Be Kind to You
What do you tell yourself when you make a mistake? If you’re in the kitchen on your own and you knock something over - what do you say?
Perhaps it’s fruity language, perhaps you’re outwardly silent, but what’s the message you give yourself in your head?
When it’s 4am and you can’t get back to sleep because you’re thinking about that thing from years ago - what do you feel in that moment?
We give ourselves messages about ourselves often, and it’s usually out of our awareness - we have to go looking for them (which gets much easier with practice).
A strong clue that our internal messages are unkind is when we feel bad about ourselves at times when we make a mistake, or when we look back on times (often over and over again) when something happened - even if we couldn’t have foreseen it or controlled it.
Another clue is when you ‘hear’ a tiny bit of that internal message - ‘You should have…’ or ‘You’re a stupid…’ - like it’s somebody else talking to you.
Often we are much more unkind to ourselves than we would be if somebody else made the same mistake; if we imagine talking to somebody else about what happened, we can take on a very different role and give very different messages - kinder messages - to others than we do to ourselves.
The messages we tell ourselves come from decisions we made in early childhood about the world and our place in it. We are so used to those messages that we take it that’s just how the world is - reinforcing those early decisions about the world.
It takes practice to notice when we do this, and it takes discipline to pause and question those messages, to test them against what we know about the world now.
Counselling can help you learn how to bring these things - and more - into awareness, and to learn new ways of thinking, new ways of feeling and behaving, and ultimately becoming more like the person you really are.
If you’re not ready for that, for now, at least, have a go at being kind to yourself. Next time you catch yourself telling yourself unkind things about something that happened, pause, tell yourself you’re OK, maybe you need a cup of tea and 5 minutes pause - just to be kind to yourself.