I’m going to be talking to you about talking to yourself inside your head because you’ve all got a little voice in there. The reason why I want to bring your awareness to that little voice inside your head is because sometimes people aren’t aware that they even have one and that can be a problem because that little voice inside your head is your way of communicating with yourself and sometimes the way in which we communicate with ourselves is unhelpful and that needs a little bit of correction.

For one thing, there are some people who inside their heads who are really good at beating themselves up and saying terrible things about who they are, you know, they might really be quite awful to themselves saying things like ‘you’re useless, you’re ugly’ and all of those sort of conversations. This is all really bad for your self-esteem. If you are someone who is struggling with low self-esteem, you need to be more aware of what you say to yourself inside your head. If you don’t want to feel bad about yourself, you have to start saying better things to yourself so the conversations that you have in there needs to be more like the conversations that you would have with your very best friend or the conversations that you would have with the version of you from when you were three and super cute. How you would have talked to yourself if you could have done back then.

If your best friend was having a crisis and feeling really bad about themselves, you would say more positive and encouraging things but there would come a point where you would be less positive and encouraging and more lovingly firm with them and you might say something like ‘that’s enough you’re a good person, I want you to stop talking that way now’. You may get to a point where you kind of put your foot down but you’re still being loving and caring about it you need to do that for yourself too. 

Recently, somebody said to me that sometimes they find themselves getting very emotional and they don’t know why? They’ll start crying and then it ruins the rest of the day. It doesn’t have to be crying some people go through that exact same process but with anger. They get angry, they don’t know why? They spend the rest of the day feeling rubbish and it kind of writes the day off and they were saying like how do I control this? I would say that control isn’t quite the right thing to do. You don’t want to be suppressing those emotions because the chances are it’s that little voice inside your head that’s wanting to communicate a message to you. Very often we know what we want to do to solve a problem it’s just that we can’t quite access the information properly.

Therefore, you need to be using that little voice inside your head to kind of make contact with yourself and to say ‘what do I really need here? what’s the problem?’ and that might mean that you take a few moments to sit with yourself somewhere quiet, where you can close your eyes and if you could almost imagine seeing yourself like if you could sit down to have a chat with yourself – notice what that would look like and start asking some questions, you know, if this were a friend who was upset, you would probably want to know what was going on for them? where those feelings were coming from? what sorts of things they worry about?

It might be that there’s not one specific little thing that’s triggering them off. It might just be that they’re worried about the whole world, you know, it could be quite a big concept like quite a big problem that they just feel overwhelmed by, in which case, it’s going to be very difficult to resolve it. You need to go back to talking to yourself in the same way that you would talk to your best friend. If this were your best friend that was having this like big colossal global worry inside their head and you knew that they were right and that there wasn’t an immediate solution for this problem then you would at least point out to them all of the things that they can be doing to keep themselves safe, to keep themselves well and to keep themselves healthy and happy. You would point out all of the positives that there are for them to notice. 

Here is my challenge for you for the next month – I want you to make friends with yourself. I want you to imagine that you can sit down inside your own mind on a sofa with yourself and talk to yourself and make friends with yourself so that you can begin to notice how that changes your emotions on a day-to-day basis and how much reassurance you are able to provide to yourself by yourself.

By Gemma Bailey
www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org