Ep. 44 Fight for You Like You Fight for Others
Who is someone in your life that you would fight for and protect? Someone who if you heard them talking badly about themselves, you would immediately interrupt and tell them to stop?
My heart breaks when I see someone I love talk badly about themself, and I'm guessing your heart does too.
It's wild that you can be so adamantly against someone talking negatively about themselves, but feel there is nothing wrong when you talk to yourself that way.
Here is something I say to all my clients: If you are having a difficult time fighting to see and treat yourself better, think of how you would fight for someone else if they were in your shoes.
There are then two different ways to next use this approach.
First, when you catch yourself bashing yourself, stop and imagine saying those thoughts to someone close to you. Whatever thoughts that you're saying to yourself in that very moment, imagine saying them out loud to someone you care deeply about.
If you're like me, I can't even go through that mental exercise in my mind because some of the things I've said to myself through the years have been so horrible. The thought of saying that to someone I care about makes me sick to my stomach - which is an appropriate response.
It is an appropriate response for anyone to be spoken to like that . . . including yourself.
As you feel that shock and sickening feeling, say in your mind or aloud, “talking to myself in this way deserves this same reaction because it is unacceptable to talk to myself in a way that I wouldn’t dare talk to someone I love.”
Go through that practice every time you catch yourself having a negative thought about yourself and you’ll start to see changes in how you allow yourself to speak to yourself.
The second exercise involving the perspective of someone you love is to imagine you caught them saying those exact words to themself. The negative thoughts you were having about yourself, imagine you caught someone you deeply care for saying them. What words or advice would you give to that person in hopes they stop and don’t do so again in the future? Whatever that advice is, it is the exact advice you need to give yourself.
Challenge:
Think of a person in your life who your heart would break for if you heard them talking hardly to themself.
Anytime you catch yourself having negative thoughts towards yourself, pause and imagine saying them to that person. Then let the shock and sickening feeling of that idea, remind you that the idea of you saying those words to yourself is just as shock-worthy.
Imagine you heard that person saying those words about themself. Think of the advice you would give to that person to get them to stop having thoughts like that, and then take your own advice.