Creating Positive Self Talks for Self Critical Person

Improving our inner dialogue to support oneself and find solutions.

You find yourself being self critical. Tick ✔️. What kind of negative self talk most people have? “I am an idiot” “I am not good enough” “I am so hopeless” “I am not worthy” “I am not loved” “I am selfish” and many more. These constant negative talks often lead to anxiety and depression. We will start to believe that negative self talk is true and it starts to define who we are.

Many factors contribute to the development of these negative self talks:

1. Having a critical parents.

2. Overwhelming negative emotions

When negative self talk becomes an automatic response to negative emotions, it may intensifies the negative emotions and oftentimes will lead to avoidance behaviour such as procrastination or even addictive behaviour.

In order to challenge those negative self talks, we need to build a skill to foster more positive self talks. In therapy, therapist will guide you in building a greater repertoire of positive self talk messages through psychotherapy and self-guided worksheets. Positive self talk needs many practise as it has more component than negative self talk. For example, negative self talk consist of “I am an idiot” while the positive self talk will be something like “I may not be good now, but I have to practise and learn from the mistake I made”. Positive self talk also often develop through rebuilding your self esteem, and cut down the automatic responses in negative situations. These will be possible through awareness. Therapy often helps people to achieve this awareness and starts working on the factors associated to the negative self talk.

Positive self talk is achievable once we allow ourselves to love and accept ourselves for who we are. We might not be able to completely get rid of the negative self talks but overtime, we will adopt more positive self talk messages that can override and dampen any negative self talk messages.