There is no one I have ever met who is as mean to me as I sometimes am to myself. And I don’t do it that often. But when I do, it is surprisingly harsh. I just started being mean to myself a few years ago, right around when my mother passed away after a harsh battle with Alzheimer’s disease. My son had been diagnosed with disabilities right around the same time and we had a very hard couple of years. If you missed that article, you can read about it here:
My mother was gone. Things were still nuts. I was still working full time, our son was having up to ten therapy sessions a week and we were trying to sell our house in Las Vegas to move back to Texas. We had never wanted to leave Texas in the first place but since my mother refused to move there and she needed help, we had joined her in Las Vegas.
I was mourning HARD. My mother was my best friend, my champion. There was no one who had loved me as she had. I felt empty. I was going through her things, getting rid of stuff. I had never realized that she was such a packrat. She saved every paper, every receipt. She had the heating bill from the house I grew up in, which she had moved out of twenty years prior. It was a lot and it was difficult.
One night, I was sitting quietly by myself and I thought, “I miss my mother.” What followed in my brain was a barrage of nastiness.
My brain said, “Well, tough. You will never, ever see her again. She’s never coming back. She’s gone. Never, ever, never, ever. Too bad. You will have to live like this. You will never feel better again. You will never feel happy again. And you helped her to die so it’s your fault.” I had honored my mother’s wishes by bringing her to hospice and having her sedated. She had chosen to stop eating and drinking and told me she wanted to die. She had had a long, hard road and it wasn’t going to get any better. I did what she wanted. I was having a very hard time with this.
I felt like someone else was in the room. And they were incredibly mean. Only, for the first time in my life, that someone was me. I was incredibly stressed and I’m sure that played a part in it.
I told no one. And then it started happening, repeatedly. I would be doing whatever daily chore I needed to do and in my mind, I would think, “I miss my mother.” And the insults would start.
It was devastating. It was becoming hard to live with. And on some level, it was true. It wasn’t my fault, but in this life, she was gone. And in this life I would never, ever see her again.
I was nowhere near any self care. I was not seeing a therapist, although, Lord knows, that would have been helpful. And I wasn’t talking about it to my husband, who was stressed beyond belief, trying to keep our life together, get the house cleaned up, get it sold and get home while participating in ten therapy sessions a week in our home for our son. I didn’t want to lay one more thing on him.
One day, when it had happened again and I felt like I had just gotten beaten up, I decided that I needed to figure out a solution or I was going to go nuts. I thought hard about it and decided that I was going to REPLACE the words that my brain was saying to me. The only thing that I could think of was the word YES. I missed my mother. YES. All the other words, when they came, were to be immediately cut off and covered with a loud, resounding YES in my brain. If my brain continued to respond, I would just repeat YES. In my thoughts. Loudly. I was going to cut off this mean mental process that had taken me over. This meanie was not going to be allowed to win. After all, how dare this mental person be mean to me after what I had just gone through?
It took a few days to overpower the thoughts. Now, almost five years later, what I put into place is automatic for my brain. Any time that the thought filters through my head, “I miss my mother,” my brain automatically says in response, “Yes.” There is nothing else to say. I can’t do anything about it. This is sufficient. I acknowledge the feeling. YES.
I then started to think about if there were other times when my brain was not as nice to me as I would like. And, I realized, that this also sometimes happens when I think about my son.
My son has PVL (periventricular leukomalacia), Duplicate Chromosome 16, Autism, SPD, Apraxia and more. We don’t know why he has any of these things. Specifically for PVL, which is damaged white brain matter, there is usually a list of things that could have caused it. In our case, none of these reasons were present. We will never know why.
I realized that my brain sometimes blames me. It is sometimes not as nice to me as it could be. And when these thoughts come, they are HARSH. It is not my fault. Not only that, but fault doesn’t even really matter because an admission of fault changes nothing. And my son is incredible. He is my happy-go-lucky angel, not a care in the world, doing well in school and thriving.
So I applied this same principal to getting my thoughts under control. I REPLACED them with thoughts that were kinder. I fought back against this stream of thought. Any time my brain began to harrass me about this I would reply loudly but silently in my head, “THAT IS NOT ALLOWED.” Because my brain, first and foremost, needed to be kind to me.
This doesn’t mean that everything is rosy and I don’t accept responsibility for things. But, I know when excessive meanness is being played out in my thoughts.
You can use this, too. Not every thought that goes through your head is true. Not every thought that goes through your head is appropriate. And, if your brain starts treating you badly, there is no reason why you have to accept this behavior. If you wouldn’t (and you shouldn’t!) accept this type of treatment from someone else, you sure as heck shouldn’t allow it in your brain either.
When you choose to replace your inner dialog with something supportive and comforting, you create a better life for yourself. This is a technique that you can use at any time, anywhere. It’s free. And it works. Try it.
I would love to hear how you applied this technique and if it worked for you. Please let me know in the comments below.