Kicking Negative Self-Talk

Listen to your Self-Talk

Write down what you are saying to yourself. Take a close look at what you are telling yourself every day. You’ll have both positive and negative self-talk, we all do. I think that’s pretty normal. But let’s learn to keep the positive and edit the negative talk to a positive, healthy one.

What’s going on over and over in your head? I know for me personally, I was always made fun of as a kid and teenager. Let me just say that the skinny girl gets made fun of too. I was about 5’5” and barely weighed 100 pounds soaking wet all through high school. I was told if I stick out my tongue and turn sideways I’d look like a zipper. I was called ugly, long legs, freak and creature from the lagoon (I gotta say it didn’t help that my last name was Creech, either). I was even told that I wouldn’t ever find a man to marry unless I paid him. The people that said these things were ones I thought were my friends and some even members of my own family. It hurt! I remember laughing at it because I didn’t know how to handle it, but it hurt. 

These things played over and over in my head like a broken record. I allowed them to dictate how I saw myself for years. Even now, many years later, I find it difficult to accept a compliment. Someone says my hair is pretty and my response is something like “Oh, it is so frizzy and really needs to be washed”. They compliment my dress and I tell them how I found it on sale for $10 at Walmart. I’m still working on a simple “Thank you”.

See, I don’t think of myself as pretty at all. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think “Man this would be such a cute outfit if it had some else’s face with it”. I know that’s not positive, but I’m just being honest.

Proverbs 23:7 says “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…”

We need to be careful what we think of ourselves. Trust me, I know how easy it is to let what others say about you replay in your head and to even jump on the ‘bash yourself bandwagon’. I think of Vivian in the movie Pretty Woman; she said “The bad things are easier to believe.” Isn’t that the truth?!? It’s so much easier to believe that “I am fat and ugly” than to say “I am curvy and unique”.  I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that I was pretty until my husband (and I didn’t even have to pay him). 😉

I love this scripture and we see so many pictures with it, along with pictures of babies in the womb. But it’s talking about much more than the baby, a couple of verses down it says.. “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect…” I am so glad that God sees my substance (what I can be) even if it isn’t perfect. So he took a broken, abused, unwanted little girl and said “I love YOU and I see something special in YOU. I created YOU for a purpose.”

We’re born beautiful, perfect babies (just ask any new parent or grandparent) and as we grow we sometimes take on things that we’re ashamed of, we do things that we wish we could go back and change. We make mistakes and we mess up! I don’t see things the way Jesus sees them. I see the mistakes, the hurtful words and the hateful actions but He sees His creation. He sees what He created us to be. He sees something in me that I don’t see in myself. His arms are wide open for us to run to Him as a child runs to their father. I am so thankful that He sees us as He made us “perfectly and wonderfully made”.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof”. Proverbs 18:21 The Living Bible says it like this: “Those who love to talk will suffer the consequences. Men have died for saying the wrong thing!”

WOW! That’s Power! We need to be careful what we say (especially to ourselves). Lord, help me to speak positive things into my life and into the lives of my family, friends, church and all those that I come in contact with.