Imagine yourself born as a Siamese twin. Conjoined at the hip, side, shoulder, maybe even at the head. Everywhere you want to walk, you have to tug, or force, or convince your attached sibling to come with you. Sometimes they win, sometimes you win, but it is a constant struggle.
Now imagine that your twin, which shares skin and organs and other vital parts, absolutely does not like you – at all. They will do everything they can to get you to fail, fall flat on your face, and publicly humiliate you. Everywhere you go, it goes too – mocking, hurling subtle insults, murmuring under its breath about how stupid you are, how ridiculous your dreams are, how ugly you are, how bad your decisions or ideas are, how incredibly inadequate that you are, questioning “Why did you say that?!”, and reminding you of every mistake you’ve ever made. It is a constant barrage of messages about how you are not good enough. This is what it is like to have shame and it is holding you back! It is preventing you from being the person that you were meant to be!
Recognizing the shame and constant negative self-talk is half the battle, but what do you do with it once you realize that your evil Siamese twin is needling you every time you turn around? Well, you’ve got to surgically remove that evil twin from yourself, and it is going to be a difficult procedure!
Think about it. You are used to it! It may not feel good, and you may want desperately for the negative self-talk to stop, but you are accustomed to it. It is like the Siamese twin attached since birth – you don’t know how to be without it! When someone loses a limb, they have phantom pain – feeling sensations in the limb that no longer exists. Removing the negative self-talk is much like this. We are so used to it being there that we feel like we’ve lost a big part of ourselves without it! We have to “grow” new, fresh parts where it was removed! That is why it is so hard to get rid of it!
To stop negative self-talk, we can’t just praise ourselves. It will never be enough to drown out the ever-present criticism. We have to begin delicately disentangling the evil twin from the person we want to be. We have to be able to look past the mistakes and see the good in us, no matter what. We have to love ourselves, despite our faults and failures. We have to give ourselves permission to error! In essence, we need to accept ourselves just as we are, mistakes and all, and learn to be kind to ourselves! The more we understand that we are human beings and were not meant to be perfect, the more we begin to know that we are worthy of love just the way that we are. The more that we believe this truth, the less the evil twin’s nasty tone will register with us and the more free we will feel. And without the evil twin constantly pulling us down, we might actually being to succeed!
Don’t let negative self-talk hold you back! I challenge you to write down what your evil Siamese twin is telling you about yourself for one whole week. You will be shocked and ready to remove it ASAP!
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