This morning I was cooking a more involved breakfast than usual and as I sat there chopping I had a shocking realization. I hadn’t turned on music, or a podcast, or the television, or taken a phone call, or used any of the other methods of distraction I typically use. I was working in silence, with just the companionship of my own thoughts. And I was enjoying it.
This is an absolutely unprecedented surprise. I’m someone who has had to take medication for YEARS to sleep without nightmares. I have been tormented by flashbacks, the chronic echoes of verbal abuse, OCD intrusive thoughts, and a vicious inner critic that kept up a constant monologue berating me for my every weakness. If I found myself without a phone or a book I would have a literal panic attack, hyperventilating in terror with the realization that there was no distraction from the carnage happening in my thoughts. And today? I hummed and chopped broccoli and thought about how the light coming through my kitchen window was so pretty at that time of day.
I owe my success to trauma therapy and proper health care, but also, to changing how I talk about, and to, myself.
The second Marrow of Body Loyalty is Self Talk, which is the aim of productive mental health care and the purpose behind our self care and health care choices. Whatever choices or practices we enact in the name of improving our mental health should be leading us towards constructive Self Talk if it is going to be sustainable.
At this point in my own journey I was beginning to recover enough to start working towards proactive healthy choices, and I was learning to recognize enough of my body’s feedback that I could start to see some results. Which is when I ran in to my next barrier: a chronic, constant, running script of self hate droning, “you can’t, you’re too stupid, you’re too old, it’s too late, what’s wrong with you, you can’t do anything right.”
When I started I didn’t know what my needs were, and then as soon as I started figuring them out I undermined every attempt to fulfill them. Any good intention was doomed, any motivation sapped by fear of criticism.
I was stuck in a meta self hate spiral, creating self fulfilling hate prophecies. I treated myself poorly because I hated myself, and I hated myself for treating myself so poorly. How do you break that destructive spiral? How can you love someone who hates you and treats you so badly? It’s harmful advice to tell someone to love their abuser, and I was my own verbal and emotional abuser.
I couldn’t just pivot and change a lifetime of behavior on a dime, but I could pretend my body was somebody else, and treat it like I treat anyone who isn’t me. I could take care of a horse named Beloved.
I went no contact with my family of origin in 1999, but for many many years after that I was still carrying around all the verbal abuse, the bullying, the shame, the negative self image, the fear based views of the world, as if they were still right over my shoulder yapping away. For years and years I carted my abusers’ voices around with me. The original harm echoed around my thoughts and wouldn’t leave me alone. Distance created safety, but I also needed relief from those thoughts before I could get to peace.
Finding that peace was a slow and long process for me that included learning tools from a number of different therapeutic modalities – CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, Mindfulness, etc. – that all could be summed up as learning how to be aware of my thoughts – make the unconscious conscious – and to evaluate what I found. These therapies taught me how my mind worked, why it worked the way it did, and strategies to work with it instead of against it.
White knuckling your thoughts doesn’t work. I know, because that is how I coped with my OCD for a very long time. The thoughts were still there, I just felt shame for them and I felt out of control, which led to behavior that was not good for me. When I learned to work with my brain the shame began to evaporate. I learned that my brain was not uniquely unsalvageable, it was just a brain. It wired in a way that was trying to keep me safe, like brains do, and it could be rewired in a new way. Like brains can. I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t even unique. I was just a regular person who had seen some shit that left a mark on my brain, and I needed to teach my brain how to react to its current environment.
Meditation has been really powerful for me here. I have a pretty sloppy approach to meditation – sometimes it’s formal, sometimes it’s closer to prayer, sometimes it’s just sitting and thinking, sometimes it’s just noticing my thoughts as my hands are busy with something else – and I still get results.
Self Talk is the second Marrow of Body Loyalty and the Muscle that goes along with it is Awareness. Awareness refers to any practice that encourages observing and learning about your inner world. Different therapeutic approaches, meditation, somatic therapies, contemplation, even just paying attention. By practicing developing an awareness of your thoughts in whatever way works for you and fits in your life, you can begin to change how you talk to yourself and make your mind a place you aren’t trying to run from.
In my view, this is very different than reciting positive affirmations to try and change your self talk habits. Positive affirmations can have their role, but I think it’s only if they feel honest. Otherwise it can just create more shame every time you feel like you’re lying to yourself. Instead of just trying to paper over the bad with some positivity, I got curious about the bad. Where did that belief come from? Do I still think it’s true? Do I believe that’s an appropriate way to speak to someone? Why do I speak to myself that way?
Getting curious was an improvement, but I knew that I needed to find a way to think about myself that didn’t pretend I was always wonderful. I was wary of anything that had a whiff of narcissism to it, and I needed a way to be angry at my body when I felt angry at my body. Having a body is a pretty brutal experience and I knew that I would fail completely if I had to pretend like things were always great. And when I was starting with all this I was completely submerged in self hate, so everything positive felt like a lie anyway.
In singing class I started learning to think of my body as an instrument, and so I started creating a persona for it in order to talk about musicianship. Slowly I noticed my self talk changing from a stream of constant criticism and condemnation, purely because I was beginning to think of my body as a separate entity from me and I don’t treat other people that way.
The persona I created was a horse I named Beloved. I chose a horse because it fit with what was going on in my singing lessons, but it turned out to be serendipity. Because horses are not wonderful all the time! Horses can be stubborn, and ornery, and sometimes even mean, but they still don’t deserve mistreatment and they do deserve care. They have their own ideas about what they’re willing and not willing to do, so if you want a productive relationship with a horse it’s one of respect and partnership, not cruelty and domination.
Slowly, as I started speaking to my body like a spooked horse, my relationship to my body and to myself changed. I began to see that my behavior was not earning the hate I was dishing out. I began to see things about me that were lovable after all, and I began to see that I was, actually, worthy of care. Because here I was getting care.
A horse is what worked in my case, but when I tell this story I always recommend options that might work for someone else. Any other kind of animal will work. Toddlers are frustrating and noncompliant but we still love them. So are cranky elders. Gardens never grown the way you want them to, but nature is still beautiful. All of these are relationships where autonomy is part of the deal and control is not possible. You do not have control over your body the way we are taught. When it is your time, it’s your time. When disease finds you, there’s no choosing to switch it off. Your body doesn’t have autonomy, obviously, but it does have an autonomic nervous system that you have to make do with, however it happens to work, or not work.
I found a freedom in recognizing the areas about my health and body where I had no control, because that meant I didn’t have to have the shame of being out of control. I didn’t have to criticize myself cruelly and harshly for every time my body didn’t behave the way I or someone else expected. Slowly, as I stopped criticizing and started noticing the good (and continued with appropriate mental health care), I stopped needing to be so afraid of my thoughts. I stopped needing constant distraction from the haunted house of my mind. And I began to see new possibilities for myself as I stopped being dragged back in to the past and began to imagine a healthy and peaceful future for myself.