Negative Self-Talk: Know Your Enemy
Imagine that you come home to your significant other after a terrible day at work. They see that you are down, and proceed to attack you, calling you worthless, useless, and stupid. When you try to defend yourself, they tell you they are just putting you down because it’s your fault that you had a bad day, and you need to do better next time.
They do this every time you feel down, whether it’s your fault or just bad luck. How long would you stay in this relationship? If your friend or a beloved family member were in such a relationship, you’d probably tell them to get out of the relationship immediately.
If you are one of many who struggle with negative self-talk, what you say to yourself in times of stress is not that different from what the abusive partner would say in this scenario. The only difference is that you can break up with an abuser. You can’t really break up with yourself. Negative self-talk is brutal, and those of us who live with it are pulverizing ourselves daily.
I think many of us who suffer from negative self-talk know that it’s not good for us, yet we do it anyway. Why is that? In order to stop the vicious cycle of responding to stressful situations by beating ourselves up, we need to understand the root cause of this bad habit and establish a healthy alternative.
We probably developed our negative self-talk as a coping mechanism in childhood. It was our developing brain’s way of making sense of physical or emotional conditions outside the realm of our understanding. For example, we might have told ourselves that the reason for an unpleasant situation or experience was because we were flawed in some way, and each time something bad happened, blaming ourselves was our go-to coping strategy.
This strategy may have worked when we were children, but now that we are adults, it’s obsolete. However, unlike a favorite pair of shoes that we eventually outgrew, we cannot simply outgrow the tendency to mentally beat ourselves up in challenging situations. As children, we relied on negative self-talk in times of stress, so this established neural pathways in the survival regions of our brains, like the limbic system and the brain stem. These neural pathways activate in times of stress, and when we beat ourselves up or remain in that heightened state, we strengthen these neural pathways, and they become superhighways.
So, in order to weaken these automatic responses, we need to ignore them and develop alternative coping mechanisms that serve us better. There are many ways to do this. Positive Intelligence, the framework that I use in my coaching, provides an effective process that allows practitioners to not only break the bad habit of negative self-talk but also to implement a far better alternative.
Positive Intelligence was developed by Shirzad Chamine, and it is designed to help people reach their true potentials. Negative self-talk and other self-sabotaging behaviors can prevent us from being our best selves. Positive Intelligence personifies these negative thoughts and other self-sabotaging behaviors in the form of ten mental Saboteurs. This makes it easier for us to do the work required to abandon the superhighways in the survival region of our brain, and start building new pathways in what Chamine calls, the PQ brain. To do this, we tell a different story than the one we told ourselves when we were children.
In the universe where our new story takes place, the Judge and its cohorts are our frenemies, and they are responsible for our negative thoughts and behaviors. Do the names Avoider, Hyper-Achiever, and Controller ring any bells? All of us have these mental Saboteurs to some degree. But it is the Judge that is the biggest culprit when it comes to negative self-talk, so the villain in this story is the Judge.
In his book, Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours, Chamine explains that one of the most harmful things our Judge does is to convince us that we ourselves are the Judge. The Judge says we’re hopelessly flawed, and we believe that that is what we think, and so we never feel successful no matter how much we accomplish. Believing our Judge and its accomplice Saboteurs can often leave us feeling drained and disappointed. With them in charge, it is very difficult to be happy.
The Judge is insidious, compelling, and powerful and not to be underestimated. In the hands of our Judges, our most awesome qualities are twisted into weapons directed at ourselves and often other people around us, usually the ones we love the most. And for us, those weapons are constantly striking us, always hitting their mark causing a great deal of damage.
Our Judge gets its power from its secrecy. As long as we believe its lies and allow it to control us, it is strong, but once we see it for what it is, a malformed remnant of our childhood imagination, we can reclaim our headspace.
So, the first step to defeating this frenemy is recognizing it as an enemy. We observe it and how it shows up in our lives. When we see evidence of its dirty work, we don’t fight it, or try to understand it; that actually feeds it. Instead, jovially, lightly, we call it out.
The next time the thought that we are not good enough arises, we stop. We label the thought as that of our Judge. Say with a light chuckle, “Oh, there goes my Judge telling me I’m not good enough.” Then shift to a more neutral state of mind.
This relaxed state of mind gives us access to the regions of the brain responsible for more positive thought processes available in the aforementioned PQ brain, and when you activate this part of your brain, you begin to create neural pathways that will give you access to a more positive mindset. The character that personifies the thoughts and emotions associated with this part of the brain is known as the Sage. This is the mentor to the protagonist in this story, who happens to be us.
The Sage and the Judge reside in different regions of the brain, so if we are in what Chamine calls Saboteur mode, we cannot access the Sage and vice versa. In order to shift from Saboteur mode to Sage mode, we need to be in a neutral state of mind.
Luckily, Chamine developed a technique known as a PQ rep that helps us do just that. Basically, we focus on a particular physical sensation, like the sound of our breathing, or the colors and shades of something we are looking at. We do this without thinking about what we are doing; we experience the sensations. One rep is about three breaths or ten seconds. For greater impact, it’s better to do it for about two minutes or more, roughly about 6 to 9 reps. This shifts our mind to neutral and quiets our Judge.
Once we have calmed down, it’s time to look at the situation which has caused us stress and ask, “How can I approach this situation with blameless discernment?” Then, adopt the stance of a curious unbiased observer, and find out everything we can about the situation without judging it. For example, if we got into a fight with our partner, we might ask the question, “What started this whole thing?” with the curiosity of a child exploring a new world.
This puts us in Sage mode. The idea is not to be right, but to understand. From there, we can ask ourselves, “What is the most compassionate thing I could say to myself about this situation?” This allows our Sage, the antithesis to our Judge, to remind us of what wonderful beings we are and how we are deserving of love. Thereby providing an alternative to our negative self-talk.
In short, when our Judge rears its ugly head, identify the thoughts and emotions that belong to it, shift into a neutral mindset by doing some PQ reps, and revisit the situation with a more curious and open mind, and with the aim to understand it better.
Because negative self-talk is a habit, we need to replace it with better habits that serve us. We need to fire our Judge and hire our Sage. To do that, we’ll need to condition ourselves to be loving and compassionate to ourselves when we make mistakes. We’ll need to build new neural pathways in the regions of our brain where our Sage resides while simultaneously shrinking the neural pathways that energize our Judge. This means a lifelong commitment to daily work on developing a positive mindset.
It’s time to stop abusing ourselves mercilessly, and use that energy to find within ourselves the nurturing, unconditional love we all deserve. We were not meant to suffer needlessly, ceaselessly, and at our own hands. We were meant to love and be loved, and it begins with changing our negative self-talk to positive, self-affirming talk. Just think how awesome our lives would be if every thought was generated by self-love and compassion.
Note: More information can be found about the Judge and the nine other Saboteurs, as well as the Sage in Shirzad Chamine’s book Positive Intelligence and his website Positive Intelligence.com.
Source: Chamine, S. (2012). Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential And How You Can Achieve Yours. Greenleaf Book Group Press
