Those formative years that I mentioned earlier are so important. They really are and the clue is in the title. They are our “formative” years. They help define and form who we are as human beings. How we see ourselves and the people and world around us. How we see our place in that world and so on.
Whilst it is perfectly normal for us all to have a self-narrative going on, we do need to be aware and conscious of that fact that this negative self-talk can be present. When we are relatively stress free, we are said to have a ratio of 2:1 in positive to negative thoughts. That’s two positive thoughts for every negative thought. This is normal and relatively healthy, apparently. But let us consider that for a moment. If we remember that our thoughts can drive our feelings and our behaviour then it is key to understanding that even in a good healthy positive mental state for every two positive thoughts and feelings, we have we are going to have one negative one. This may be on face value a fair trade off and things can’t be all positive all the time, or so I am told but I am sure I would much rather live in a world of positive thoughts and feelings and try and change that ratio to 20:1 or more. Wouldn’t you? If you consider that this is something that is internal to you and I then surely, it’s something we have control of, unlike so often our external environment.
When we are distressed, down or not in a good place this ratio can change to 1:2, one positive thought for every two or more often much more than this.
But even when we are not starting off from a distressed point of view because this ration of 2:1 exists in humans we can over time start to listen and believe the negative thoughts that we have. Even if these thoughts are irrational or unreal, over time if we continue to listen to the negative thoughts, we can start to believe what they are saying.
The thing about these negative thoughts is that they tend to be irrational and if dwelt upon can actually be harmful. If over the course of our life and certainly in those formative years we have been exposed to negative self-talk, negative external talk and so on we may over time have started to believe those negative things about ourselves.
This can then start to lead into us having a negative narrative about ourselves and the world around us. In some teachings this has been called the Pain Body or the Story of Me. It’s the negative narrative of ourselves and who we are.
This negative self-talk from early childhood to our present-day situation will be influenced by our family, friends, and media and so on. We feel we should be smarter, better looking, live a certain way, look a certain way, get a certain amount of exercise, do this do that, don’t do that and so on. We tell ourselves that we “should” be like others or that the things they say about me are true and so on.
When we develop a negative narrative about ourselves, we can often use it to define who we are and why we are the way we are:
- Bad things always happen to me
- I never have any luck
- I am too fat
- Too old
- I don’t look as good as she does in that magazine
- I am not smart
- I am stupid
- I am useless
- I am a bad person
- I can never seem to do anything right
- Why am I always ill?
- I have no confidence
- I suffer from insomnia
- I never sleep
- I won’t be able to sleep tonight what is the point in even trying
- And so on.
I think that anyone can clearly see that thoughts like this are not healthy or helpful to anyone. And that if we started to obsess or believe any of these or similar thoughts it would do us no good whatsoever. If this negative narrative is going on and we hardly even notice it or even worse it is going on a deeply subconscious level then it is something that I am sure even the most negative person would look to address.
Photo by Quaz Amir from Pexels
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