You think positive self-talk would always result in feeling more positive about yourself.
New research suggests that may not always be the case.
If a person has poor self-esteem to begin with, and then tells themselves something like, “I am a lovable person,” they actually end …
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This is fascinating. Thanks John. Phew. One less thing I have to do … be positive.
I believe in this article posted. I think every individual has his own way to manage himself. There are individuals says negative things to himself and for him it is the effective way to do better in life, and some people are positive to himself and can make a great work.
I don’t think it always has to be about having positive thoughts about yourself, but maybe more in your way of viewing things. I try to look at things differently now than I did before. This new way of thinking seems to have given me a much healthier self-esteem. I know I can find my way out of the negative pattern of thoughts now. When I am filled with enlightened and positive thinking it helps me to believe. I wouldn’t think just saying it to oneself would be enough. Change happens more effectively through experience, I believe. This is an interesting article.
It’s useless to use positive talk if you don’t believe it yourself. I’ve been there, so I know that this article is true. But I have to agree with Beth – you also have to develop a more mature and more objective way of thinking in order for the positive reinforcement to work.
I have to laugh . . this is something I have known for years . . . and I just fired a psychologist who insisted that repeating positive mantras that I didn’t yet believe was the quickest way to healing.
I kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t working and that I needed a different way to shift my core beliefs, but she she insisted I was simply being non-compliant. So, it is good to see someone backing up my thinking!
- Marie (Coming Out of the Trees)
http://mmaaggnnaa.wordpress.com/
Proponents of positive thinking implicitly blame victims of anxiety and depression for their condition by suggesting their feelings are due to a self-destructive ‘choice’ of outlook. This pernicious and smug atitude creates the false expectation that life can feel good all the time if only we could learn to count our blessings and look on the bright side. Wrong. Shit happens. Life is unfair and often just random. Accepting this hard to swallow fact wont make you happy but it will stop you being unrealistic and feeling guilty about your emotions. Which is a start.
There may be another reason that repeating “feel good” statements to one’s self may be self-defeating. My book, “Emotional Honesty & Self-Acceptance”, examined the link between violent and aggressive behavior and acceptance of one’s “emotional reality.” Specifically, the issue is being able to cope honestly when we are “emotionally wounded.” The conclusion I reached was that it is hard to accept yourself when you seek to disown, displace, and thus reject owning and taking responsibility for recovering from your own emotional pain. The result of this emotional disconnect or “dishonesty” is living a life of emotional pretense (a phenomenon British refer to as “emotional labour”). This pretense not only leads to difficulty genuinely accepting ourselves. It may lead to a “disability” to experience emotional intimacy with others. My book examined these factors in the context of teenage perpetrators of indiscriminate school shootings. Unfortunately few schools, parents school mental health programs recognize this connection. Thus we suffer by ignoring the teaching of coping skills to help youth to recognize, destigmatize and heal these “wounds” – just as important as if they were physical rather than emotional. It’s hard to accept one’s self if we reject our true, instinctive feelings of vulnerability. Rather than heal these wounds, some turn to avenging them. Underneath the pretense of “superiority” is the unrecognized nagging feeling of being “unlovable and unacceptable”. Emotionally insecure teenagers, for example, are often at risk of “fooling themselves” this way, thus feeling like “a fake.” Of course they feel this way because of the disconnect between “faked” feelings and the ones we think hurt too much to heal.
The findings of this study reflect my own experience. In the past, I have found that positive affirmations such as “I am loveable” or “I am a worthwhile person” (just as an example) have made me feel even worse about myself. It is good to know that this is not something particular to me, another reason to think I’m messed up!
I have long suspected that having people tell you that “your are so fine, you have everything going for you….dadada.. you should not have to have this poor esteem of yourself”, actually makes me feel worse. So thank you all, I feel somewhat better. Maybe I should “fire everyone that tells me so”, but then I would have no one to turn to.
In my country, though civilized,we don’t have good mental health care even though we pose as such.
My comments are about what the “new research” about positive self statements actually measures. Assuming for a moment that the results with small numbers of participants can be replicated, the study tells us almost nothing about positive self-statements as they might be used in any counselling or self affirming activity. The experimental situation is unusual in the extent to which a single positive statement is buried in the midst of dozens of negative statements, at least for one of the low esteem groups, the key group in the study. The authors and commentators appear not to have thought too much about the context in which the self-affirmation statements were made, but it is clear that low self esteem people had been responding to questions about how they felt about themselves, which by definition were negative responses and were making such statements even at the time they were supposed to say the one single positive statement to themselves. It is difficult to think of a real life situation that is comparable. Alternatively consider a counselling situation where a therapist will be emotionally supportive (and as Dr Wood has argued such social input this is the key to positive self-esteem) and will encourage new and positive ways of thinking about oneself. The content of the dialogue is likely to involve rational analysis and justification for these new ways of thinking (rather than a single confronting emotional idea) and in this way might present many believable, acceptable ways to think about oneself. The experiment, on the other hand, is so far removed from such a real life situation that it is difficult to determine what it may tell us about anything at all. It certainly doesn’t tell us that positive affirmations don’t work, except for one very unusual, artificial, experimental situation.
I am also smiling to myself even if for my own, private reasons.
But why stick to self talk? Why not try the real thing and see what happens when this person with low self esteem talks out loud, and/or especially to those he/she grew up with.
Let’s take X’s experience with her family, and X here is a person with low self esteem. If she tells her mother, (an example) that she is a ‘piece of shit’, and/or ‘stupid’, the worst that can happen is that mother will not disagree, right? More likely, mother will reward the daughter’s ‘humility’ and she will praise X by saying something: “Well, you really can be pretty smart”, or “I don’t understand why you have so many negative feelings about yourself.” (Clueless?)
But should X tell her mother that she thinks she looks very pretty and that she is actually very smart, then more than likely, X’s mother will say something in response that will make X feel horrible, and that is a punitive statement. It may even be something very sarcastic. (come on!)
So, the negative self talk, either in the form of self talk, or talk with someone else who matters is, if nothing else, protective of the person who has poor self esteem. She/he knows very well what she/he is doing, and for good reasons?
Self-talk, or non-verbal self-talk, bounces around in my cranium and is generally unconvincing, and impersonal. That is, it seems contrived and unbelievable and detached from my own real self.
Of necessity, I need to test my thoughts about myself and my welfare by verbalising them, preferably in the presence of trusted friends or family. When I can hear “what I am saying about myself”, or what “I fear that I am fearing” I can get a better sense of reality. Friends are “ears and perspectives” that will correct me, or advise me, if necessary.
I absolutely agree that many self-help books are worse then useless. I’ve seen my fair share of them and then some. I’m glad that at least someone is realising it.
Same with diet books!
self talk works!
I swear by it!
You don’t have to believe it, its not a prerequisite.
Whether its true or false is irrelevant.
What is relevant is to install the thoughts and beliefs you want the brain to run. REally there are 2 sides to every coin–a negative view and a positive view and a choice as to which view you will choose. Both are true. But its better to have a positive focus and positive beliefs–its healthy.
Soon when you run some positive selftalk ontop of negative destructive, depressing thoughts–soon you will replace your negativity and come to believe the positive selftalk.
If you feel tired and you believe you are–is it possible that in reality you are tired because you told yourself you were and as a result believed it because you became tired? In reality you haven’t lifted a finger to justify the exhausted feeling– so the tired feeling is a psuedo-tired–its not a real tired that comes from physical exertion.
My point is you come to believe what your thoughts are asserting, your thoughts make themselves true by causing you to act in conformity to them. This means that If you tell yourself you feel great, full of energy, have enough to sell electricity back to the power company because you have an abundance of it, see what this does to your tiredness. It will make an energized state become a reality. Its a program and the brain is a computer, it runs whatever program you download into it, true or false it makes it true. Even the Bible endorses downloading the opposite to make a new reality in this verse: (Joel 3:10) . . .. As for the weak one, let him say: “I am a powerful man.. . .
Notice God’s Word said if you are weak, say I am powerful.
This is exactly the correct format for selftalk, to state it as if it already is a present reality. The truth is I am weak, the new thought is: I am powerful. Soon the individual will become powerful and then believe he is powerful as the result of becoming powerful. See how that works? State it in: I AM format, and you will become it. So believing it is not a prequisite to it working, in fact its irrelevant wether you believe it or not.
I think that there is value in practicing an active perception of ‘the positive’ as opposed to frequently being mindful of the ‘negative’ in one’s life. However a more useful practice could be to change the emotional and intellectual context of how and to what degree a person evaluates ’cause and effect.’ Just how much impact and influence does a thought or circumstance afflict? I notice that beginning with a more objective viewpoint a person can then go on to assess more realistically the things that are actively ‘positive’ and also NOT as negative as they may have first assumed. Harm reduction and lessened.
One of the things that happens is the the distance between “I am worthless” and “I am terrific” is too great on the emotional scale. Try moving to a place that is more in the middle, “I’m not so bad” or “I am helpful sometimes” or (my favorite) “I am enough” or “I am good enough”. This has helped many of my clients move from poor self esteem to accepting themselves as worthy. Once they are firmly in “enough” then they can start to move up the scale, starting with self love. I use mirror work for that.
Moving from “worthless” to “worthy” is a really big jump, too big for most. I help my clients move to a middle ground “I am not so bad” or “I am pretty okay” or “I am enough”. This last one has been the most powerful, as many of my clients have come back and said that it really helped them raised their internal sense of self. Once they are firmly grounded in “enough-ness” then they can work on feeling deserving, starting with self love. I usually do mirror work.