the thoughts do: sad feeling— negative self-talk—self-defeating behaviour— negative self-talk—-depressed feelings—self-defeating behaviour and the vicious cycle continues.
Become aware of your internal negative narrative, question its purpose, and question its validity. Do you believe that you are what your negative self-talk says? Almost everyone has an inner critic. At times, this critic does zero good and all bad. If you believe all the negative it says, you have a starting point. Investigate the origin in the kindest way possible.
They say if you can’t tell it to someone you love, why are you telling it to yourself? Depression is highly biological and psychological in nature. You can play a part in manipulating the psychological part by trying and making it a habit to cultivate constructive and positive self-talk and reducing the volume and recurrence of negative self-talk. We may not control when the first thought pops up but we can prevent it from snowballing. Hard as it may seem, be your first cheerleader and express love to your own self as you recover.
SPEAK LIFE!