Weekly Support & Downloadable Resources for
Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse
SELF-TALK OnePage
Almost all of us carry on an internal dialogue with ourselves throughout the day. We talk to ourselves about not just who we are
and how we’re behaving in the world, but what we think of people and situations we encounter. How we talk to ourselves and
what we say has a remarkably significant impact on how we view ourselves and the world. For this reason, it’s important
that our self-talk be as honest, reasonable and positive as possible. What we say to ourselves is a direct reflection of what we think about ourselves and the world – in other words, the value we
place upon both of those things. If we love ourselves we speak to ourselves in a positive way and we see the world as a good
place to exist within. But, if we think negatively of ourselves we will tell ourselves bad things about ourselves and we’ll label
the world such things as “terrible”, “scary” and “a horrible place to live”. Unfortunately, for survivors of childhood abuse, our abusers groomed us to feel badly about ourselves. If we felt badly about
ourselves than we were less likely to resist the abuse, reach out to anyone and report the abuse (because if we’re bad then
we must deserve it), or even seek out friends. Instead we endured and felt the abuse was our fault.
This grooming sticks with us into adulthood in the form of negative and critical self-talk. Long after we’ve ceased hearing our
abuser talking in front of us we hear them talking in our head. We hear the put downs, the judgments and the disgust or
disdain. We hear their opinions about the world and the catastrophizing that everything is going to turn into hell on earth when
the slightest difficulty occurs.
Learning how to speak to ourselves with kindness and compassion will remarkably change both how we see ourselves and the
world around us. It will change our attitude, our perspective and our hope that we will recover. For this reason, it’s so
important that we focus on making our self-talk as healthy as possible. To improve your self-talk use these tips and strategies: n Follow the strategy of “See it. Stop it. Change it.” to change your self-talk. Become aware of your negative self-talk. Stop it.
Replace it with healthy self-talk. n Be patient. Positive self-talk can feel like a foreign language at first. The transition from negative to healthy self-talk will
be slow and take practice. n Pick small ways to start. Change one small piece of your self-talk at a time. n Self-talk is NOT about convincing yourself that the world is rainbows and kittens, but about seeing things realistically
instead of through the lens of your abuser. It’s telling ourselves “I am feeling sad today, but I am still okay” rather than “Today
I’m going to feel wonderful all day and seize every opportunity that comes my way”. n Self-talk isn’t just about our view of ourselves, but our view of our situation and experience. Negative assessments of our
circumstances can become self-sabotaging. Saying “This is a hard situation” is very different from saying “This is terrible. I’m
doing awful. I’m never going to be able to face this.” n If you can’t think of positive ways to speak about yourself —ask your safe, support team for help.
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