By Priscilla Pittman, MSW, MA
Opinionator…Wow! The computer doesn’t like that word. But we all have opinions don’t we. This time of year we only seem to hear political opinions and unless we have the time to do a fact check we may turn a deaf ear to those as well.
A number of caregivers confess a family member focuses on criticizing everything they do, and inevitably they are the only family member providing care. Being a caregiver is a difficult task and then adding additional negativity makes it twice as difficult.
Sometimes it is the care-recipient providing the negativity. It is best to take this criticism and convert it into a distraction or a positive remark. With a little practice, some caregivers have become pretty good at returning the verbal jabs.
Being positive in the face of constant verbal adversity is good self-care, but this type of resilience takes practice. We often are critical of ourselves and it seems we continue to replay the same negative remarks and often in advance of a situation and predicting our failure.
Zig Ziglar cautions us, “The most influential person who will talk to you all day is you, so you should be very careful about what you say to you.”
What we say to ourselves will determine our success at what we attempt, every day. Unfortunately, more than 75% of what we say is negative programming that works against us.
Our brain does not care where the programming comes from or how it arrives, and it will continue to accept information fed to it by you and others including the pictures, feelings, thoughts and judgments we make about ourselves and others.
You may have had someone you considered an authority figure tell you, you are stupid, you are useless, etc. You may even be replaying programming from your childhood.
Your wonderful brain is a powerful computer system, and will do all in its power to help you live out the programs saved in your subconscious mind.
If we pay attention to the things we think and say, we can reprogram our brain by replacing the negative thoughts and words with those that are positive.
It pays to be more aware of the things we tell ourselves. In fact, Ben Martin with psychcentral.com, believes we need to question some of our mental activity and, replace some reflections with more reasonable thoughts.
He suggests:
- Reality testing to examine the evidence for and against our thinking
- Alternative ways to look at a situation
- Examining the situation and our perspective; is it as bad as I believe it to be?
- Utilizing goal-directed thinking and learning from each situation a better way to do it next time
Challenge negative self talk with him at: http://psychcentral.com/lib/challenging-negative-self-talk/0003196
A closing thought: When negativity comes into our mind it brings a folding chair. If we pay attention it might buy a recliner.
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