What’s Your Relationship Like With Yourself?

Think about the most important relationships in your life. When they are going well, how are you talking to that person? Are they are priority in your life — time, energy, money, etc. Do you treat them with love and respect? How do you treat yourself? Are you kind, considerate and supportive or harsh, critical and demanding? Imagine, for a moment what it would look like to come alongside of yourself, as a good friend would. Some might think it just sounds ridiculous to work on your self-talk and your relationship with yourself. “That’s weird!” Well — isn’t it weird to trash talk, demean and spew hateful verbiage toward yourself?

Here’s some ideas to work on to befriend yourself.

1. Pay attention to your self-talk. We can become so unaware of our self-talk that it just tumbles through our minds and even out our mouths in the most careless of ways. Sometimes it’s good when we verbally speak it because it may catch our attention as to how mean or unhelpful it is. Or we might find ourselves agreeing with the negative rash of words. The bottom line is we can’t change it until we are aware of it. Start by just putting a stop to the negative, trash talk. No bashing of you!
2. Consider how you would treat someone you care about. How would you want to treat the ones you care most about? I would hope the consideration you would extend to those you love would include kindness, thoughtfulness and support for their well-being. What would it look like to share that same consideration for yourself?
3. What would keep you invested in not changing the relationship you have with yourself? Would it feel wrong to develop a positive relationship with yourself — like it’s not okay to do? Whatever keeps you stuck in this pattern, it doesn’t need to continue. Just as you can work on becoming a better friend to others, you can learn to be a better friend to yourself.

There is much written on the topic of self-compassion by Kristen Neff and other researchers. Listen to a podcast. Read a book on the topic. Practice being kind and compassionate towards yourself and see how it pays off. It is definitely worth the investment to work on improving your relationship with yourself.