I have been starting to do more positive self talk this week.

Just to myself, in my head.

I’ve been really trying to tell myself that I’m a good person.

And I deserve to take care of myself.

That I don’t have to do much of anything to be nice to myself.

I just need to retrain myself.

But it’s really, really tough.

Retraining my mind is not as simple as it sounds.

I have hated myself for so long that negative self talk has become a habit.

A really, really, really shitty habit.

After all, why would I pamper or even take care of something I hate, like myself?

But I realized very recently that I have got to break that fucking pattern if I really want to survive.

And the romantic relationships I found myself in over the years didn’t help that negative self talk.

My ex-husband was a drunk and a mean one at that.

So a lot of the negative shit I tell myself, he told me too.

Which created this hole in my heart when I left him.

I no longer considered myself to be worthy of love, or to even be capable of it.

I had to find my worth by myself after leaving him.

He would yell at me that I was unlovable.

That I took advantage of everyone around me.

And that I was a piece of shit.

I’m not blaming him for my self-talk issues.

I’m saying it didn’t help.

At all.

It really made things way worse for me.

We were toxic for one another.

And I took responsibility for myself by leaving him.

But the main voice I remember hearing for the first year or so after leaving my ex, was his.

It was his voice still belittling me and making me feel awful in my head, even after I left.

The hallucinations really gripped me when I left him.

I knew something was going on, and I knew I needed to get healthier and get help because things were getting scary.

But in reality, I’ve been mean to myself my entire life.

I’ve never thought I was good enough for much.

I always called myself a piece of shit in my head.

My go-to phrasing was usually calling myself a dumb bitch.

And I believed it.

I believed it so much that I married a mean drunk.

I thought that’s what I deserved.

That was the best I could get.

I have dated guys that were abusive too.

It was my destiny, at least it felt like.

Screaming matches.

Me getting belittled or laughed at.

I thought these horrible ways I was being treated were justified.

That’s how I felt about myself, so obviously everyone feels the same way and I should be treated as the trash that I am.

I also thought these men were the best I could get.

I didn’t think there was a pattern to break.

I just thought, this is what I get.

But today, I know that’s not what I deserve.

I deserve someone who’s patient, loving and kind.

I was talking with one of my online friends about this the other day and that’s what really prompted this entry.

They said I should speak to myself as if I were speaking to a friend.

Yes! That’s it!

And I have heard that before, but it just now registered in me.

Maybe I am ready for it now.

Maybe it makes more sense now that I’m able to step back and see a bigger picture and break some of these negatively ingrained habits.

Because it’s awful that hating on myself has become my go-to.

It’s not okay.

And it’s sad that I’m just able to realize this now, but later is better than never in regards to pretty much everything.

Because negative self talk has taken over me for far too many years now.

The ideas I had of myself are slowly changing.

And I need to reflect my new outlook on life in my self talk.

I abuse myself with it really.

When it comes down to it, it’s a form of self harm.

And I’ve been working really hard on not physically self harming, but the self talk has a long way to go.

But I imagine it takes time to rewrite the entire brain and have positive self talk become a habit.

But, I’ve started the process.

Hopefully it’ll just keep plugging along.

I know I’ll have times where I feel like I need to hate on myself, but I’m hoping that gets gentler with time too.

– Keren