Healing Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk arrests our ability to think clearly, rationally, and consciously. When our emotions are high, our decision making is halted and reactivity kicks into high gear. In this episode, Life Coach and bestselling author Lisa A. Romano helps you get clear about six steps you can take to put an end to negative self-talk.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about learning to negate and push off negative self-talk.

We're going to be talking about what we can do to help heal negative self-talk.

And you might not be aware that there is a little person inside of you or a younger version of you that is taking it all in.

You know,

It's like opening up a garbage can and dumping all the garbage inside of it.

I remember being a little girl and that's the way I felt.

My mom very often times would fly off in a rage and she was very easily irritated.

I think she had a lot of suppressed and repressed rage and the slightest things would set her off.

And she would use terrible language and call me the most ridiculous names,

You know,

That I would never even imagine calling my little girl.

But I understand now from the greater perspective and through understanding living below the veil,

I understand what it's like for the child of a narcissist and the child of alcoholics to feel.

And as I healed on my own healing journey,

I was able to go through my own wounds and then I was able to imagine the life of my mother and my father.

And I was able to put peace together what their life must have been like and how easy it was for them to be frustrated by things that were happening that they just did not have the life skills for.

And I was able to develop eventually empathy for them.

But in the writing of my story,

The Road Back to Me,

Many of you know that I've written a book called The Road Back to Me.

That was my first book.

And in that book,

I recant what it was like growing up in a home that was toxic,

But the adults would not acknowledge that it was toxic.

And so we lived in denial.

We had a beautiful home.

We had the hedges in the front of the house were nicely trimmed.

My father was always working in the yard.

My mother was busy doing laundry,

Busy doing,

Doing,

Doing,

Doing,

Doing.

And what was really happening was a lack of attunement.

There was tremendous frustration and it was never being identified.

And I always felt like and I always felt like she cut the top of my head off and she would just dump whatever she was feeling into me.

And then once she released all this toxicity and I absorbed it,

She seemed to feel better.

And this was a cycle.

And so I wanted to keep my daughter's picture prominent in the video so that you can remember that when you hear yourself using negative self-talk,

There really is a little one inside of you that is receiving it.

And,

And that little child doesn't know that what they're receiving,

They don't deserve.

And so the first thing that I,

That I want you guys to understand is the power of disidentifying from negative self-talk.

What I mean by disidentifying from self-talk is the ability to catch it.

Meaning the minute you are aware that you have said or heard something negative in your mind,

In that awareness,

You recognize that that negative self-talk is a remnant from the past.

It is a narrative that you have absorbed very much like you would talk into a tape recorder or a voice recorder.

It is a narrative that you have absorbed and you may not be aware is not your narrative.

I learned about this concept when I was in therapy years ago with the therapist who finally told me about co-dependency.

And he asked me one day about the way I spoke to myself.

And I told him that most of my self-talk was negative.

And he said,

Well,

Whose voice is in your head?

And I thought about it.

I was like,

Mine.

And he was like,

Think again.

And I pondered on that and I considered it and I chewed on it.

I read a lot about self-talk and I realized that I had been programmed to speak to myself a certain way.

Children don't know that the big people in their life are wrong.

Children don't know that the big people in their life,

Children don't know that the people that are paying the mortgage,

The people that are taking them to the dentist or should be,

Or the people that are around them,

Children don't know that they say things that they should not say,

That should have never been said.

And that oftentimes big people do things they never should do.

Children don't know that.

They assume that what is being told to them is true.

Children assume that their parents,

Their people who are raising them,

That they love are like God.

There is an adoration from a child,

A natural adoration that children feel towards the people who are raising them.

And that is not a bad thing,

But unless when it goes awry,

When the people in charge are dysregulated,

When the people in charge are narcissistic,

When the people in charge are below the veil of consciousness,

They are co-dependent,

They are in denial,

They are addicted,

Or there is some other issue in the home like alcoholism that nobody is talking about.

No one knows how to process,

No one knows how to acknowledge,

Right?

And so when a child is in a state of adoration for the adults in their lives,

And the child is unaware that the people in their lives are making mistakes,

Then the child naturally absorbs the narrative because the child believes the narrative is true.

For this reason,

It's so important that when you catch yourself saying something negative,

That you disidentify immediately from the negative thought so that you can create a space for the miraculous ability that your brain has to become aware of the way that it thinks.

This is called metacognition,

And we don't use this ability often enough.

We don't think about the way we think often enough.

We are reactive in most cases,

We get sucked down rabbit holes,

We are emotionally triggered,

And it's very difficult for us to sit with how we feel,

Observe how we feel,

Process how we feel,

And to make a decision about how we feel that has been run through the filter of rational thinking that has us knowing that we are not reacting and that we are investigating what we can control,

What we can't control,

What we have a right to control,

And what we don't have a right to control.

The second thing that I'd like you to consider is to refuse ownership.

So when you disidentify,

Step one,

When you disidentify from what you heard the next step is to say,

That is not my voice.

Remember that you are a sacred being that has a physical body and a brain that has been wired perhaps due to trauma,

That you are on the journey of figuring out.

So within you is divinity.

Look at this little baby's face.

She's precious and she's innocent,

Right?

Every child born is precious and innocent,

Right?

Who we become is the result of the petri dish environment that we have been born into.

Our environments affect the way we turn out,

They affect our behavior because our environment affects the way we speak to the self.

And so if we came from an environment that was a very from an environment that was abrasive,

Then we have an abrasive self-talk narrative.

If we came from a home that was nurturing and forgiving and understanding and compassionate and respectful,

You know,

And wasn't abrasive.

And then the way we speak to ourself is loving and compassionate.

I'm so sorry,

I didn't mean it,

You know,

Like I can forgive myself.

I know that I'm not perfect and I don't need to harass everybody else because they're not perfect.

Because I have been offered forgiveness and kindness and compassion and because my feelings matter to the big people outside of me,

I now know that my feelings have to matter to me.

Number three,

I want you to understand after you disidentify,

Refuse ownership,

I want you to recognize the negative self-talk as a symptom.

That's right,

It's a symptom.

You would never speak to yourself in a negative way,

Unless you had some experience outside of you that taught you to do so.

So recognizing negative self-talk as a symptom of something that you've experienced is extremely helpful.

It allows you to,

Again,

Create that space,

That space between you and the negative self-talk begins to widen.

And as the space widens,

Shame is alleviated.

You're beginning to understand,

Wait a minute,

This happened to me,

Right?

I haven't been able yet to become conscious enough of the idea that this negative self-talk is a symptom,

Right?

And it's a consequence of someone that I love speaking to me this way.

Children always assume responsibility for what happens to them in their environment.

They are not objective thinkers,

They're subjective.

And they don't know about the world at large,

They don't know about trauma,

They don't know that parents can be disordered or parents could be narcissists or alcoholics or simply,

You know,

Well-intended,

But make a mistake.

Even the most well-intended parents are going to make a mistake because we have to understand that a child's experience is very limited.

Like their awareness is like a pigeonhole.

And so the slightest thing that can upset a child can traumatize a child,

The slightest thing.

So there are parents who are dealing with children who have negative self-talk,

Right?

Who have developed self-talk because the parents weren't able to fulfill every single need of the child,

And the child might be very sensitive and assume that the reason this parent is unable to fulfill the need is because there's something wrong with them.

And so we have to recognize that even the most well-intended parents can make mistakes,

Or even the healthiest,

What seems like healthiest families,

We can still come from what looks like healthy,

Healthy families where parents had every good intention,

But still have negative self-talk.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I want everyone to understand that any negative self-talk is not of the divine,

Is not of spirit,

Because spirit wants to love you and your spirit wants you to grow.

Spirit wants you to find the flow.

Spirit wants you to find abundance,

Find peace and find contentment.

Negative self-talk interrupts that process.

And so us understanding that negative self-talk really,

Really debilitating,

Negative crushing self-talk actually pulls us out of alignment with spirit and creates a constricted life experience,

Which is the opposite of abundance.

The fourth thing that I want you to do is become non-resistant to what you hear.

So oftentimes,

You know,

I'll coach somebody or I'll hear someone say in one of my coaching groups that they hate themselves because they hear themselves hating themselves.

It's not a term that's accepted,

You know,

In the mental health community.

It's a term that I've come up with.

I call it layering.

So I have this experience of self-talk and now instead of just sitting with it and saying,

Wow,

There is my self-talk again,

There it is,

A symptom.

There it is.

I need to just identify it.

It's not my self-talk.

I would never consciously speak to myself or a child this way.

So it's not my stuff,

But it's a part of my download.

It's part of my data.

Right.

And so instead of just sitting there and becoming non-resistant to,

Wow,

I just noticed negative self-talk.

So oftentimes what we do is we go into a shame spiral.

So now we have shame because we have negative self-talk,

Which is we're layering it.

Right.

Or we hate that we hate ourselves.

We hate that we just called ourselves stupid.

We hate that we just called ourselves fat.

We hate that we're criticizing ourselves.

Right.

So if we just eliminated the layering and instead we became non-resistant to what showed up,

Think about what would happen.

Think about that space and think about how less cluttered that space would become if we were just non-resistant to the negative self-talk,

The moment we noticed it.

The fifth thing that I would like you to consider is to offer yourself compassion.

That's right.

The one thing so many of us needed when we were little was compassion,

Compassion for the little fears we had when we were a year old,

Compassion for the fears we had when we were 15,

Compassion for peeing in our pants when we were being potty trained,

You know,

And not being ridiculed or smacked or thrown up against the wall because we potted in our pants.

We didn't do it on purpose.

We were in the process of learning how to control some pretty serious muscles,

You know.

If we had had compassion for being afraid of going to school for the first time,

If there was compassion for us when we woke up in the middle of the night when we were hungry,

If we had been able to go to big people in our lives and tell them that we were sexually abused or that we were being physically abused,

Right.

If we were able to tell one parent,

I'm afraid of that parent.

And if what we had shared had been met with compassion,

What we had shared had been met with compassion,

We would have known that our feelings mattered.

But when you grow up with a lack of compassion,

Right,

You do not have compassion for the self.

You do to the self and you speak to the self the same way that you have been spoken to.

And that is not our fault.

So offering yourself and your negative self-talk,

Compassion,

Recognizing that it's not you,

It's a product of programming and conditioning.

And it's very real.

It's neurological.

Your brain has been wired and your brain has been firing,

Thinking that you are stupid,

That you are not worthy and that you are not enough.

Offering yourself compassion helps heal the shame.

So the space between you and the negative self-talk is learning to be less shame-filled.

So the sixth thing I want you to do is celebrate the birthing of this new awareness and this new ability.

This is an incredible moment.

If you've been able to go through the five steps and you've been able to offer yourself compassion when you've heard yourself say something negative,

That is something tremendous to celebrate because it means that you are developing space between you and your programming.

You see,

When we're below the veil,

We are one with our programming.

We don't understand that we are not our programming.

We're one with it.

We are unconscious.

We are below the veil of consciousness,

As I like to say.

We are reacting to what we hear in our minds.

We are reacting to what we feel.

We are one with our emotions.

We get triggered and we're one with the reactivity.

We get rejected.

We get discarded.

We are one with these emotions and these feelings and this negative self-talk.

That comes up.

If you've been discarded by a narcissist,

Oh my God,

The shame that happens from being discarded by a narcissist,

It's almost unbearable.

I mean,

Narcissists generally love bomb you.

They pull you in,

Right?

They groom you sometimes.

They get you to trust them.

You start to feel seen.

You start to feel like this is awesome.

Oxytocin is flowing.

You begin to let your guard down.

You trust this person.

As you're trusting this person more and more,

Your guard is going down.

Your heart space is opening up.

You're inviting this person inside,

Inside the chalice of your being where they do the most damage,

Right?

They activate all of the wounds that you have been on this miraculous journey to heal.

Being abused by a narcissist is absolutely horrible.

It's horrific.

We have to understand that a lot of narcissists don't understand that they're narcissists.

And that's,

I think,

Lends itself to understanding why they can be so convincing.

If you've ever spoken to somebody who is under hypnosis,

Who believes that they're a gorilla,

Pretty hard to convince this person they're not a gorilla.

They're jumping around on the stage,

Beating their chest,

And in that moment of hypnosis,

They think that they're a gorilla.

When you're dealing with someone who is truly a narcissist,

Even if they are absolutely 100% wrong,

They will not see it.

They absolutely believe that you are wrong and they are right.

And you're standing there as a logical person and logical people tend to wonder,

Could I be wrong?

We're self-reflective.

And lots of times we think that because we're self-reflective,

The people that we're dealing with are self-reflective,

And that's an illusion.

That's the way a child thinks.

An adult learns to realize that,

Wow,

Not everybody thinks the way I do.

Not everybody is fair.

Not everybody wants to know if they're actually doing something wrong.

Not everybody wants to know if they've hurt someone else's feelings.

Not everybody wants to make amends to someone that they may have hurt.

Oh my God,

Lions and tigers and bears.

Oh my,

That was a huge wake-up call in my brain when I realized,

You know,

My mother doesn't care about my feelings and she admitted it.

She actually said,

Lisa,

I never once thought about your feelings when I was raising you.

You could have knocked me over with a freaking feather.

She admitted it,

Admitted it.

Amazing.

And then one day,

My ex-husband,

And it's seared into my brain as he's putting a gallon of milk into the fridge in his blue shorts and his white t-shirt,

Says to me,

I never think about your feelings.

Here I am since as long as I can remember.

A child who does nothing but worry about how my mother feels and how my father feels and how my brother and my sister feel.

It's the way I grew up.

I didn't know that the people in my life weren't thinking about how I felt.

I had no clue.

Then I marry somebody who admits it too.

I never think about your feelings.

And he thought that he was right.

He thought that he was completely correct.

We had a house,

He went to work,

He didn't drink,

He didn't smoke.

What more could I possibly want?

The fact that he was passive aggressive,

Abusive,

Gaslit me all the time,

Twisted the stories and lied was completely irrelevant in his head.

It didn't matter because in his head,

He was right and I was wrong.

Growing up with that is very,

Very destructive because you grow up thinking,

Not knowing that other people don't think like you.

And so when you are treated in a way,

When you were treated with indifference,

When you suffer gas lighting,

When you attract narcissistic abuse,

You end up becoming codependent.

You suffer with codependency.

You become a people pleaser.

You become somebody who wants desperately to convince other people that you're not this horrible person.

You want to help people.

You want to rescue people.

You think that if I rescue somebody,

Then I'm worthy.

You tend to put other people before yourself.

In all of that,

There is a reinforcement of negative self-talk because you are attracting takers.

You are attracting abusers.

And when you attract abusers,

Their narrative is you're wrong and they're right.

And so when the soup isn't hot enough,

You're wrong because you made them soup.

Even though you didn't make yourself soup,

You made them soup and you should have known the soup wasn't hot enough,

That their palate preferred hotter soup.

When you go to the post office before you go to Target and they ask you why you went to the post office before you went to Target,

You feel like you've done something wrong.

When they tell you they'll be home at five o'clock and they don't come home until seven or eight,

Or they don't come home at all,

They meet you with,

Why are you trying to hold me to five o'clock?

What's the big deal?

Why can't I come home when I want?

You are consistently being abused because you don't know how to hold on to the self.

That's not your fault.

And so we've got to recognize that being raised by people who are indifferent to our feelings.

And again,

There are those situations where the best of parents,

The most well-meaning parents make mistakes,

Right?

The more we can look at our mistakes without shame,

The easier it is for us to come clean and to speak to our children in a way that speaks to their soul so that they know that we didn't mean to hurt them.

But when we are children who grow up with indifference and we are met with abrasive others,

When we are told in many ways that what we think and what we feel is irrelevant,

When we are mocked,

When we are criticized,

When no one's home when we get home from school,

When no one comes home to cook us dinner,

When there is constant fighting and no one cares how we feel and that no one's thinking about us cowering in the corner,

Or no one cares that we're out all day and all night because we don't feel comfortable in our own home,

Right?

We have to recognize that as a consequence of that,

There's this little person inside of us that very much assumes responsibility for the inability to connect with the people that we love.

Reviews

Highly recommended! Information is spot on and truly helpful! As a sports psychotherapist and coach myself, I often give the link out for this one! Thanks for what you do Lisa!

Thank you! Will come back to this again for sure. 🙏🏾

Everyone of your meditations are useful and I learn something from them Thanks 🌼💜🌸💖

She's amazing!

Love her work

Amazing thank you 👍

Thank you very much!

Wow. Amazing. I could really relate to this! Thank you! 🙏🏻

Spoke to my soul! Thank you!

This is very good, but slightly marred by many personal references. I think your message is very valuable, as is the knowledge that you transcended suffering. Somehow, I felt blocked from connecting to my history by those references. I do not mean to be critical for the sake of it. I admire your passion and your wish to help others. Thank you!🙏

Thanks, Lisa. You were speaking directly to my child hood, to my little debbie. I cried.

Such incredible insights ... thank you for sharing!

I related with everything you spoke about. Thank you for this talk that allowed a more understanding on self ❤️

Very insightful! Addressed core issue that I have been dealing with for a lifetime. Thank you, Lisa❤️

Powerful stuff.

Lots of identification, very relevant for me. Thank you. 🙏❤️

Lisa, I can't thank you enough for sharing your wisdom with us and helping us get clarity to go through our own path of healing. Thank you wholeheartedly. Metta and namaste. Igo 🙏🌻

Story of my life . Been working on pulling it all together 3 plus years now. progress has been made then I regress if only for a moment but that’s all it takes to break the spirit of my inner child or my grandchild.

That was powerful! I needed to hear all of it! Thank you, thank you 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 very grateful for this helpful, healing podcast.