Somewhere (or many places) in the work you will be doing at NCWW, you will be urged to become increasingly aware of your self-talk system. This is because the manner in which people talk to themselves so fiercely impacts attitude and behavior. This is crucial in the fundamental weight management factor of motivation. People who are able to sustain the enduring, positive motivation that is essential for long-term, positive weight management speak to themselves in an affirming, empathic and encouraging manner. Adjusting/improving your self-talk is also fundamental to so many of the issues we consider in Treatment Issues. A valuable treatment for perfectionism, for example, is developing affirming, empathic and encouraging self-talk. The same is true for the deepest level of the treatment of emotional eating. In this regard, improving your self-talk is one of those things that improves many, many things - it is thereby enormously well worth doing. What you will learn from attachment theory is: a) that your self-talk system is most often an internal representation of the sort of talking to or talking with you - with the dynamics you had with your major attachment figures. c) that to change your self-talk system, you need to know what you would want your self-talk to be d) that it is advisable for the new self-talk system to resemble what securely attached people have going on Basically, this means talking to yourself in a manner that is self-affirming - in a way that acknowledges with respect and tender empathy what you are thinking, feeling and wanting; and in a way that is encouraging - in a way that suggests that with careful, solid attention, you will be able to positively cope with whatever it is that is of concern. So working at this from an attachment perspective has a great deal of merit. Some people find it helpful to launch self-talk change initiatives in the form of speaking to themselves in almost the manner one would use if I speaking to a child (on a "good-parenting" day)! Try it! It may feel a little silly at first, but if you are like most people, once you get the hang of it, you will most assuredly like it - lots. And as I say, it is bedrock for progress with quite a number of the treatment issues we study in this class. An important second dimension of this work concerns self-compassion. To link it with attachment theory, I would say that one way to synthesize the lucky lot of the securely attached child is that they are brought experiencing credible and reliable compassion from their attachment figures. Consistent with what I've said above, then, that child goes on to internalize the compassion as self-compassion. And that becomes the foundation for the attentive, affirming, empathic and encouraging self-talk the lucky child enjoys. We are all about wanting to help you convert to self-compassion based secure self-talk. There is literature on both topics below. I think it is well worth taking some time going through it. |
