I’m Not What I Feel: Self-Talk

What’s self-talk? All day long, all of us have feelings about events in our lives. We feel loved, hurt, lonely, anxious; many feelings race through our heads every day. But what if I told you that your self isn’t made up of the feelings we have every day? What if those were just fleeting feelings, not things that identify who we are?

“I am…”

I suffer from a lot of anxiety. Often, I feel paralyzed by my emotions and thoughts. Will the car start? Will we get in an accident? What noise is the car making?! Okay, all my anxiety doesn’t come from the car, but you get the point. If there is something I can find to worry about, you know for a fact that I’m worrying. But that doesn’t define who I am. I am not a loose, crazy, anxiety-ridden stress-ball. I am actually a pretty cool person, but I spend too much time identifying with what I feel, instead of who I am.

What does this mean? It means who I am isn’t what I feel. Feelings are temporary and they change. How I feel about a certain situation isn’t necessarily how I’m going to feel about it tomorrow, much less in the next five minutes. Our feelings are transitory things. So when I say things like, “I am sad”, what I really mean is, “I feel sad.”

An Important Distinction

So, what’s the big deal? What’s the difference between “I am” and “I feel”?

It’s important because if I say to myself enough times, “I am anxious”, eventually I will come to believe it. Self-talk is a very real thing. How we talk to ourselves is what we really believe about ourselves. I will be the first to say that I have, in the past, had horrible self-talk, and after a prolonged period of years, I believed a lot of it. No one could convince me otherwise. My own self didn’t even support me!

It was only after being exposed to some much needed cognitive therapy was I able to see that the way I talked to myself and about myself had become my reality.

Cognitive therapy is based on the theory that what we believe and feel about ourselves is true, that it becomes our reality, whether good or bad. By using positive affirmations and looking for the truth in situations, cognitive therapy can be used to change your reality from something negative to something positive.

Many, many people have used this method to change the way they think about themselves and the world. It helps a person to identify what they feel right now is not the person that they are.

We Are Alike

The worst part about anxiety is the way it separates me from others. I don’t mean that it makes me different, or unique, but that I often feel like I am alone. My feeling of loneliness doesn’t arise from the fact that I am actually alone, but from the feeling that I’m irreparably broken, that no one else feels the way I feel. That’s just not true. Honestly, I haven’t invented anything. People have the same feelings that I feel all the time. It’s just more bad self-talk.

I know now what I wished I’d known from the start. I am not terminally unique. Everybody feels alone and separated from “the herd” at times. It’s not a nice feeling, but I can promise you, this will pass. Maybe painfully, like a kidney stone, but this isn’t your new “normal”. It’s just a feeling you have right now, and one of the ways to diffuse the intensity of the way we feel is to acknowledge that it’s just how you feel about a situation, not the reality of it.

Where Am I Now?

What do we do with this information?

No amount of education about cognitive therapy will help if you don’t trust in the process and believe that it will work. That’s the bottom line.

If you are like me, you know that in all things, practice makes perfect, so I urge you to practice talking to yourself in the way you would encourage a friend. If you would like more information about how to build a better relationship with yourself, Dianne wrote a great piece on it earlier in the theme.

Try It Out

You can also try this exercise. I try to separate myself from my feelings. I say, “I feel sad”, instead of “I am sad.” I refuse to be defined by a transitory bunch of chemicals traveling through my brain at a given moment. And when I can’t extricate myself from the way I feel, I say to myself, “Where am I now?” Usually when I say this, the situation is over, and I’m dealing with the aftermath wave of feelings.

I’m telling you, if you’re on the run from the “what-ifs”, identifying where you are physically located and what you can physically do about the situation is a life-saver. Remember, the “what-ifs” are the enemy, and they will stick you in despair if you let them. By focusing on the present, a lot of the “what-ifs” lose their power. Tell yourself the truth about the situation and allow it to be over.

What are some ways you practice telling yourself the truth about yourself? Do you engage in negative or positive self-talk? Share your experiences, strengths and hopes below. Until next time!

Photo Credits:

Alone – Pierre Guinoiseau

Object Mirror Object – Emilie