How many self-help books, therapists, quick mindful worksheets, and Instagram posts have you seen that say to insert one positive self affirmation a day and all will be okay?
… aka say something positive to yourself and your life will be grand!
This momma has! Look, I am a mental health therapist and believe in positive self talk, but I’m OVER people telling me to do it! So I can only imagine how you feel. When your life feels like it is in shambles, a quick nice statement to self is sure not going to magically fix everything.
When I first meet a patient seeking mental health therapy and discover the amount of low self worth conversation that takes place in their own internal dialogue, I know that positive self-talk must take place for proper healing. However, when I have a patient who describes the scenario below, how could I ever give them the answer of, “Just say something positive to yourself and all will be okay?”
Patient scenario:
A momma enters therapy and begins to describe a life of her perceived chaos. A daily life where she is not sure if the kiddos will be at home or school that day, where there is a household of hungry people all of the time, there is laundry to be done, people needing constant attention, work pressures, societal pressures, and pandemic pressures creating a world of chaos and uncertainty. She finds herself feeling hopeless, helpless, and full of irritability due to all of the happenings of life. Her mind begins to wander to thoughts of: did I make the right decision becoming a mother, how can I possibly be strong enough to raise a family and work, why do I feel so lonely when I have children yelling my name all day, why do I not feel like myself anymore, I want my life to look like that moms life, my life is forever going to be miserable. She reports increased anger, irritability, low motivation, sleeplessness, tearfulness, fear and worry. She feels as if she is a complete failure for thinking this way, feeling this way and even worse, acting this way.
As a therapist, I see a broken internal dialogue. An inner “pathological critic” (Dr. Harry Barry, “Emotional Resilience”) who picks apart each move she makes. She compares herself to others, finding her flaws to be bigger, stronger and harder than anyone else’s. She comes to me seeking help.
My first instinct… Have her change her negative self talk to positive self talk. Can you imagine if this momma comes to me with her deepest vulnerable emotions, asks for help and I tell her to head home and start her day by saying something she likes about herself to herself?
It is not enough, it will not work, it will only break her down more.
So in this scenario, positive self talk is stupid. Positive self talk does not work without the science of the brain, the explanation of rewiring that needs to take place and most of all. The thought that she did not create this negative internal dialogue, the world around her did, and with some work it will go away.
So if you are a “positive self affirmation” doubter, here is some research of why and how it works.
An article, “The biochemistry of belief” states the following: “Beliefs are developed as
stimuli received as trusted information and stored in the memory.” [1] In other words, the brain believes what we tell the brain to believe.
If the brain identifies that information it hears comes from a trustworthy source then our brain will believe it. If we then believe it is a trustworthy source continuously, the brain feels safe to make it an actual belief system (part of our internal dialogue on a subconscious level).
Simply put, if I wake up every morning and say to myself, “Here we go again, a day of irritation and failure, why cannot I not get it together,” then science is saying my brain will believe and create a day of irritation and failure.
Many times in session I refer to a client’s inner negative dialogue of self as if they are punching themselves in the face. I have clients look inward for a day, and identify how many times they second guess themselves, present statements of low self worth, critique themselves. I then have them imagine punching themselves in the face every time they identify a negative self-talk. I want to know and I want them to realize how swollen and bruised their face would be at the end of the day. It is shocking to find out the amount of bumps and bruises their internal dialogue shares with them daily.
If we sit each day and allow an internal dialogue of negative self-talk to beat us up until it becomes a belief, it is no wonder we feel like crap. Again, if we punched ourselves in our own face until we were swollen, bruised and in pain – everyday- we would only create layers of unhealed wounds.
So let’s insert the argument of “say something positive to yourself”.
If we said to ourselves at least 3 times per day, “I have been given another day, another breath and today WILL be as great of a day as it can be!” Then we insert the science we learned above, which says “the brain believes what we tell the brain to believe.” Then we are creating an internal belief that we are great, the day will be great and everything that happens today will be as great as it can be!
The point of positive self -talk, positive affirmations, and statements like “be kind to yourself,” is to remind yourself that your internal dialogue can become a belief bully without even knowing it. If we intentionally replace some of our internal critiquing with a statement of praise (nurturing words of hope), then our internal belief system will have a hope, healing and power, which will change our behavior to ourselves, our family, and the world around us.
I guess “positive self talk” is not stupid after all.
- Sathyanarayana Rao, T. S., Asha, M. R., Jagannatha Rao, K. S., & Vasudevaraju, P. (2009). The biochemistry of belief. Indian journal of psychiatry, 51(4), 239–241. https://doi.org/10.4103/0019-5545.58285
