I’ve had a tendency to over-inflate just how optimistic I am to the people around me. While I consciously attempt to see the good in a situation or in a person, I realized quite recently that I often failed to see it within myself. One recent library journey gifted me the book Sh*t I Say to Myself: 40 Ways to Ditch the Negative Self-Talk That’s Dragging You Down by Katie Krimer. I perused the table of contents, still letting my ego decide that this book wasn’t for me (yet, a part of me obviously knew I needed to select it from the shelf). Within the contents, Katie Krimer cuts directly to the chase, naming each chapter by quotation commonly told to ourselves: “I can’t change”, “If only I could change the past”, “Sure, but”, “I’m a negative person”, “This feels like it will last forever”, the list goes on. I felt familiar with enough of these statements and felt justified in believing them that I honestly didn’t even realize some were negative self-talk. They were just my self-talk. But I am a positive person, right? One of the chapters, “Things are black and white” expelled this exact sort of thinking for me. It was time to take a real look at myself and what I say to me when I’m alone.
Through examining the habitual patterns circling around my brain in the form of self-talk, I’ve been able to recognize that some negative self-talk has ingrained itself in me for so many years, even under the guise of being a positive attribute. For example, “I feel responsible for other people” is something I have commonly told myself for years. Krimer painted so clearly for me why this mindset has become detrimental. Choosing to be responsible is not the same as feeling responsible. Often we feel responsible for others from a young age when we are raised in a home where parents are emotionally dysregulated, dismissive, reactive or unpredictable; we learn early on that we need to step up to mitigate the chaos in our lives, and by hiding our own struggles and prioritizing other peoples’ needs, we create a dangerous cycle of the feeling or pressure to be responsible for others. For me personally, Krimer called me out on the long-term consequences of convincing myself that I am responsible for other peoples’ emotional states, and I fell victim to myself as a people-pleaser, overaccommodator, and neglector of my own needs and boundaries. I lived a life of saying yes to others at the expense of my own self-care and happiness. While I believe in altruism, doing something good for others is positive and healthy, whereas taking on the emotional burden or feeling liable for someone else’s mood is where the line needs to be drawn. Krimer describes a clear distinction between empathy and compassion. While empathy-putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and often co-experiencing their pain-is portrayed as a positive quality, in truth it is exhausting, and truly feeling involved or responsible for another’s pain is not helpful. Compassion, on the other hand, acknowledges the suffering of other people, and involves a feeling of care and concern for others. With compassion, we have a bit of space where we aren’t taxing all our own emotional resources and fatiguing ourselves, but are still able to find altruism and warmth within the present moment.
For this statement, and 39 others, Krimer succinctly describes why the statement is negative self-talk, perhaps where it stems from, ways it might be manifesting in your life, and most importantly, what to do about it. Sometimes it’s these quick little reads that can pack the biggest punch-right to the psyche, where we need it most.
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