Self-Love and How we Speak to Ourselves

Hey Hi Hello! Happy Monday!

Let’s talk about self-love!

There are a few directions that we could go to talk about self-love: Self-care, continue discussing self-compassion, or even some more R-rated topics. But today, I think we will focus on how we speak to ourselves.

Last week I introduced Internal Family Systems as a model of therapy. As a reminder, IFS is the idea that we all have parts as well as a Self. Our Self is the truest form of ourselves, whereas out parts are affected and have behaviors due to the world around us. We can think of Self as the version that we are as soon as we are born, nothing has imprinted or affected us yet. Whereas our parts have been and they play out behaviors/thoughts/feelings in accordance.

The interesting thing about this model is that as we learn and strengthen our relationships with our parts, it is often the first time we are listening to our thoughts fully. Unfortunately, more often than not those thoughts are extremely negative and self-deprecating. Which I believe to be significantly due society and not necessarily something that we have created in ourselves. Let’s break down some of the reasons why we would be so negative towards our Self.

How our inner thoughts are influenced:

We have grown up in a world where it is socially accepted that we judge one another. We live in an incredibly prejudiced world. A world where most of us grew up learning to judge people based on the color of their skin, their gender, their sexuality, the way they dress, the way they speak, and so much more. More often than not we have been indoctrinated into a world of judgment.

For those that are reading this, I don’t think anything I just said was particularly surprising. What may be more surprising to think about is that we have taken that judgment as a way to look at ourselves just as much as how we look at others.

If we think of all of the judgment, negativity, comparison, and hate that we have experienced and witnessed throughout our lives, it is rather obvious that it would affect how we look and think about ourselves.

The biggest influence of how we see ourselves is media, especially social media. With the introduction of the internet in the 80s we set a course to be inundated by the viewpoints and opinions of others. Before the internet, we had magazines, books, TV, news, movies, etc to compare ourselves to those who were in the spotlight. If therapy was more socially accepted and more similar to how we currently practice back then, we would have definitely seen that people compared themselves and probably had some pretty negative self talk.

Back then, media was pretty darn well regulated, compared to what we experience now. We would have had to go to the movie theater, purchase magazines, or own a TV to have these types of influences enter into our lives.

However, with the rise in social media over the last 2 decades, we have opened ourselves up to an insurmountable amount of content to compare ourselves. In milliseconds, we can go from sitting idly to scrolling a social media app, where we see people “living their best lives”. It hasn’t been until recently where we have taken steps to recognize the idea that what we are seeing on Instagram or TikTok is only brief, curated glimpses into other’s lives.

But that doesn’t take away from the years and years of judgment and negative self-talk towards ourselves for not living up to what we thought was the societal expectation of how to live. It’s going to take quite a lot of work to begin rewriting our automatic thoughts or communicating with our parts to let them know that we don’t have to compare ourselves to those around us.

Let’s think of a few common examples of how our brain might work when scrolling on social media:

*Scrolls past people exercising and eating healthy* = “Ugh, I’m so fat and lazy because I don’t exercise or eat like them”

*Stops to watch GRWM (get ready with me) videos* = “I will never look like that in those kinds of clothes” or “I could never afford those types of clothes, I’ll never fit in”

*Scrolling along on Valentine’s Day* = “I am going to be forever alone” or “My significant other must hate me because they didn’t do those things for me”

Each of those automatic thoughts leads to ingrained thoughts about ourselves that stick with us until we recognize they are there. Which leads us to figuring out how we can begin changing some of those thoughts!

(I didn’t even touch how much our family and how we talk to each other can affect how we speak to ourselves from such an early age. We will get to that when I talk about intergenerational trauma at some point).

How to try to change their tune:

Let’s go back to Internal Family Systems and the idea of parts. I enjoy this model because it allows you to single out specific areas of your mind that you notice similar thoughts stemming. We can then speak with our parts, and more importantly, listen to our parts to see what they need to decrease their not so nice behaviors and thoughts that they promote.

For me, I have a huge amount of judgment towards myself. My judgment part knows exactly what to say to get me to doubt and second guess myself. It provides me thoughts like “Why are you doing it like that?” or “No one is going to understand what you are saying, so don’t even try” or “People have so much worse going on for them, you don’t deserve to feel your feelings”.

If I had someone physically around me saying these things out loud to me, I’d probably punt them across the room. But because I am saying them to myself, I 100% believe them. We don’t like to think that our mind is a place that can hurt us, but it is becoming increasingly clear in the work that I do with my clients that we are SO mean to ourselves! And that’s not very nice!

So how do we begin being nicer to ourselves? Great question, Sara! The first step is generally to notice how we speak towards and about ourselves. If we have no idea that we are being mean towards us, then how do we know how to tackle the mean? Take the opportunity this week to notice how you are thinking about yourself. Is it mean? Are you being nice? Judgmental? Loving?

This can be quite a jarring experience to do for the first time, if you begin noticing that it is difficult to handle, give yourself some compassion and allow those thoughts return to background noise again and bring it up with your therapist during your next session.

After we have a handle on what we are saying about ourselves, we can begin to explore why we might be speaking to ourselves this way or what these thoughts may be hiding from us. Our mind is incredibly intricate and complicated, but usually if we just give ourselves a listen, it usually guides us to a better way of thinking and ultimately a better way of existing.

Remember, we are in control of our own thoughts, it may not feel like it, but we are! It just takes some mindful work on our part to begin redefining how we see and love ourselves. Self-love begins in our mind and radiates from ourselves once we can get there.

Speaking of self-love, this will be my last post for a little while, while I am recovering from a surgery. I love to promote self love to you and my client’s and it’s even more important to remember I deserve a little some of that towards myself too.

Virtually yours,

Sara Barber MSS, LCSW, CCTP

P.S. Remember if you are reading this (and you aren’t one of my clients) I am not your therapist and you should take what I share with that in mind. I’m here for the laughs (mostly at myself) and the education. If you’d like me to be your therapist or are interested in finding a therapist, email me!