The Loop of Negative Self Talk - The Muzak in Your Head

Most of us, no matter how positive and upbeat we are, will have some negative self-talk.  This is like Muzak– you know that easy listening music that plays just below the surface of your consciousness, at the grocery store, the doctors office, in elevators and any place where people gather where nice background music makes shopping or waiting a more pleasant experience.  Well, our self-talk is just like that, it plays beneath the surface of our conscious minds and only when something happens to make us become conscious of it do we notice what we are telling ourselves, on a minute-by-minute basis.  This also becomes our naturally occurring comments about our lives that we share with others in a kind of non- conscious way.  This happens mostly in social situations where gossip and sharing is done in a small talk way.  In other words, someone brings up a subject and each person gives their party line on that subject.  This happens in situations where there is no major consequence to you for your opinion on the subject, at least not from the people you are sharing your opinion with, but there is a major consequence to you, yourself, if this party line is negative and keeps you stuck in a negative loop. 

Muzak Tune # I Married a Jerk and I Can Prove It!

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say you are divorced.  If this is fresh, that is, it just happened less than two years ago, then the chances of you making negative comments about your ex are pretty common.  This is understandable, as most people will need to rid themselves of these negative feelings as they go through the natural grief process of morning this major loss in their life.  Depending on how long you were married, this grief stage could last from two to three years, but once you have established a new life for yourself as a single person you need to begin to let go of the negative thoughts and comments about your marriage, divorce and ex spouse.  If you don’t and these thoughts continue to be part and parcel of your mind’s “Muzak” then you are stuck in a loop and that loop is keeping you from enjoying your new life.  This negative self-talk and the small talk it engenders with friends and family, becomes insidious and will keep you forever going around in this loop.  It also has the affect of attracting other negative thinkers and talkers and this creates pity party alliances. 

Muzak Tune #2 - My Boss and My Work Don't Appreciate Me

Another example is a work situation that turned out bad for you.  Maybe you got fired or downsized or reassigned to a position you did not choose or you went for a promotion and someone else got it and now two or more years later you are still running the Muzak from that situation in your head every single day.  Then when you are not at work and are with family and friends these negative thoughts and opinions tend to fall out of your mouth like pearls of wisdom but which are in truth, bitter pills of discontent which you keep spitting out and they seem to be always there ready to do this spilling out. 

Muzak Tune #3 Nobody Loves Me, I think I'll Go Eat Worms

Another area of self talk is simply the tendency to be pessimistic and to beat up on yourself and the world with all the possible bad things that could happen, but have not yet happened or if they have, in most cases, the result was not as bad as you may have predicted.  If you tend to see every possible thing that could happen as potentially negative and or dangerous - then you too need to look at your self talk. 

In addition, if your self esteem is not what it should be then take a look at the Muzak in your head and see what tune is being played.  If your self esteem needs shoring up then do some things to make you feel better about yourself and stop lamenting your mistakes - everyone makes mistakes and self forgiveness is the key to moving past a negative situations.  The big thing with mistakes is either you learn from them or you keep making them.  So first forgive yourself for whatever you have done that didn't serve you, and then put in motion the ways and means of making sure you don't make that mistake again.  

Muzak Tune #4 - Venting Where Safe and Negative Body Language 

Playing the negative self talk about what has happened to you in your head and then venting where it’s safe with friends and family is not going to be of service to you in maintaining your job, your career or your self esteem in the long run.  So like the divorced person, the first thing to do is take responsibility for your part in what happened.  The second thing to do is forgive yourself for what you did or didn't do or what you thought and ended up revealing through your non-verbal behavior.  Remember, most thoughts come out whether they are said or not, via our body language.  If you think your boss is a jerk and an idiot but you never voice this to anyone at your work, make no bones about it, they know – it all comes out through your non-verbal communication.

If these examples remind you of yourself then it’s time to take a stand and get yourself out of this loop.  Now some of you may say, yes, but he/she was a jerk to me or he/she did do this and that bad thing and this may very well be true.  You could have married a narcissist, a dishonest person who lied to you or who cheated on you. Okay, you divorced them because of this and now you need to rid yourself of their impact on your life – in these cases divorce was only a first step in this process.  Now you need to heal your wounds and get on with your life. 

It's Time to Play a New Tune 

In order to heal and get on with a life of passion, purpose and possibilities you will need to rid yourself of as much negative self-talk as possible.  Negative self talk is addictive and habit forming - it becomes over time like a mantra - you simply say it to yourself and any one who will listen any time the topic of your marriage, your job or your self worth is triggered.  It’s a neural pathway that has been set down in your brain and until you make a concentrated effort to change it, it will always be there.  Time for a new tune. 

New Tune # 1 I forgive Myself and Give Myself a Break 

The first wound you need to heal is your own complicity in the marriage.  In other words, you married this person, you stayed with them and you had your reasons for doing this.  Forgive yourself – you were young and naive, you were broke and desperate, scared and insecure, you were in need of a rescue or there was some other reason you let yourself choose or be chosen by this person.  Forgive yourself.  That’s the first step.  If you feel you were wronged and you don’t see your own complicity in the marriage then you need to get real with yourself.  Getting real means to stop being a victim and take responsibility for your part in things.  

Maybe you were flattered.  Maybe he or she was a prize or appeared to be and winning the hand of this person made you feel like you too were a prize.  Maybe you were just going along with the culture’s ideas about marriage, but once married you realized you were not interested in a traditional marriage but your tribe believed in this and so the only way to get out of it was to make your spouse the bad guy so the tribe would okay your decision to divorce.  Maybe the person offered you things you felt you could not get on your own – an upscale lifestyle – joining a social group you did not have access to without them and so on. 

There are a million reasons people marry who they marry and another million for why they do not work out the way the partners thought it would.  The only way to deal with and heal from a broken relationship is to take your part in it and own up to it and then forgive yourself.  Being a victim is a monster you have to feed on a daily basis – stop feeding that monster. The same is true if your negative event is work related.  If you got fired, downsized, reassigned or whatever the event was, blaming it on the company, the economy or President Obama and not taking responsibility for your part in it, is a vitality killer.  You were there, you took the job, you chose to stay and whatever happened, in most cases, was not a surprise to you and if it was, then it was because you were not paying attention.

New Tune #2 I Play By The Work Rules or I Find a New Game

Unlike a marriage, where it’s a partnership and is a legal contract, working for someone else is not.  Going into a work place and having the mindset that they will take care of you and treat you with respect and so on is naive and foolish.  It’s also naive and foolish to think that if you work really hard this will protect you from any negative events.  In many, many cases this is not what keeps people employed. Working hard is a given by the company, they expect it but being a team player is what gets noticed.  

What keeps people employed is that they recognize that the real job is joining the culture of the company and buying into the ideas and programs of those in the position to fire them.  Being a company man or woman and knowing how to play politics, this is the real key to being promoted and staying employed.  The other one is rolling with the flow – the changes that naturally occur in any business.  We live in a very volatile world where work is concerned and those who adapt to the new are the ones who stay employed and happy in their jobs.  Those who resist change and resist joining the corporate culture are destined to have negative events happen to them. 

New Tune #3 I Learn from My Mistakes 

Maybe you married the wrong person, for you, or you took a job that in the end didn't fit you, or you started out in the world with little self esteem because your primary care givers didn't recognize your genius or you simply have a temperament that tends to second guess yourself, regardless of why your self esteem is not up to par, the day has come for you to start shoring it up by playing a  new tune.  

New Tune #4 - I celebrate and Value Myself 

I once saw a poster in an agency I was thinking of going to work for which said in big bold letters, "God Don't Make No Junk"  Well, I agree - play the tune that celebrates you and stop letting the Muzak of negative thinking bring you down.  Another way to eliminate the negative loop of self talk and playing that negative Muzak in your head all day is to use the ABCDE Disputing Technique.  I will post this next week, so stay tuned.

Blessing, Lorraine

Just the Way You Are

So I got flack from some of my readers yesterday about how long my post was – so here goes a short and sweet one. Billy Joel wrote a song back in the 80’s, Just the Way You Are – It’s one of my favorite songs. In it he says, “Don’t go changing to try and please me, I love you just the way you are."  Well, we gotta love ourselves just the way we are as well. So here are five things you can do to start letting the true you shine through:

1. Go shopping and buy yourself something your ten-year old self would have loved to have and put it somewhere you can see it every day.

2. Post an affirmation that says “You Rock, Just the Way You Are!”

3. Do something this weekend that you have been longing to do regardless of how silly or unrelated it is to your regular life.

4. Give yourself permission to loaf – let your imagination take you to a new place,

5. Get a massage, make love, go swimming, hold a baby, go out into the moonlight and lie on the grass and look at the stars - do something sensual and savor it.

Okay, that’s it for now…next time, well, I’ll surprise you, don’t you just love surprises, I know I do.

Blessings, Lorraine  PS - That's my granddaughter Ellie - Isn't she a doll?

Pentimento - Letting The Real You Shine Through

The word pentimento comes from the art world where painters, particularly some of the old world masters would often paint over an image and then later the painting would fade and the old image would begin to show through. I think this happens with people, as well. In our first act we develop a persona, an image, if you will, of ourselves that is designed, more or less to show to and be approved by the outside world. In fact, I would say that this image building is more or less the major activity of the first act of life. Who are we? What are we good at? Who will we associate with and what will we do with our time and talents? This begins at puberty and goes on for another twenty, thirty, maybe even forty years. In many cases, we become what we set out to become, or we become what our parents, teachers, spouses and bosses want us to become. Most of us want to be successful in the world and we look for others to mentor and guide us in this process.. By our mid forties, this image, this persona is pretty well set but is it the true you or simply a painted over version of an earlier image that begins to show through whether you want it to or not?

But where does this earlier image come from? It comes from deep within your soul and is there in childhood. Most people, if they look back on when they were say eight or ten years old they will see their true nature. But this nature, particularly if it does not fit the norm for your family and community will be “painted over” by years of social conditioning and peer pressure. Children are rewarded for being good little boys and girls not for showing their true colors. I was both a tomboy and a budding artist/writer when I was ten years old, but this was not looked on in my southern family as appropriate or useful behavior for a girl. What my mother and my father wanted from me was that I become a “little lady” and help my mother around the house by being a kind of second mother to my siblings. Going out into the woods and creating stories about the people I made up out of my imagination and then building “houses” for them out of the sticks and stones and whatever else I could find, was not what they had in mind for me.

Spending hours on my bed reading left my mother cold too – “Get in here, Lorraine and help me with this laundry, I can’t do this all by myself.” She would say. Then later when as a married woman I decided to go back to school for a degree she asked me why I did this and when I said I wanted to go to work and have a career she said, “ I thought your husband had a good job, doesn’t he provide for you and the kids?” When I told her that wasn’t it, she told me that a decent woman stayed home and took care of her children unless her husband was unable to do it and then she might go to work, but only then. So I got no approval from my family for my true self which was from early on a dreamer, a thinker and a creative person.

Then after I graduated from college I got that job – that career - and I listened then to all the voices of the women’s movement, which told me that the juice of life was in the corporate world of business. I dressed for success and I went out there and tried to have sisterhood with all the other feminist but what I found was I didn’t like that world. I found no sisterhood, all I found were women, and men, trying to best each other so they could get a heads up on you in the drive for promotion and ultimately, success. It wasn’t creative, it wasn’t interesting and it sure the heck didn’t fit any dreams I’d had back in the woods when I was building those dream houses out of sticks and stones. I was disillusioned.

So I quit the corporate world and became a therapist. I put a little more paint on my image and tried to make it stick, but this too turned out to be a non creative, often depressing world where I felt like I was going into a dark wet cave everyday trying to help the people in this cave get out of it and back into the sunshine. I was able, Thank God, to get some of them out, but most didn’t budge.

Then about five years ago I began to see this other image in the mirror when I looked really close. The pentimento of my true self was starting to shine through all that family and societal conditioning. I began to unburden myself of other people’s opinions of me, and what I should or should not do or be. I joined a writing group and found my true niche with the other writers.  I started taking only the clients I felt were capable of living in the sunshine and I eventually closed my practice and became a full time writer – what I had always wanted to do and be all along.

But, what about you? What is trying to show through your public image? What image is under there wanting to be freed from the layers and layers and layers of social conditioning and pressure from others to be something you truly are not? If you could strip off the paint of years of pretending and going along with the program, what do you think would show through for you? Who are you underneath all that slapped on paint and gunk from the outside world? Don’t you think it’s time for you to take a peek and see what shows up? Think about it, and then start divesting yourself of the image you present to the world that is not you but only a pentimento of your true self.

Do this illuminating exercise - Think back on what you were like at ten years old and write up a profile of yourself or tell it like a fairy tale - describe your likes, dislikes, favorite stories, favorite heroes, favorite activities and who your friends were and what you did.  What made you laugh and what made you cry?  See if the true you shows up and how you might begin to let him or her show through now and get yourself out there into the sunshine before it's too late. 


Blessings, Lorraine

Becoming a Rainmaker

In my book Second Act Soul Calls – Your Guide for the Reinvention of Your Life at Midlife and Beyond with Passion, Purpose and Possibilities, I talk about taking a new path at midlife and beyond which moves away from the idea of cultivating direct power to one where you listen to the call of your soul and become your true self. If you do this right, that is, if you do this in a way that you are living a soulful life then you will become a rainmaker and your power in the world will go from direct power to influential power. Rainmakers don’t make it rain, they provide the atmosphere that encourages the rain. As Carol Pearson says in her book, Awakening The Heroes Within, “Rainmakers do not do anything to make the rain happen...they do not make the rain come; they allow it or more exactly, their inner atmosphere of allowing and affirming what is, creates a climate in which what needs to be, happens.”   I think we can all do that but first we must do our homework and become our best selves in the world.  Below are nine ways to bring the idea of being a rainmaker into your life. 

Nine Attributes of a True Rainmaker 

They Become Conscious – Anyone with true power, and true power is influential power, has developed this by becoming conscious of who they are and what they are capable of doing and being and then doing that in an ethical and conscious way. They take time to reflect on themselves and their actions on a daily basis and they make course corrections when they see they are off course. They learn from their mistakes but don’t beat up on themselves when they do mess up.  At the same time, they are not arrogant or narcissistic either.

They Have Considered Opinions – They check things out and do their research. They do not shoot from the hip and have opinions unsubstantiated by evidence. They take in other people’s opinions and ideas as well and are open to reexamining their own.

They Walk Their Talk - They don’t say one thing and do another. If they say they are honest and trustworthy then you can bet on them to be so. If they tell you or their children not to lie, cheat and steal, then they don’t lie, cheat or steal when no one is looking.  They are also honest with themselves and are not blind to their own charater traits and potential flaws. 

They Don’t Try to Have Their Cake and Eat it Too – They know that there is a cost to most things in life and they don’t try to get away with not paying that price by justification and manipulation. If they are married or in a relationship, they do not cheat on their partner or talk about them behind their back in a negative and dismissive way. If it’s not working, they confront the problem and deal with it and if they can’t make it work, then the do the right thing and move on. They do not stay in relationships or jobs for the benefits while bad mouthing and or cheating on the partner.

They Like and Value Themselves – They know that if they like and value themselves then others will as well. They set good boundaries and know where the line is and they enforce the line, they don’t expect others to do this for them. If they have self-esteem issues they work on developing themselves so that this is no longer a problem – if necessary, they seek professional help and do the work to develop the undeveloped parts of themselves.

They are Calm, Cool and Collected From the Inside Out – Although from time to time they may get stressed – we live a world of stress inducing situations - but they handle them with as much calm as possible and feel that no matter what, they are doing their best. If they occasionally feel they have lost this calm, they go back to the first idea of being conscious and look at what might be disturbing this calm and then they address this and make another course correction.

They are Grateful – People who are rainmakers and have influential power know that they are not doing it alone. They thank God or the Universe or whatever is their idea of a higher power, for the good in their lives and they count their blessings daily. 

They are Generous – Rainmakers are incredibly generous with their time and energy. They love to contribute to the greater good and feel that this really is their reason for being, but they are not martyrs or people who care take others at the expense of their own being. They know that in order to serve and be of service they have to come from a place of well-being, they therefore take care of their own body, mind and soul first and move out from there with a generous and grateful heart.

They are Positive and Optimistic – Rainmakers love the world and the people in it and they bring joy wherever they go. If they find themselves in a place that doesn’t accept or value their way, they then go some place else – a place where they bear the most fruit.

So think about these nine attributes and see which ones you may need to work on - I think we can all be rainmakers - it's never too late to let your soul call you home.  I hope you begin to today to think and ponder these ideas - I think you will find it a most satisfying way to live - a soulful way.

Blessings, Lorraine