#20: How Do You Talk to Yourself?
In today’s episode, we discuss your relationship with yourself, focusing on the skill of Loving-Kindness.
- When you are having a hard time, are you kind or harsh with yourself?
- Do you berate yourself for real or perceived mistakes?
- Do you try to motivate yourself with criticism?
These tactics tend to not work in the long-run and erode your sense of self.
What if you had permission to be gentle and compassionate with yourself?
The DBT skill of Loving-Kindness meditation is based on the Buddhist practice of Metta, which can help you cultivate a gentle, loving relationship with yourself. Although the roots of this skill lie in Buddhism, we offer a secular version of the practice here.
Show Highlights:
- Self-criticism can get conflated with accountability
- How would you speak to a good friend, or to someone you love when they are having a hard time?
- The role of hope in being kind to ourselves
- Acknowledging our common humanity is part of self-compassion work
- Everyone goes through hard times and this is part of being human
- Loving-Kindness Meditation is a series of 4 statements:
- May I be Safe
- May I be Happy
- May I be Healthy
- May I live with Ease
- Try sending Loving-Kindness to a neutral person first, then to someone you love, then to someone you’re angry with. Lastly, send it to yourself.
- Loving-Kindness can be a way of practicing Opposite Action
- Let go of the language of “deserving”
- Rather than being selfish, being kind to yourself can actually help you be kind with others
Links & Resources:
- DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition
- The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff
Would you like to ask a question and have the chance for it to be answered on the podcast? If so, please use this form. Please note that asking a question and this podcast in general is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual mental health treatment.
#20: How Do You Talk to Yourself? Transcript
Marielle Berg
Hello and welcome to The Skillful Podcast where we explore DBT and RO-DBT skills to help you reduce emotional suffering, improve your relationships, and become more present in your life. I’m your host, Marielle Berg, a psychotherapist at the Bay Area DBT and Couples Counseling Center.
Marielle Berg
Today, we’re going to be talking about your relationship with yourself. So we’ve been exploring on the podcast a bunch of different skills that help you navigate your relationship with others. But we haven’t spent a lot of time on talking about how you talk to yourself and how, what your internal dialogue is. So we’re gonna dive into that today.
Ed Fowler
And I do think this is a really important topic when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Because our relationship with ourselves is the relationship that we spend the most time on and we often spend the least conscious time cultivating in the way that we, you know, consciously cultivate relationships with others. And yet, that relationship with ourselves is really a foundation on which all of our relationships are built.
Marielle Berg
For many people, they might not even be familiar with the concept of having a relationship with themselves. But we all have internal dialogues and ways of relating to ourselves, that, as you said, that are often unconscious. That are just kind of playing out in the background.
Marielle Berg
And so we’re hoping today to get people thinking, and wondering about how they talk to themselves, particularly when they’re going through a hard time. One thing that is so common is that, for so many people, when we’re struggling, we can get really harsh with ourselves, when what’s needed often is kindness and compassion and patience.
Ed Fowler
And I think it’s such a common tactic for self motivation, is just be tough, be that tough coach. To say, hey, keep going, you got to do better, you got to keep trying. And we can overuse that kind of approach. And I think it’s a really, really common thing, to develop a sense of self motivation that is almost exclusively self critical.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And that that’s a common objection, often too, when we talk to people about what we’re going to talk about today, which is self compassion. And in particular, this skill called Loving Kindness mindfulness practice, or Loving Kindness Meditation, which is borrowed from the Buddhist practice of metta. That’s often something that people will come back with like, but I can’t be nice to myself or loving with myself, because I won’t get anything done. Like the way I motivate myself, is by being critical.
Ed Fowler
And when that comes up a lot when I’m working with people, and my question always is, well, how is that working out? And almost always, I just get a blank stare of like, oh, maybe not so effective. But at the same time, if it’s all we know, and I certainly have, have overused self criticism, and had periods in my life, where it’s like, I really did not know how to be kind to myself. If all I know is how to criticize myself, and that’s the only way I know how to motivate myself, and it’s not really working that well, I’m at a loss and I need something concrete to do that would actually be compassionate.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And you’re talking about overusing self criticism. And I feel like self criticism is rarely if ever, very useful. And I think they can get sort of conflated with accountability. Or we can think like, if I’m not critical with myself, how am I going to be accountable to myself and others? But I think there’s certainly a way to be accountable and be responsible that doesn’t involve that self criticism, or what I think both of us often see when we’re working with folks is more like a self flagellation. It’s, it’s so extreme. Like, I’m a terrible person. I’m a loser. God, I messed this up. I mess everything up.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
That kind of thing that can happen in people’s heads.
Ed Fowler
Right. Yeah, I had a teacher once who was so good with this kind of stuff, about relationship with self. And one of the things that she would say is, if I went with you through your day, and you whispered in my ear, everything that you say to yourself over the course of the day, would I have a good day or a bad day? And when she would say this in the context of like a workshop or a speech or something like that people would laugh. Because I think most of us if you think about it, oh, if I said to other people, the things that I say to myself all day long, they would probably be horrified at how harsh that is.
Ed Fowler
And I think often when it comes to that kind of motivation, through self criticism, to think about, would I ever motivate someone else in this way that I’m trying to motivate myself? Would I ever speak to someone else in this way and say, you’re a loser, you’re terrible, you can never do anything, right? You need to stop, you need to get over it? Would I do that to someone else?
Marielle Berg
And the answer almost always, is no. And so when we’re thinking about how we talk to ourselves, or more broadly, about self compassion, and I’m also drawing here on the work of mindful self compassion by Christopher Garner, and Kristin Neff, and we’ll we’ll link to those resources in the show notes. So if your good friend called you, and they told you that they’re really upset because they didn’t get a job offer that they were hoping to get, how would you respond to them?
Marielle Berg
So you likely would not respond the way you would respond to yourself. If your friend tells you they’re upset, because they didn’t get this job offer they wanted, you would probably offer understanding, and patience. You would validate. You might say things like, I’m sorry, you’re hurting. That’s really painful. Maybe you’d reassure them that something else good would come along. You might say things like, of course you’re upset, you really wanted that. You might ask how, how can I help? How can I be here for you? You wouldn’t say you’re stupid, you wouldn’t berate yourself, you wouldn’t insult them, you wouldn’t tell them they deserved it, which is, so often what we might tell ourselves.
Ed Fowler
And I think you probably wouldn’t say, of course, you didn’t get that job, you were stupid to even try to get that job, you know? But what you might say is, I know this is really hard, I still have hope that you will get a good job for you. I still believe in you. Being able to acknowledge the loss, but also hold that hope, which is often easier to do with someone else, and really valuable if we can try to start to turn that towards ourselves.
Marielle Berg
I’m so glad you brought that piece up, in terms of hope. Because that is something that we can offer to others so much more easily, because we can see the sort of whole course of how things unfold. And we can know that bad things can happen to our friends and good things, and we can feel hopeful for them. But when we are disappointed or upset are suffering in some way, it’s so challenging to access that hope, and that belief that things will shift. And things always do shift. Not always for the better, all the time.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, nothing, nothing is permanent.
Marielle Berg
Yeah.
Ed Fowler
And I think that, again, using the approach we would use with someone else gives us that sense of what’s possible, even as it can be really hard, for instance, in a moment of loss to have hope within ourselves. Much easier to have for someone else with a little bit more objectivity and distance.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And another piece of mindful self compassion work is around acknowledging what is called our common humanity. And what we mean by that is acknowledging when we and respecting when we’re going through a hard time that everyone goes through hard times. And that we’re, that this is part of being human.
Marielle Berg
Because often when we are struggling emotionally, we can make it worse by thinking we’re the only one. Or we’re the only one who’s feeling lonely or afraid or were uniquely flawed in some way. So if you can feel more connected to our common humanity, which at times is the experience of suffering, you can feel less alone in your pain. And the skill we’re going to talk about the Loving Kindness, mindfulness meditation will speak to this common humanity piece as well.
Ed Fowler
Because I do think in our relationship with ourselves, it is us with us, which can feel isolating at times. And we don’t have the same perspective as we have in relationship with others who have totally different perspectives than we do. And there may be similarities, but they have their own life experience and that in communication between the two of us we can put those together and recognize oh, there’s a a lot of commonality here. In our relationship with ourselves, it’s a little harder to make that connection. And that’s where a practice, like Loving Kindness can help us strive towards that awareness, that I’m not alone. It’s not just me, there’s a common experience of humanity that I am tapping into right now.
Marielle Berg
So let’s, let’s lay out what the what exactly this Loving Kindness mindfulness meditation is. So it’s a series of statements, there’s four of them, you can tweak them as you like, but I suggest that you try to keep them simple. And if you are new to this skill that you try out the ones we are offering here, which, as always, we’re working out of Marsha Linehan’s DBT Handouts and Worksheets, and we’ll link again to that in the show notes, so you can look that up if you want to get more detail about the skill.
Marielle Berg
But the Loving Kindness meditation is a series of these four statements that are, you might say, are well wishes, you can use the word prayer, if that resonates for you, but you do not have to be religious in any way to engage with the skill. It’s sort of a wishing for the best for others, and then ultimately, for yourself.
Marielle Berg
So the four statements that we start with are, May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. And may I live with ease.
Marielle Berg
So I put that all in the with the eye. And so we’re actually going to probably back up, and we’ll talk about why, when you’re beginning with loving kindness, you might want to try sending it to other people first before you send it to yourself, because that can be the most challenging. So if you’re sending these this loving kindness to someone else, it would be may you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease.
Ed Fowler
And I think that the simplicity of this practice is that we cultivate this sense of openness to others, and ultimately also to ourselves, simply by just repeating these sentences, as a way to deepen our our felt sense of what these mean, and direct it towards others direct it towards ourselves. So just four simple sentences with a little bit of direction can actually change the way we feel.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and I think that, so this is, it really is it’s a Mindfulness skill. So it’s a it’s a way you can practice mindfulness. Particularly, it can be helpful to have sort of like a mantra, these four lines that you repeat to yourself over and over, if you find other mindfulness exercises, like following your breath more challenging, because it gives your brain something to focus on. So it’s essentially a mindfulness skill. But it also, you know, I think about this Loving Kindness meditation, as part of our Self Soothing skills, which are part of Distress Tolerance. It’s a way that you can soothe yourself when you’re feeling that you’re way in Emotion Mind and feeling really upset. I know you’ve talked, Ed, very clearly about how you think about it in terms of Opposite Action. If you use this loving kindness with someone you’re angry with.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, I think that again, like if you are feeling really angry, or frustrated with someone else, or with yourself, and recognize that that’s really fueled by a lot of assumptions and judgments, interpretations, not so much facts based, or not effective to be angry in the moment, one way to cultivate an Opposite Action of openness, so rather than being angry and closed and wanting to maybe lash out, or push back, Opposite Action would be to be open. And this is a way to cultivate openness.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and so a very let’s do like a super quick review of Opposite Action. So we use Opposite Action when our emotion doesn’t fit the facts, or acting on emotion might not be effective. So if you are feeling angry with someone, and it doesn’t fit the facts or acting on it isn’t effective, and a lot of times with anger, it isn’t, not all the time, but enough of the time, one of the suggestions is to to act opposite to that anger. Is to be a little nice to the person you’re angry with. And sometimes that can feel like a bit of a stretch.
Marielle Berg
So I think of Loving Kindness meditation as a way to, at least internally, act a little nice towards the person you’re angry with by sending them these, these well wishes.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, exactly.
Marielle Berg
So when we’re teaching this in group, we have people first think of a neutral person. And so if you’re listening along, you can think about that for yourself. We start with a neutral person because we want to start with practicing this skill with someone where there’s not a lot of charge. So you can think about sending it to someone you know, you see at the grocery store regularly, maybe the checkout person who you don’t particularly have any feelings about, or you know your mail person or a neighbor that you don’t know, someone who’s neutral. And begin by sending them these well wishes, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be at ease, and see see how that feels within you.
Ed Fowler
Then the next level would be to send this loving kindness to someone that you actually have love for. So starting with someone neutral gives us a little bit of practice, and then sending loving kindness towards someone that we actually have love for and deep care. And noticing when you practice that, saying these four sentences kind of as a mantra, what do you notice within yourself, when you wish send these well wishes of loving kindness to someone that you have deep care for?
Marielle Berg
And for most people feels really good. Because if it’s someone you love, or if there isn’t someone in your life right now, who you can love without a lot of extra noise, like someone, because there might be people in our lives that we love that we also have conflict with. So you can use a pet, or something where you can really just sort of bask in how you really want this person to be safe, happy, healthy, or at ease? Person or pet.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Marielle Berg
So that that can bring up a lot of positive feelings,
Ed Fowler
Right. And I think it’s interesting to notice the difference from someone neutral to someone that we actually have care for, and positive feelings towards. And notice the difference when we do the same meditation or reflection for those two different people, and then move on to something maybe a little bit more challenging.
Marielle Berg
Which is trying to send loving kindness to someone you’re angry with. And we suggest that you don’t pick the person in your life that you are most angry with, or who has hurt you the most, because it’s going to be really hard. So if you’re new to this picking someone who there’s a more mild anger or annoyance or frustration with. Just to see what it’s like to actually in your mind, send someone who you’re angry with well wishes. And this is where the Opposite Action comes in. So you get to experiment with being a little kind to someone that you’re angry with, at least in your head.
Ed Fowler
Right.
Ed Fowler
And with most of our practice of skills in Interpersonal Effectiveness, we encourage people not to pick the person that you have the hardest time with, because that is, if you start with the biggest stretch not necessarily going to be really effective. So starting with someone that that you have some frustration with. And then see what do you notice?
Ed Fowler
And when we do this in group, oftentimes people will say like, I definitely noticed, feeling different, feeling more open, having more understanding for that person. So that this practice can really shift the way we feel towards someone else. And when we do this in group, there’s always experiences where people say, no, actually, I just couldn’t do it, it was too hard, it was too much of a stretch. So you play with it.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. And that might be because you’ve picked someone who you really are not, there’s been too much hurt or boundary crossing where it’s not the right time or place to wish them well. Then try to pick someone who’s a little less charged. And what people I know from my self I’ve noticed is that when I try this, there’s a softening of the anger, it doesn’t mean that everything they did is okay, or I’m excusing behavior that may have hurt me, but there’s a there’s a softening of the of the edges or the intensity of the emotion.
Ed Fowler
And again, I think it gets into that balance of acceptance and change that is a huge dialectical focus in DBT. And so, you know, practicing Loving Kindness towards someone that we’re frustrated with, is really focusing more on the acceptance side of things. And like when we talk about Radical Acceptance in Distress Tolerance, being able to have more acceptance can open up more possibilities around change. So we may be able to have more clarity about how to deal with the frustrations by starting with developing and cultivating a little bit of acceptance. So just focusing on that side isn’t saying that we won’t try to change the things that frustrate us. We’re putting that off until later. We’ll consider that later. Right now, we’re just focusing on this loving kindness meditation and seeing what happens.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And then next level, the final level is sending it to yourself. So may I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. And so I’ve repeated this several times here, because what we want is for people to kind of memorize these. So you can just sort of repeat them over and over. And you’ll get it if you if you, with some practice, of course.
Marielle Berg
And at least the way I was originally taught to do this was to wait to send it to myself before I practice in all these different ways, sending it to a neutral person, sending it to someone I love to, sending it to someone I was angry with, and then sending it to myself. Because for so many people, sending this loving kindness, as we talked about in the beginning of this episode, being self compassionate, being kind, being gentle with ourselves, can be the most challenging. And you can contrast it when you try to send it to yourself, the difference between when you send it to someone that you love, where there’s a real heart opening experience, very often, when you send it yourself, it can feel really uncomfortable.
Ed Fowler
And when when we do this exercise in our groups, there are always numerous people after we practice sending the loving kindness to ourselves, who say that was really hard, I really struggled with that. And so you may find that when you practice this yourself, that you also find, like, wow, I didn’t realize how hard it is for me to actually send kindness to myself and, and cultivate openness and caring towards myself. And that’s helpful information to have, even though that can be disconcerting.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and so don’t be discouraged if you find that, because it is, you know, it happens with some regularity. So it’s in some ways, it’s to be expected. If you don’t struggle with it. Fabulous. But if you do, watch the judgments, or the self criticism that you might pile on, like, I can’t even send myself loving kindness, right?
Ed Fowler
And that’s the advantage when we do this in group, is that people are able to hear oh, I’m not the only one who struggles with this and can take it more as like a ha, isn’t that interesting? I guess maybe I want to work on this as opposed to see, you can’t even do loving kindness. Right? Which is really the opposite of what we’re going for here.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And so just as you would wish all this for someone you love or care about you’re you’re wishing yourself well. And as I said earlier, this can be very soothing. So I think of it as a Distress Tolerance skill, if you can kind of repeat these phrases to yourself as a mantra. And for some people, it’s their primary meditation practice. So some other things that might make it difficult to send yourself loving kindness or to be self compassionate, in general is a sense of, I don’t deserve it. And so that language of deserving is usually not effective, it’s a moving target. And I wonder, like, who, who’s assessing that?
Ed Fowler
Right? According to who, do I not deserve this?
Marielle Berg
And to bring us back to what we talked about earlier, someone we love, our good friend deserves it. Like, why are we less than?
Ed Fowler
And I think if we, if you do notice that that is a barrier that for you, I don’t deserve this, to just have a stance of putting that to the side and trying the loving kindness to see what happens, to see if that changes, maintaining a little bit of openness. From the perspective of like, we, we, whether we want to or not, we do need to have a relationship with ourselves. We are with ourselves all day, every day. And so if I am struggling with openness to myself, whether I deserve it or not, maybe I can put that to the side and try to practice and see what happens.
Ed Fowler
The other thing I would say is that oftentimes, if you’re really struggling to develop the self compassion, you’re probably not going to be able to do it on your own. And you will need help from a therapist or a friend or a trusted loved one, to help you work on this. And, you know, come to terms with and confront the ways that you’re holding yourself back from that openness to yourself.
Marielle Berg
Yes, that’s this is a process and if you have a lifetime of being harsh to yourself, then it’s going to it’s going to take time to build a different kind of internal dialogue. And often we treat ourselves the way we were treated. So if you were raised with a lot of criticism, or punishment, or invalidation, then of course you’re gonna grow up and treat yourself in a similar way.
Ed Fowler
And I think one of the things that can help with that you is basically, you know, trying to understand and recognize that very often when caretakers are harsh. And then when we take that on and we are harsh with ourselves, it’s from a place of trying to motivate, of wanting to protect of, you know, wanting safety, and thinking that harshness is the most effective way to create safety. When again, as we’ve discussed, it often is not. And so rather than judging it, just noticing it, acknowledging it. Yep, I grew up in a harsh environment, I’ve taken on harshness towards myself. It is what it is, probably done to try to help, but is not helping so much right now. What can I do to move forward?
Marielle Berg
Yeah, I’m thinking of the question you say, Ed, that you ask people when they talk about motivating themselves through criticism, which is like, how is that working? Because if we don’t question it, we just think it is, or that’s the only way to do it.
Ed Fowler
And again, I think that in DBT, we hold effectiveness as the, the standard we’re going for, as opposed to good or bad deserving or undeserving. So rather than the question of do I deserve to be open with myself, the question of is it effective to prioritize criticism or harshness? And if it’s not, then what are some other possibilities, loving kindness, self compassion, those are some options to try.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And even though it can be so challenging in the beginning, what I find is, you know, this comes up in our groups is that people often come back to the skill over and over. And actually, as we’re talking, I’m remembering that years ago, when I first started teaching DBT, this was not a skill I regularly taught, because I was following along, and Marsha Linehan’s manual, and there’s so much to get to, we don’t have a lot of time. And so that wasn’t one of the ones that was like that was absolutely necessary. She had marked off certain skills, like absolutely, you must cover and this was more of an optional one. And there was never just time to get to it.
Marielle Berg
And I remember I had a week in skills group where I think it was maybe before the holidays, and it didn’t make sense to start a whole new module, because we were going to have like a three week break. And I thought, let me try this skill, because I had my own experience with practicing Loving Kindness. And I said, let me let me teach this to the group. And I was just sort of amazed, as you know, in the months following, how many times when we did check in about other skills that people were using, or what they were relying on to help themselves, how it came up over and over. And I thought this is something I want the people that we work with, to to get on a regular basis. I want everyone to be exposed to this, I think it can be so beneficial, even though it can be challenging.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, I do think that when, when people give this skill a shot, and try the Loving Kindness practice, they often find that there is an impact. And again, we offered those four categories of sending Loving Kindness: someone neutral, someone you care for someone you’re frustrated with and yourself. And usually people find that not every single one of those four is meaningful to them. Usually people find at least one of those is like, oh, wow, that was powerful, I felt something, that shifted something. So giving this a shot, I think often gives people an opportunity to to add a skill that can be really useful.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And maybe let’s just talk about another objection or two or common objections that we hear, in case listeners are thinking this as they’re kind of following along. And one is some variation of it’s selfish, selfish to like spend time, wishing good things for myself. And I think that actually, being kind to ourselves can help us show up more fully for others. Like the softer we are, the more patient and loving we are with ourselves. And again, don’t confuse softness with means that we don’t work hard, we don’t motivate ourselves. But I think it has the potential to make us more kind, caring, and forgiving with others.
Ed Fowler
I think that when, when I am being really hard on myself and impatient with myself, I tend to be more impatient with others. When I cultivate patience and openness and kindness towards myself, I feel that more easily towards the others as well. And so it could be kind of selfish, to not do this. Not cultivate openness, because it does impact so much in our lives.
Marielle Berg
And many folks have been raised with the value of being kind to others. And in that equation often isn’t being kind to ourselves or that can be viewed as too self focus. So I’m glad that we kind of turned it on its head a little bit to think about how if that’s a value for you, being kind with others, that this can be a side effect.
Ed Fowler
I think about the quote unquote golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And I think that the inverse can also be helpful of do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. Yeah, I like that.
Ed Fowler
Because we would not, most people do not like when other people are really super critical and trying to motivate through harshness. It doesn’t feel good. So if I wouldn’t do it to others, and I wouldn’t like it, if they did it to me, why would I keep doing that with myself? If I would really appreciate some loving kindness in people’s approach to me, maybe that’s what I want to approach myself with.
Ed Fowler
So when thinking about how to actually do this, as Marielle said, you have the four statements, may you or I be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease. And just finding a quiet space to just kind of go inward, either closing your eyes or looking down so that your attention is within rather than around the room around you. And just taking a couple of minutes, I think it oftentimes can be helpful to set a little alarm for maybe two minutes, or three minutes, or one minute or 30 seconds, depending on your tolerance, or 10 seconds, right? Whatever is going to be effective for you. And just like repeat those four sentences, or some other kind of mantra of kindness and openness that you create for yourself, and just repeat it and sit with it. And notice what what you feel as you do that.
Marielle Berg
Great. Thank you so much.
Ed Fowler
Yeah, thank you.
Marielle Berg
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. To learn more, or if you’re in the Bay Area and want to get started with therapy, you can find us online at bayareadbtcc.com. That’s bayareadbtcc.com.