Postitive Self Statement Backfire

A while back I purchased the book, "The Complex PTSD Workbook", by Arielle Schwartz, PHD. I worked through the first two chapters previously, then took a break from it. I started Chapter 3 Sunday and was working on it some more last night after work.

Basically, it covers a topic and then gives you an exercise to complete and then you journal about it. Chapter 3 is about Healing Avoidance Symptoms.

One exercise is about coming up with a positive term about yourself and then repeating it several times. A suggested term was, "I love myself just as I am this moment", but it recommending coming up with your own statement. I thought that statement was a bit to strong for me so I came up with, "I love myself even though I can't handle life". I started repeating it, and after repeating it several times realized, I had inadvertently changed the term to "I hate myself even though I can't handle life".

I think I have a lot of work to do....that kind of put me into a funk because after that I couldn't get any positives out of what I was doing. So I went to sleep.

Well you are just starting. Don't be so hard on yourself, it's something new and it may take some time to get that thought to be comfortable enough to say without questioning it. I also have that workbook. Got it right before I started the PE therapy so I never started it. Seeing this T is more than enough for me right now. But from what I did see in it ..it looks more fitting for CPTSD than the PTSD workbook did. That was a total waste for me.
We all have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid it's going to be work until the day we die. Maybe not as hard but hopefully we will get to a place where we can function with a occasional tune ups from the T.

Yeah -- I found the whole thing strangely ironic though. It's amazing what ways our minds finds to torture us, and how exhausting it is to control and change it.

Affirmations rarely worked out for me. Challenging deep-seated beliefs through positive affirmations didn't make a dent in making my brain user friendly.

Healing from CPTSD is a complex work, affirmations alone won't work, at least for me. As much as we want to make our brains user friendly, the body needs to heal too. Bessel recommends Yoga classes and stretching as a way to bring more relaxation to your body by making the Para-sympathetic nervous system/sympathetic nervous system work in a more balanced way. I'm just starting with Yoga classes and I think they are an important work too. Pete Walker recommends somatic healing in his book too, but I didn't think yoga could actually helps reducing our chronic stress, but it actually does.

Try to go to Yin warm yoga classes and see if you can benefit from them.

I'm doing more than just this one exercise. Guided meditation is something else I'm trying as well as self guided meditation. I'm really just testing the waters, trying to find things that help me control my anxiety and stress. Yoga is a good recommendation, I'll need to look into that.

(((safe hug))) Self-help books are not to be done alone IMO when dealing with PTSD. A T needs to help you through this stuff, it's tough.

I think perhaps, and I could be wrong, that your initial statement included a negative...and it was at the end of the statement... so your brain kept that part : I can't handle life ...and then the other negative came back onboard.

If we think of RIGHT NOW, RIGHT THIS SECOND... we can love ourselves... why? Because we are "only" sitting and typing... and there's nothing inherently wrong with that... and we aren't bad for that...and we are here to give and get support and those are good things...so we're doing good and we can love ourselves for doing good right now!

Soooooo you could maybe possibly say I like myself right now! and agree with it?

Maybe that is the real message you have deep in your mind when it comes to yourself. That is something that you need help with understanding better. Often our inner critic is coming from the messages we got growing up where a parent/adult authority figure/ and even siblings or piers encouraged us to think badly about ourselves.

Dealing with others is a big part of our lives. When we are subjected to negative messages at an early age, that becomes a "voice" that can stay with us our entire lives. Part of our "healing" journey is discovering the source of that voice and finding our way towards slowly correcting that and that is helped a great deal if we experience a therapist that can have the ability to see it with us and add a positive caring voice instead of that old negative voice that we carried around that "hurt" us and encouraged us to continue self criticizing rather than self nurturing.

I agree to some extent. The exercise had a canned statement that I thought was too strong for me and it recommended coming up with your own. I looked at this statement as a neutral statement I think.

This is 100% correct. My father was horrible. I never remember him saying anything nice to me. It may have happened, but I don't remember it. Most of my memories are of verbal and physical abuse of my mother, brothers and sisters and I. He told me he hated me many times. Actually told isn't correct, he screamed it at me. My first memory of this was when I was 7 or 8.

I am sorry you experienced that reb. Often what someone like that is really saying is how much they don't want to "love and appreciate". This typically comes from their own history and negative messages their parents handed them. Unfortunately bad parenting, abuse and neglect tend to be handed down from one generation to the next.

It's hard to get rid of the negative messages our parents or siblings or other adult authority figures imprinted in our minds.

I do know that my father was horribly abused by his father. I've think he was severe BPD and NPD. I made a promise to myself at an early age, that when I had children that I would not do the same, that I would break the cycle. I was successful with my daughter in that respect, but unfortunately I suspect I wasn't always there for her emotionally.

I'm sure you did everything you possibly could for her. I ordered that CEN book and it talks about breaking that cycle. We are just human though, we will make mistakes. Since CEN is not a real obvious thing to most people it's probably hard to detect and fix yourself without education and help. We survived and we will do better by others, that's the best we can do with that.

Have you been over to the new Childhood Emotional Neglect forum? I jump between there and here.

I've been there some, not a lot.

It's very hard to always be "there" emotionally for another individual, even when it comes to one's own child. This is especially true once a child is exposed to others in school, on the bus, and get hurt in ways they simply don't share with a parent.

I think "now" it's even harder in that our children are so much more exposed because of the technology we have now that can make them even more accessible.