How We Communicate with Ourselves
How we communicate with ourselves encompasses how we talk to ourselves, how we treat ourselves, and the images we display to ourselves. These are all modes of communication with an inward focus.
I used to have an old cassette tape in my head that said I was always on the verge of being in trouble. As a kid, there was this joke in my household that if something went wrong, it was my fault. While I’m sure my adults didn’t say it maliciously, this story really stuck with my child self.
Until I learned how to manage my mind, how to kindly communicate with myself, I was constantly worried that I was effing everything up without even realizing it.
That old cassette tape would start playing in my mind every time a supervisor said they wanted to talk with me, and I would start beating myself up mentally.
I was mean to myself in advance because it was my habit. A thought habit that led me to be defensive and unkind to the most important person in my life. Me. In turn, I communicated with others in an equally defensive and less than awesome way.
Our minds and the thoughts they produce have enormous power because they determine our feelings. Our feelings then lead us to take action in the world.
We can start to understand that so many of the thoughts we think are true are just old habits, old cassette tapes in our brains from childhood, ancestral beliefs and cultural or societal stories.
We can create some cognitive dissonance to ask ourselves if these thoughts serve us and if we want to keep thinking them. If we don’t, we can grab the reins and lovingly begin to redirect our habitual brain. Thereby, we can claim our power in this world.
We set ourselves up for success and for the happiness that we all want and all deserve.
We learn thought patterns in our childhood years. Then those thought patterns are made stronger and compound as we grow. It sets the style of how we communicate with ourselves from a young age.
Our families of origin and communities teach us through example what sort of things are okay to think, say, and do. How to communicate in an acceptable way. In order to build bonds and, at its most base level, to literally survive, we have to adapt to some degree to our social surroundings.
As we grow up and our social circles and sense of self in the world shift and grow, sometimes those thoughts don’t serve us anymore. We call these sorts of patterns that persist even after they no longer serve us maladaptive behaviors.
Let’s say that you were taught to think that one certain way of being in the world was superior to others.
In my childhood, I was taught that being thin is good and being fat or overweight is a sign of complete moral decay.
If that’s what you were taught, then that’s what you’re likely going to carry into adulthood as a guiding thought in your life. That thought will then inform the sorts of things that your habitual brain says to you. That if you’re not some perfect size two, that you’re less than and that you’re not deserving of love.
When we communicate these things to ourselves, when we repeat these painful lessons, we are literally creating our reality.
The thoughts that you hold about yourself and others create your feelings in this world.
If you walk around thinking I’m fat and that means I’m terrible, you are going to feel terrible about your perfect, incredible, amazing human body. Feeling terrible about you will lead you to take action that will keep you in that framework of feeling.
If you walk around telling yourself you aren’t deserving of love, you’re unlikely to find love. Holding that thought about yourself will inform the way you act, the way you show up in the world.
Likewise, if you experienced a lot of anger around you as a young one, you may communicate to yourself with anger.
Angry self-talk damages our bodies by spiking our cortisol and other chemicals into our bloodstream. It also colors the way we see the world and how we carry ourselves through it. When we walk through the world in anger, we are less likely to see the positive. We wind up projecting that anger out into our surroundings.
When I work with my life coaching clients on tuning in to how they communicate with themselves, I hear a lot of resistance that this is something that can change. Remember, our brains do not like change. Homeostasis is the name of the game for mammals like us and change is scary on a neurological level.
I hear clients saying, I’m not being negative. I’m just being honest, when they replay their tapes of self-depreciation or blame. That response only makes sense if we don’t have the tools to recognize our patterns. We fall back on our habitual responses and our brains get confused.
Our brains hold on to a thought and call it a fact.
When we look out upon the world through these self-deprecating, blaming lenses, everything becomes colored by it.
Your boss calls you and says your report needs to be revised, and in your brain, you might think, I’m a fraud. They’ve finally caught on to me. Man, I shouldn’t have gotten this job in the first place. I’m so unqualified.
Instead of revising the report, you ruminate.
You spin in this old story and then you don’t get your work done anyway. You prove to yourself that you’re the fraud that you think you are.
It’s worth pausing and assessing in these moments of knee-jerk negative self-talk where these words and images are coming from.
The most common sources for these kinds of communication with self are: (1) confusing thoughts with facts and (2) telling ourselves someone else’s story about us and believing it.
While there are many possible sources for these stories, these are the most common in my life and in my practice. Once we understand them, these are ones that we can start to shift.
Let’s look at how easy it is to confuse thoughts with facts.
Nerd time. Thoughts are quite literally, electrical reactions in our brains. That’s it. That’s what they are. Thoughts are sentences written in your brain. As the old saying goes in neuroscience—what fires together, wires together. The thoughts that we think over and over, and the associations we make with those thoughts, create strong electric chemical pathways in our brains.
Imagine running a wheelbarrow over soft ground over and over and over again, creating a rut in the ground. As the poet Mary Oliver puts it, “and now I understand something so frightening and wonderful, how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.”
When we think the same thoughts over and over like, “my relationships always end in hurt and pain,” we get neurologically stuck in that rut of thinking.
The reality may be that your partner is kind, thoughtful and totally head over heels. But that old wheelbarrow keeps going back to: “this is going to end in pain, watch out, defend yourself. Don’t get too vulnerable, don’t get too cozy.”
Those kinds of thoughts may be rolling around in your subconscious, that child space. These thoughts are just habits.
These are thought habits you’ve developed in your brain that don’t necessarily reflect your current reality.
Another thought pattern that many of us have is “pain is bad.” Avoid pain. Pain is scary. We can see the obvious evolutionary reasons for this. Organisms do not enjoy pain. On a cellular level, it’s very depleting to an organism to experience pain.
All the endorphins, all the neurochemicals. It takes up a lot of cellular energy. When we partner up those two thoughts – “pain is bad” and “relationships, love, romance, dating always leads to pain” – boom, relationship sabotaged. All because we confused our thoughts about things like pain and relationships with facts.
The words that we say to ourselves are so powerful and lead us to take action.
By doing regular breathwork and thought work, we can start to get some distance from our habitual brain. We can listen to the thoughts it produces for what they are. Thoughts. Chemical signals. Electrical impulses in the brain that certainly affect the body.
These powerful thoughts that feel so real, at the end of the day are just electrical currents that got wired in there.
With certain practices, you too can start to rewire how you communicate with yourself.
We can learn to be our own watcher, even in the middle of a hard conversation. We can start to notice when our habitual thoughts are taking over and clouding our current, present experience. When we notice the difference and get really skillful at differentiating between thought and fact, we gain a more clear vision of our reality.
We can communicate with ourselves with messages based in reality, not in old thought patterns that keep us from fully loving ourselves.
Another source of harmful communication with our beautiful and perfect selves comes from the old tapes. Those tapes that contain other people’s negative stories about us, like my own stories that I was always effing everything up.
Those stories that if I wasn’t like some perfect thin thing, I was not as worthy of love. Those stories that we’ve had on replay, on repeat forever and ever in our minds. This source of nourishment for the habitual brain is a cousin to the confusion of thoughts and reality.
When someone else tells us something negative about ourselves, we buy it.
Hook, line, and sinker, our brain takes in that information as another electrical message. When we replay that tape over and over again, we create yet another wheelbarrow rut in our brain.
Why then do we play those negative harmful tapes over and over again? Why not just turn the tape off? Our minds are drawn to things that stand out, that don’t fit the pattern, that don’t make sense.
This has its own evolutionary origin. When we were scanning the savanna looking for danger, your eye was trained to see that beautiful brown plains grass with the rare tree here and there, perhaps a little watering hole. Your mind became accustomed to seeing that pattern, and to seeing it crisply and in clear outline.
If a hippo or a lion charged towards you and your loved ones across the savanna, you would notice that it does not fit the pattern. It stands out. It doesn’t make sense.
When it comes to the negative stories others have about us, they stand out and often don’t make sense.
In our cores, at our deepest level, we are made of love, of acceptance, connection.
When we are told that we are less than, unworthy or otherwise bad then we take that opinion as some sort of truth. But a part of us may have pushed back because we know deep within, it can’t really be true.
Our brains are amazing machines built to notice patterns and to solve mysteries. We can’t help it. That’s what we do, and so often, it’s helpful for us. Perhaps you remember a time when you couldn’t remember some piece of information, then three hours later you remember. Your brain is working non-stop in the background.
When we take in other people’s negative stories about us as truth, our brain goes to work trying to figure out how it could be. In the process, it runs the wheelbarrow of that harmful, painful thought back and forth, leaving a deep and, when unchallenged, potentially damaging rut. Creating a story that you will believe.
By getting into your breath and better understanding how your thoughts work, you can put other people’s critiques into perspective.
You can start to see them for what they are; one person’s opinion informed by their experiences, their belief systems, their thoughts.
You can start to see them not as some commentary on your most inner self, but as more information about that other person and the way they think. It’s great to have more information about the world, about other people, how they think, what they’re feeling, and about ourselves. We have tools like the thought work protocol to help you rewrite those stories and to re-record those cassette tapes.
You can get better control over the messages you tell yourself and the habits of mind that you build.
You can improve your communication with yourself, which is such a beautiful gift to offer to you.
Your homework is awareness. It is always the first step. Bring your awareness to when you’re playing old cassette tapes, when you’re labeling a thought like, “I always F everything up,” as a fact. My darling, that is not a fact, it’s just a thought.
Continuing to think that thought doesn’t serve you. You continue to communicate with yourself in a negative way.
The irony is that story, “I F everything up,” actually keeps you from seeing where you have made a mistake, where there is something that you would be delighted to do differently. It keeps you from learning and growing. It’s protection. It’s your inner child. It’s some part of you trying to protect you from suffering. But it just keeps you in your suffering because you beat yourself up because you’re having that thought. You don’t hold the space to see where things could shift and grow.
The ways in which we communicate with ourselves informs how we live our lives, how we feel about ourselves, and thus how we communicate with ourselves and others.
If we don’t get into the habit of regularly pausing to examine how we talk to and about ourselves, we are not fully in control of our lives. We’re not managing our minds.
It’s hard to change the things you cannot see. The more in touch with yourself you can get, the more awareness you can bring to the ways you communicate with yourself. You will have more power to direct your thoughts, and thus, create the outcomes you want in life.
If you’re thinking old self-defeating thoughts, then you’re going to feel every feel those thoughts provoke as though they were truth. Yet they’re not.
They’re just old stories. We all have them. You can shift them. I know you can.
You can do hard things. Borrow my faith in you if you’re not feeling it quite yet.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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