Wednesday 7 October 2015

Stop normalising your negative self talk.



The past couple of days were a difficult time for me. My body image was never particularly good, I've been through horrible eating disorders that have had me destroying my body to a point that I was at deaths door and yet couldn't see that it was a problem because I was still in the normal BMI range; anyone who suffers from a "real" eating disorder is emaciated right? I'd done such a good job at hiding it from the people around me that I had hidden it from myself too. Purging 6x a day on average was something I'd done for so long that I thought it was a completely normal practice, even though my teeth were falling out, my hair came out in clumps and I was weak, dizzy and disorientated every day. I think that is a big problem for a lot of people, not just those of us who suffer from eating disorders, finding normality in our self abusive behaviours, one of the main ones being our negative self-talk.

Once you begin to see your negative behaviours as normal they begin to get deep seated inside yourself to the point that they become very hard to shift because they become a part of you. I know one of the biggest issues on my road to recovery with my eating disorder was finding out who I was without the disorder. I was diagnosed at 17 with Bulimia but had had these issues for a long time prior, for the entirety of my teenage years and spilling into my childhood as well; though these things were odd behaviours they were still things that eventually developed into a full blown eating disorder. The part of my life that should have been reserved for self development was taken over by the development of an eating disorder. I felt that all I was was the negative self-talk voice in my head.

Negative self talk is something that I have been plagued by as long as I can remember, even in other aspects of myself than the eating disorder. I'm a real perfectionist and even though I absolutely love writing stories and being creative my perfectionist voice kicks in and tells me that because it's not "perfect" it's not good enough. But what is perfect really? When negative self talk comes in one thing that really makes me think is "would I say this to my best friend?" Would I say that my best friends work is sub par or that it looks stupid? Would I stand in front of my best friend and call her fat etc? I would never do that. I think all my friends are gorgeous, talented and intelligent people in their own special ways but then I say these horrible things to myself. Shouldn't I be my own best friend?

Of course you should be your own best friend! The people in your life enrich it for sure but you are the creator of your own world and your own happiness and you have to be with yourself for your entire life. You are the main person in your life. At the end of it all you have to find happiness in yourself and appreciate yourself and all the things you can do. You are a superstar and the only one of you that there is. You are good enough. You are worthy and that negative self talk needs to go.

Stop normalising your negative self talk. It's not doing you any favours. Whenever you find yourself giving yourself negative self talk you need to stop and think. You need to stop what you're doing and really evaluate what you are saying to yourself. Sit with that feeling for a moment and then start thinking about the reasons why you are saying these things to yourself. For example, when I start thinking about how something is happening because I'm too fat I have to sit down and think about what is really the problem and most of the time I realise that it really isn't because I'm "too fat". We need to take back our inner dialogue and reclaim the parts of our brain that are our own worst enemies and fill them with cleansing light. Positive affirmations, meditation, journalling all the things that you did each day that were achievements or positive or whatever; anything that will make us fill our brains back up with self-love.

Our society conditions us to hate ourselves. There are multi-billion pound industries based on making us feel like crap, based on feeding into the negative self image that we are building up over the years of our life. Our society feeds on us feeling bad about ourselves and we need to stand up for them. Don't feel guilty about complimenting yourself. If your ass looks good in those jeans, own that! If you paint a gorgeous picture, own that! If your acheivement is to get out of bed on a morning where you really really would rather hide under those covers and wallow in your self pity then fucking OWN that! When good things happen you are allowed to feel proud. You are allowed to love the skin you're in. You're allowed to look at your body and appreciate all the things it does for you on a daily basis and, god forbid, love it. Stop normalising negative self talk, it isn't normal, it's toxic and you don't need it in your life anymore. You deserve to be your own best friend so own it. Own yourself. Own your life.









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