I would never speak to someone else like that

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 120

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A really common phrase that I hear from people is "I wouldn't speak to anybody else the way that I speak to myself" and I bet at least eleven pence that that might have been something that you've said in your time if you're listening to this.

And I just wanted to unpack that a little bit and try and work out why some of this stuff is so that you can stop telling yourself not only that you're getting something wrong, but also using it as a sort of extra weapon to bully yourself about why you're not doing your own self-care work "right" And the reality is that it is so much easier to see your friends and other people around you without the cloud of socialisation that we've been taught about what people need to do or to be in order to be acceptable, safe, to be someone that you want to be around, just generally worthy of taking up space.

We have this voice in our head that tells us that we have a particular remit of things that we need to achieve or be, or do, or especially look like, in order to be worthy of love, safety and care. And I would love to tiptoe the idea towards you, that perhaps the voice in your head is not only not true, but also that it's not yours. The reason why these messages can be so different is because when we look at the people that we love, we can see with clarity that they deserve to take up space, that they deserve happiness, that they deserve safety, and that they don't need to do anything in order to be worthy of any of that stuff. And frankly, when we're talking to ourselves like this, we're not showing ourselves as much love and compassion.

The way we speak to ourselves is all about how we've been taught that we must have this scale of things, this frankly endless scale of things that must be achieved before we're allowed to be worthy of love. And for all of the people that we love already, that scale doesn't exist. It just is. Your friends exist, you love them. That's probably just about where it stops. There isn't a tick list of things that they need to do in order to be fulfilling any particular role, in order for you to just think that they're allowed to be human. And sometimes that's allowed to be human with mistakes.

But for us, we don't allow ourselves the same kind of grace. We don't cut ourselves the same kind of slack. And that is because we are measuring ourselves against a scale that is impossible to fulfill. And it also highlights to ourselves where frankly, we could do with showing ourselves a little bit more love and compassion.

I want to just tiptoe the idea this week that you could choose actively to treat it like a little game of exploration:"What would your life look like if you believed that you were as worthy of love as you believe your friends to be? As you believe the people in your life that you love to be? Do you believe your pets to be?" They are probably not doing anything for you other than laying around and snoring and eating and causing you to sort out all of their toiletry needs. What would your life look like? Not if you bullied yourself because you're not saying the right thing or the you don't treat yourself in the same way you treat other people.

But if you did just approach your life like you were worthy of taking up space, like you're worthy of existing just because you exist, and you could treat that as a little experiment this week, and then next week, if you prefer bullying yourself and telling yourself that you have to do a whole lot of things in order to be worthy of love, you can always go back to it. And perhaps this week you could just dabble in the idea that maybe, just maybe, if you spoke to yourself the same way that you speak to the people that you love, that life might feel a little bit lighter and it might feel a little bit more loving and you might have a lot more to give to yourself and to those that you love.

If you do decide to dabble in this, I'd love to hear how you get on with it. Do drop me an email or message me on social media. I'd love to hear how you get on. Good luck with it all. I'll speak to you next week.