Help with Negative Self–talk Volume I

Nearly everyone has negative internal self–talk at times; some of us have this internal chatter going on almost all the time. An internal voice may remind us of past failures, sorrows, or disappointments, torture us with criticism or verbal abuse, describe frightening or unpleasant futures, or distur b us in other ways. "You failed miserably" "What a loser I am." "I'll never succeed." "Life is a crock." "My life is over." Typically this kind of internal voice causes unpleasant feelings, which are not very helpful in reaching goals and succeeding in life. You can probably easily think of some time in your life when an internal voice did this, putting you into an unpleasant state. These bad feelings can be the root cause of a very wide variety of problems, some of them quite serious and long–term. In this book we're going to show how these inner voices can be transformed, and the positive impact that can make in many areas of our lives.

"Nothing I can do will make a difference" in a low, slow voice can easily result in depression. "I'm think I'm about to die" in a rapid, high–pitched tempo can result in anxiety or panic. "Those bastards are out to kill me," in a low angry tone can result in violence or paranoia. Often someone's unpleasant feelings are so strong that they don't notice that they are in response to what an internal voice is saying.

The realization that everyone hears internal voices is relatively recent. Not so long ago, most psychiatrists thought that hearing voices was a sign of psychosis, and a few still do. A patient would report hearing voices, and the psychiatrist would say to himself internally, "Hmmn, this guy is hearing voices; he must be nuts," without realizing that he was also hearing a voice, and without — in most cases — being nuts himself!

The voices of some psychotic patients may sound much louder than what the rest of us hear, and sometimes they may seem to be external to them, but we all hear internal voices. In even earlier times, hearing an internal voice was thought to be a message from God, the devil, or some other external entity. Even today some people who commit crimes say that they were ordered to do it by a voice that they heard. "The devil made me do it."

Hearing internal voices is a natural part of being able to understand and produce language. With the exception of a few people with damage to the language area of the brain, we all have internal voices, and usually they provide very useful information and direction. These voices may orient us to tasks that we need to accomplish, alert us to some kind of danger, review the events of the day, etc. "There's an important meeting tomorrow morning." "Let's get out of here before the trouble starts." "I got quite a lot done this week."

Sometimes inner voices offer us useful advice. "Look both ways before crossing a street," is a voice that most parents deliberately try to instill in their small children in order to protect them from being run over. At other times, an internal voice may simply offer information that is needed to solve a problem, or direct our attention to get back to an unfinished task. "I wonder if those towels are in the laundry." "I'd better get going on that homework if I'm going to get enough sleep tonight."

Infants begin to learn language by listening to parents and other people around them. The first step in this learning process is to remember the sounds that they heard, and slowly begin to recognize repetitions of those sounds and patterns of sounds. As they are doing this, they are also learning to produce sounds, first by babbling, and then gradually adjusting that babbling to approximate the sounds of the language that they are exposed to. Initially both the sounds that they hear, and the sounds that they are learning to produce have no meaning. They are just learning to recognize and produce the sounds of their native language.

The child's next task is to divide the flow of language into separate words, and then to understand what the words mean by connecting them with recurring events. Just as in learning a foreign language, we begin to understand the meaning of what someone else is saying long before we are able to put words together into a reply. These internal voices that we remember are the basis for learning how to produce language and communicate with others around us. Much later we learn to recognize written words so that we can translate little squiggles on pages into the sounds of language, and understand books like the one you are reading. If we had no internal voices, we would not be able to understand the words that others say to us, and we would not be able to communicate with words. We would be forever limited to the nonverbal noises, gestures, and movements that we had as infants.

As we learned the particular words and grammar of the language of our parents, caretakers, or others around us, we also learned all the nonverbal musical sounds of their language — the volume, tempo, rhythm, timbre, intonation, hesitation, regional accent, emotional inflection, etc.

For instance, when you hear the voice of a stranger, you can determine with close to 100% accuracy if they are male or female, using these tonal cues — even though you may have no idea what aspects of tonality you are using to do this. And when you answer the phone, usually you can identify who it is by their tonality after hearing only a few words.

Pause right now to remember and listen to the voices of several people you know. Recall them one at a time, and hear the distinct tonality that each one uses. First recall the voice of one of your parents, …

(Three dots […] indicates a pause for you to actually do the instruction, and notice what you experience. You will only really learn from this book if you pause for a few moments to try each little experiment.)

Now hear the voice of your other parent, …

And then recall the voices of several other important people in your past, …

And then some good friends of yours in the present… .

Notice how each voice has a distinct tonality. Unless you are musically trained, it might be very hard for you to describe exactly how those voices differ, but you can still hear the differences clearly. Now listen to each voice that you just heard, in turn, and notice how your feelings change in response to each voice… .

Those feelings are partly in response to the words that you heard. But they are also in response to the unique tonality of each voice, and to the experiences that you associate with each of those people.

If we were fortunate, our parents were usually kind, nurturing, and understanding, and through imitation we learned to have inner voices that sound kind and understanding. If we were less lucky, we may have learned to talk to ourselves in a tone that is usually critical, distant, gloomy, dismissive, or even abusive.

And since even the most wonderful parents are sometimes tired, frustrated, irritable, limited, or out of choices, all of us also have memories of times when our parents communicated in ways that were less than ideal. Since this often occurred in situations that stirred strong emotions in us, these may have become strong "imprint" experiences that affect us throughout our later life — even if most of the time our parents spoke in more caring and reasonable ways.

Every other book on negative self–talk I have seen focuses primarily on the words that we say to ourselves, seldom on the tonality. Yet the tonality of a voice is often a major factor in how we respond to it. For instance, hear a voice that says, "I love you," in a harsh, sarcastic voice… . Then hear a voice saying, "You son–of–a–bitch" in a soft loving sexy tonality. Did you respond primarily to the words or the tonality? Sometimes when you change the tonality of a voice, you don't have to change the words at all.

Someone who experiences a lot of negative self–talk is often willing to do almost anything to quiet the voice, and avoid the bad feelings that the voice produces. Many people do this by seeking distractions of various kinds — taking risks, using drugs, overeating, etc. Many of these work temporarily, but many also have unpleasant long–term consequences.

Many who are tormented by their voices would gladly volunteer for a selective lobotomy in order to silence them. Although our internal voices are learned from other people in the real world, when we recall them they are inside us, so they are a part of us, a part of our own neurology. If we were successful in removing them, we would also remove all the positive things they can do for us, and we would become less whole, and less human. Eliminating a voice — even if it were possible, and even if it might make us feel better — is not a good solution.

Another quite popular and highly regarded approach is not quite as radical as silencing a voice. Many schools of psychotherapy, particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, advocate arguing with an internal voice in order to overcome it or subdue it. If you have ever tried to argue with someone else in the real world, you may have realized how ineffective that usually is. Typically the other person will respond by redoubling their effort to convince you, and the same is true of arguing with your internal voices. Arguing with an internal voice usually makes the voice even stronger, which is probably not what you wanted. Even if you manage to shout down a troublesome voice temporarily, you can never really overcome it, and it will return to torment you.

This book takes a very different approach. By reading these pages, and doing the simple exercises offered here, you can learn how to change your own inner voices to enhance your life, and make each day a more positive experience. First you'll learn how to identify the inner voices that have been causing you trouble. Then you'll learn a variety of ways to rapidly change both the words, and how you say those words, to make your life work better. You'll also learn to recognize what kinds of changes will actually improve your life, and what kinds of changes might sound good on the surface, but would actually cause you more trouble.

The developments in this book are based on the field of Neuro–Linguistic Programming (NLP) a field that has made possible a leap forward in personal growth and development. You can read a brief description of what NLP is in the appendix at the end of this book if you are interested. Or you can simply read on, and experience the application of these understanding to the topic of negative self–talk, and experience the benefits.

Refocusing Attention

When you have an unpleasant internal voice and you feel bad in response, it is natural to want to escape it so that you can feel better. One very ancient way to do this is to learn how to attend to something else, allowing the voice to recede into the background. At any moment we attend to only a very small portion of our experience. For instance, as you have been reading this chapter, you have probably not been paying attention to the sounds around you, some of which may have been quite loud or repetitive.

Pause now for a moment to listen to the sounds that you have been ignoring… .

You didn't have to deliberately ignore these sounds — and if you did try to do that, it probably resulted in paying even more attention to them! When you were focused on reading this book, the sounds around you simply faded into the background of your awareness. They were still there, but when you were not attending to them, you didn't notice them, and they didn't affect you.

Now focus your attention on your bodily feelings — the temperature, your posture, your breathing, etc… .

As you do this, you may find that parts of your body have been in one position too long, and have become a bit stiff, motivating you to shift your position a bit to relieve that. Even when you are attending to your bodily feelings, you have probably been ignoring some of the messages coming in from different parts of your body, like the small of your back, the soles of your feet, the backs of your knees, etc. However, as soon as I mention those, you have to notice them in order to understand my words. You have only so much attention; as you attend to those bodily sensations, that withdraws attention from other feelings, and from the sounds around you, and all the other things that you could be aware of.

If you are watching an engrossing movie, or reading a fascinating book, you may find yourself almost completely oblivious to your bodily sensations and events around you. This principle, called figure–ground, or foreground–background, has even been used by hypnotists for over a hundred years to help people deal with intense chronic pain, by teaching them how to attend to other aspects of their ongoing experience.

Most of our problems and difficulties don't exist in the "here and now"; they are usually either memories of the past, or imagining what might be happening right now in some other place, or thinking about the future. In many ancient meditative traditions, attention is focused on some aspect of our present experiencing — your breathing, or a candle flame, or a religious object — in order to withdraw attention from whatever is troubling us.

Our memories of past troubles only exist insofar as we resurrect them and bring them into the present moment. It is too bad that they happened even once; continuing to recall them means that they keep happening over and over again. Wasn't once already too much? Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped, tied to a tree, and sexually abused for nine months in 2002 when she was 14. After being rescued, she said that the key to her readjustment was letting go of the hate she felt toward her abductors. She said, "Nine months of my life was taken from me, and I wasn't going to give them any more of my time." That is a very useful attitude for anyone who has had bad experiences, freeing them from having to re–experience them over and over again.

This morning I was troubled by a potential legal problem that could result in a loss of a considerable amount of money. Although that is a problem in the real world, and I needed to do something about it, it does not actually exist in the present moment. I have not yet lost any money; that is only a possibility that might occur in the future. As Mark Twain observed, "I am an old man and have suffered through a great many troubles, most of which never actually happened." Once I had done what I could to prevent the possible future problem, it made sense to return to the present moment, where everything is fine and I can relax.

Another way to refocus attention on the present moment is to engage in a sport, or some other activity that requires us to be in the present. If you are hitting or catching a fast–moving ball, you have to perceive it in the moment in order to do that. If you are cutting down a tree with a chain saw, you really need to attend to the saw, and which way the tree is likely to fall. Once I knew a woman whose guru told her to get a job chopping vegetables in a Chinese restaurant, a job that required her to chop vegetables very fast, with a very large and very sharp knife. That motivated her internal critical voices to be silent so that she could attend to the present moment and avoid losing some fingers.

Attending to anything in the present tends to withdraw our attention from an internal voice that talks about the past or future, or about present events in some other place. Learning how to redirect our attention in this way can free us from being helpless prisoners of our thoughts. This undoubtedly accounts for the popularity — and immense variety — of programs that advocate learning how to "be in the here and now," some of which are thousands of years old.

The major difficulty with most meditative methods is that they typically take years of practice, and many people find them only partly effective. Another difficulty is that the idea of "being in the present moment" has sometimes become a universal prescription, applied to all self–talk, whether negative or positive. A voice that remembers a horrible past can also remind you of treasured memories and satisfying successes; a voice that predicts future failure and misery can also encourage you by forecasting pleasure and happiness. If you were always in the present moment, you would lose an extremely valuable source of support and optimism that can carry you through rough times.

Internal voices can be very destructive and disorganizing, or they can be very useful and supportive — and everything in between. This book will help you become aware of how you talk to yourself, and how you can change that in order to feel differently. We will be exploring a number of ways that you can transform your negative self–talk into something positive and useful.

For simplicity and ease of understanding, each chapter will be devoted to one or two methods for doing this, beginning with some very simple nonverbal ways that can be surprisingly rapid and effective. We will be exploring a number of ways to alter the voices themselves, both the words that they say and how they say those words, so that they become resourceful allies, instead of difficult obstacles.

Most people pay attention to the words that an internal voice says, and it can often be very useful to change those words. However, the nonverbal sounds that are used to convey those words are often much more important than the words themselves, and they are often much easier and simpler to change. So we will start there, with how a voice speaks, and only later show how to change what a voice says.