...how you talk to yourself and how it impacts you?

I recently started a new series of workshops in communication and stress management. These topics most people have some kind of relationship to, opinions on and experience with. This could be why many of my workshop participants comes with so different expectations on what they think they will learn and what we will do. I've learned to not get nervous about that fact, and I trust myself, the content I actually will show and my participant's own ability to be open to more than they think at that first moment.

What I have learned is that my participants have not just been content with what we did, but they are often surprised on just how interesting and rewarding it was coming. I often hear the words "I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I'm very glad I came."

It's always exiting to meet a new group and to get to hear their stories. Even thought I have women from all over the world coming, it is a constant reminder of how different yet similar we are. That these two ends on a spectrum is intertwined with everyone around us in different volumes and quantities making up the connections, or loss of connections, to one another.

We dug into the topic of self-talk, something I'm convinced of this is the first topic to work on for any long-term lasting self development. In TA there is a concept called "Script", which is the life story that we, at a young age, created to make sense of our surroundings and our place in it. When we are teenagers we test these beliefs to see if they are actually true and if nothing changes, most of us will live our lives with those beliefs as our blueprint. "Is the world a good or bad place, are people safe or unsafe, am I capable and accepted in this world I'm in?" and so on. These questions are answered for us in an unconscious way as we explore life growing up. You could say that we are all living in our own reality or universe where some things are completely normal and others are so strange we can hardly picture them.

I see the life story/script as the canvas on which we paint our reality on. A topic before we start with the first topic. A pre-topic. A topic we can relate and connect all other topics too to understand the bigger picture. The life script is priming us and conditioning us to think, feel and behave a certain way; a way that fits in to our story.

We as humans want order and routine and it is a useful to not need to spend too much time to always process new data. This is why we like to put things in categories and tend to think black and white, right and wrong, good and bad.

This can also be an explanation to why we are bias; bias to whatever fits our life story. That will allow us to get an inner order and our reality makes sense. The life view will stay protected which means that we can continue to live in the belief that our way of living is correct and we can be at peace. When our world view/beliefs gets questioned or challenged, we tend to get confused or angry trying to protect our truth. It can lead to strong reactions and existential crises to realise that we were wrong.

By understanding the conditioning, and that we all have, to some extend, different canvas to start painting on, we are now in a better position to take on the work and questions we might have about how we talk to ourselves and why. With patience, bravery and self-love we can start listening and hearing what we actually are saying to ourselves, understanding the reasons behind it and ultimately change what we want to change.

The participants did an exercise where they got plenty of time to write down thoughts that they thinking about themselves in their own heads. I encouraged them to continue this at home. We then looked at any patterns they saw. They found some interesting things.

The words or sentences showed one woman a truth about her life, where she realised that she was taking on more responsibility than she actually wanted.

Several witnessed that their thought patterns came in clusters, starting off with negative thoughts and only with a conscious and active switch they were able to change their self-talk, first with seemingly neutral thoughts and then positive ones. They witnessed that after they actively worked towards thinking more positively, they fell back into negative self-talk again as if this was the norm. This went on and on and we could see a wave-pattern. As soon they had given themselves positive strokes/feedback, their reaction was to go back to negative self-talk. I found this astonishing!

Why was it like for these women? Do other women also have similar patterns? If this is a common pattern amongst women, what is causing it? The results to this exercise interest me quite a bit and I will keep this in mind for the future, in the co-relation between women and self-talk which ultimately is the foundation to our self-esteem and self confidence.

But one thing I am sure of; those who tend to have these negative patterns, could very well benefit from practicing active and conscious positive self-talk and practicing boundaries to negative self-talk. At the end, the brain is a muscle and needs to be trained, just as any other muscle, for a good (mental) health.

Much love,

Sara Thulin

5 March, 2023