Category Archives: Mental Health
You Are Who You Think You Are
Our self-image is formed by allowing ourselves to be influenced by various authority figures. As we mature and accept the responsibility of defining ourselves, these internalized voices of authority must each be examined and evaluated. It is only when we take back our own power to define ourselves that we are truly free.
Our conscious mind is where thoughts are formed. Our subconscious mind is where our creative mind takes root. As we learn to harness the vast power and energy of the subconscious mind, we are tapping into our real source.
Transactional analysis therapists estimate that we each have 25,000 hours of internalized negative self-talk. We are generally taught what is wrong with us by our authority figures at home, school, church, etc. In an effort to understand who we are, we accept these self-limiting labels as who we are. However, we each individually are the only one who can truly “know” who we are, or, at least, we are in the best position to make the best educated guess. Learn to challenge the “voices” (one of friends called them “the committee”) or negative self-talk you carry around in your head. Listen to what you tell yourself about you.
In learning to monitor your inner critic, learn to first determine if the criticism is helpful. If you find the suggestion to be helpful, next check to see if the inner critic is kind, gentle, and polite to you. If it is in a condemning voice, ask your inner critic to speak kinder to you.
The techniques you may use to change your inner critic from enemy to friend are: speed up the volume, mimic a falsetto voice, etc. My favorite ploy when I was learning this was to scream “Stop”. It is better to practice these techniques while alone. As someone has suggested—learn to join the airwaves until you own the station.
Self-esteem comes from how we evaluate and accept or reject input as well as the foundation we’ve created from the successes we’ve experienced. By learning to focus on our strengths rather than on our weaknesses, we have each taken charge of our own destiny.
After learning how to utilize our inner critic, we next need to take charge of our thoughts. What we choose to focus our thinking on determines what we will think and feel about ourselves. You are what you think you are. By substituting positive self-talk for negative self-talk, we are re-programming ourselves for positive action.
What Are Your Inner Voices Telling You?
Learning to give up those negative thoughts we entertain about ourselves is the first main step to taking control of our mental and emotional life. Thinking negative about ourselves is the same as picking up a club and hitting ourselves over the head. Negative thoughts lead to negative feelings.
Transactional Analysis (TA) research states that we have over 20,000 hours of negative thought by the time we are 21. If we don’t learn how to plant beautiful thoughts about ourselves in the garden of our subconscious mind, we’re surrendering control to our inner weeds.
Today I want you to think of your mind as your cash register. Picture your negative thoughts as a “No Sale” and when you find yourself thinking about yourself negatively–push “No Sale” and change your thoughts to positive.
Some others’ writing about this:
Weight Loss Without Dieting: The Weight You Can Stop Carrying- Part 1
“When we’re the most disappointed, the most frustrated and the most vulnerable, many of us have this thoroughly unreasonable idea that an emotional version of the slap-upside-the-head is what’s needed. If we allow it, the critical voices in our head that tell us we’re “not good enough” or lazy or incapable can really take control. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard tell me the harsh, awful, demeaning things their judgmental inner critic tells them about themselves and then, in the same breath, tell me how carefully they listen to it! This is not helpful!”
Independence Day Starts From Within:
“The next step in constructing a personal Independence Day document is to consider what inner grievances you have to air out. Time to be honest here. Make a list of the qualities that have held you back over the years. Maybe it is being critical of others, being judgmental without considering another side, living in fear, shutting down emotionally to others, feeling angry for no good reason, shutting off loved ones from your life or not speaking up when you know you should.”
“By writing down these qualities that no longer serve, you can give yourself permission to let them go. The infamous Tony Robbins always said, “if you have a limiting thought, change it.” Imagine replacing each grievance you have with a more positive option, and imagine the exhilaration of how it would feel to live life that way.”
Are You the Boss of You? Really?
“Once I recognized that voice and could see it was not really ME, I could ask it, ‘What makes you say that?’ Or ‘What do you think is going to happen? Death, famine? What?’ The voice was then stumped and I could see that it didn’t really know about something awful about to happen. it was not an omniscient being. It didn’t even make any sense. What a relief. I feel so grateful.”
“Now I can hear it when one of them says, ‘You need to go sit in the corner now.’ I was panicking then because I knew on some level that I was being abandoned when I was excited and hopeful and feeling powerful. And I was being asked to not be who I was.”
“I was also panicking recently because I soooo much want to start my business, and I know now that when I sit in a corner metaphorically, I am killing my spirit. But now that I know those voices are not ME I know that I can just notice them and go on doing what I think is right.”
Learn to Listen and Guide Your Inner Voices
I have written about the importance of using transactional analysis to discover which of your inner voices has the main track. Our feelings come from our thoughts. So if we are basically in our inner child, we may feel inadequate, angry, abused, etc.
TA teaches us that we have inner child, inner parent, and inner adult. Each of these three mind sets also have good and bad components to each of them. The components of each of these is explained very well by Dr. Claude Steiner. Dr. Steiner’s biography is here.
The components excerpts are from this page:
(1) “Ego States and Transactions: People’s interactions are made up of transactions. Any one transactions has two parts: the stimulus and the response. Individual transactions are usually part of a larger set. Some of these transactional sets or sequences can be direct, productive and healthy or they can be devious, wasteful and unhealthy.”
“When people interact they do so in one of three different ego states. An ego state is a specific way of thinking feeling and behaving and each ego state has its origin in specific regions of the brain. People can behave from their Parent ego state, or from their Child ego state or from their Adult ego state. At any one time our actions come from one of these three ego states.”
(2) The Inner Child is referred by Johnny Truant writing for copyblogger.com. His post is titled: “What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing”
“You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?”
“Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”
“In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.”
“You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.”
“Because that kid always remains at our core (and if you’ve ever caught yourself playing kids’ games with genuine enjoyment, you know that it does), our base motivations remain as well. They just get a little harder to see.”
(3) “Art of Attention: Awakening” by Elena Brower encourages self-observation:
“Self observation, leading to self mastery, is the most neutral scientific observation of one’s self in order to discover from which center [physical, emotional or mental] the current reactions are flowing. Translated: to see which part of your being is enslaved to some external circumstance right now. To do so, practice watching your tendencies with curiosity instead of dread or judgment; the slightest bit of agility with your attention is all you need to bring you back to what is really happening, and your heart becomes more nimble all the time.”
[Tangentially, an example for the parents: your child needs you to be unshakably calm. Through watching myself overreact with my child, I've learned that to be an attentive parent is just to offer the simplest, calm responsiveness - and that our calm is infectious every time. I write this so I will remember this.]“
