Last week’s blog looked at why carers particularly can be ultra self-critical.  This week’s blog is going to explore how to work with your negative self-talk.  However, a caveat before I start.  I’m going to be talking from the perspective of coaching and coaching tools.  Sometimes negative self-talk needs a therapeutic space to excavate deeply embedded negative messages from childhood, or support where negative self-talk develops because of trauma.  If you feel you might need this kind of therapeutic support, have a look at the BACP’s register of therapists.

I’m going to take you through a three-step process to engage with your negative self-talk and work with it:

First step: identification or how are we talking to ourselves?

There are a number of typical ways that we can engage in negative self-talk.  These can include:

Filtering: ignoring the positives and only picking out the negatives in what we do.

Personalising: blaming ourselves for things that are actually out of our control, or only partly to do with us.

Overgeneralising: because I made this mistake, this thing will always be this way.

Should: This ‘should’ be this way otherwise I am a failure.

Name-calling: calling ourselves names like ‘loser’, ‘failure’ etc.

Magnifying: making an event far more significant than it actually is.

Consider what patterns of self-talk you engage in most commonly, what kinds of things do you tell yourself?  Reflect on what are the triggers for this negative self-talk.  Do some activities, or others’ responses lead to more intensive negative self-talk?  Is it constant, or more intermittent?

Second step: evaluation

Here we take what we’ve found out in step one and examine it further to reflect on what these negative thoughts mean for us (here you might want to use a journal or a notebook).  We can ask ourselves about:

Self-esteem: how does this negative self-talk make me feel?  How does it impact on my behaviour?

Acceptability: would I talk to others like my inner critic talks to me?  (What are your thoughts about this?)

Facts: ask yourself: What evidence do I have that the things my inner critic is telling me is true?

Outlook: Here you can ask yourself: If this negative self-talk continues, what will be the impact on my life?

Third step: reframing

Finally, we want to take our thoughts about how we talk to ourselves (step 1), and what this means (step 2) to consider what might be a healthier alternative.  We can ask ourselves:

What could I tell myself instead?

We can use the following format to begin to reframe our thoughts:

“If …. then (replace negative thought with more reasonable belief)”

For example:

Original thought:

“My son is having a meltdown because I haven’t done enough to support him (personalisation), and ultimately I’m failing as a parent (magnification)”.

Reframing:

“If my son has a meltdown, then it’s because there are things in his environment and things about his day that have stretched him beyond his capacity for toleration/have heightened his anxiety and pushed him into fight or flight mode.”

Other examples might include “Ideally, I … but” formulations for “should” obligations from our inner critic.

For example:

Original thought:

“I should be vigilant all the time for things that could upset my son.”

Reframing:

“Ideally I would like to be vigilant all the time for things that could upset my son, but ultimately I have to accept that some things will be out of my control.”

You’ll notice that these ‘reframings’ are all about deescalating from ‘absolutes’ to more reasonable expectations of ourselves.  They give us permission to be more fallible (see Szymanksa and Palmer, 2012), less perfect humans.

If this post has resonated with you and you want to deal with your inner self-critic and reframe how you talk to yourself, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.