Sad Inner Monologues About Not Knowing Who You Are
Aren Cohen, MBA, MAPP '07 is a learning specialist working with academically, motivationally and emotionally challenged students in the leading private schools in New York City. Every bit shown in her website and weblog, Strengths for Students, Aren uses the tenets of positive psychology to teach her students to use their strengths of character to alter educational challenges into educational triumphs. Full bio. Aren's manufactures are here.
Also Many Voices
Too Many Internal Voices?
This week, one of my favorite television programs ended. I am a footling bit embarrassed that as a positive psychologist, I took real pleasure in watching The United States of Tara, a show about a woman with dissociative identity disorder (DID), more than commonly known as multiple personality disorder. How could I find a show nigh mental disease so compelling? Isn't there something contradictory for a positive psychologist to enjoy a tv set show that examines (and perhaps fifty-fifty romanticizes) a blazon of mental affliction? Maybe. But ane of the things I loved virtually Toni Collette'south Emmy-laurels winning portrait of Tara was her effectiveness at creating the many different voices and personalities of Tara's various identities. Each of them provided a dissimilar inner monologue for Tara, and each 1 was a protective coping mechanism that allowed her (and her very damaged self) to operate (admitting not very well) in the real earth. But what struck me the about was this very fact. To survive, this character had to have many different versions of her inner phonation.
Sometimes I is More than Enough
Thankfully, the bulk of us accept only one inner monologue that narrates our globe. Nosotros use language in two ways. Language is a tool for outward expression—how we communicate with others— but it is also the tool past which we empathise and explain to ourselves the earth around us. We accept our ain personal conversation translating events and circumstances constantly. I suppose information technology could exist argued that this inner monologue is "wordless," just information technology does seem to take on the language that nosotros apply in communicating with others. Guy Deutscher points this in his Baronial 29, 2010 New York Times Magazine article:
"If dissimilar languages influence our minds in dissimilar ways, this is not considering of what our linguistic communication allows usa to think only rather because of what it habitually obliges united states of america to think well-nigh."
Also, it is of import to note that the voice inside us tends to be "thinking" (ie. supposedly rational or logical) rather than "feeling." All of u.s. accept this constant monologue of chatter running in our head. How do our perspectives and languages habituate our inner monologue? Does the voice cull a fixed mindset ("You are the way you lot are, and you can't actually change it.) or a growth mindset ("You lot can learn to exist and practise many things with plenty effort.") à la Dr. Carol Dweck? Do we tell ourselves, "I might fail if I do that?" or do we say, "Heck, that could be a great gamble." The inner voice reminds us of what we have to exercise and it evaluates how we perform. Oftentimes, our own self-talk is more judgmental than the appraisals of others. How oftentimes accept we heard someone admit (or even admitted to ourselves), "I am my ain toughest critic?"
Dr. Aaron Brook
Our inner monologues shape our psychology as much every bit, if not more than, our outward language. Aaron T. Beck, the "male parent" of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), understood this. Freudian theory suggested that a patient needed to revisit and discuss trauma, but it was Beck who understood that creating new behaviors to combat thoughts, feelings, and behaviors acquired by trauma was the only style to help an analysand improve and recover. New behaviors, however, would only occur if the person's inner discourse could modify. In Positive Psychology, Drs. Martin Seligman and Karen Reivich accept popularized the ABCDE talking model (Adversity, Belief, Consequences, Disputation and Energization) to structure a process by which a person could work at retraining the path his inner monologue takes to combat negative beliefs. For an example of ABCDE in action, see Nick Hall's before PPND article, Is Feeling Better as Easy as ABC?
Steadying the Inner Monologue
Nosotros all have this inner monologue, and sometimes it is cracking and sometimes information technology is lousy. How best can we train our inner voices to be more loving, more supportive, more friendly, more forgiving, and more productive? Yes, talking cures like CBT and the ABCDE method have proven constructive, but perhaps in that location are other means that could too work. Many people turn to meditation to try to quiet, steady, or control their inner monologues.
Yoga
Like meditation, a good deal of enquiry exists on the importance of physical exercise on mental health. Sports psychologists, possibly more than than any other blazon of mental health professionals, assistance their patients modulate the inner monologue to achieve success and overcome setbacks. So, looking beyond the so-called "talking cures," what happens when you pair the inner monologue with concrete activity??
Inten-Sati
For over a year, I take wanted to write about my experience with a practise called Inten-Sati. I was introduced to Inten-Sati by two of other PPND authors, Emiliya Zhivotovskaya and Louis Alloro. At first glance, Inten-Sati is an practice class like any other. However, one time you experience its unique philosophy and methodology, y'all come to realize information technology is, in fact, quite an effective positive psychology intervention. Unlike sitting in a psychologist'southward function working methodically through the steps of CBT or ABCDE, personally I have found that Inten-Sati is a more physical and successful process for irresolute my frame of mind from one of doubt and criticism to 1 of health and confidence.
Martial Arts
Inten-Sati was created by a woman named Patricia Moreno, a fitness guru. I would draw Patricia more than as a spiritualist than psychologist. While I accept heard her reference self-help authors such every bit Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, (and Gandhi who said, "Exist the change you lot desire to encounter in the world"), I have not asked her if she is familiar with the works of Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, or Ed Diener. I exercise know that every time I leave her class, my outlook has changed, and I am more than apt to be productive and believe in my abilities to accomplish whatever I need to do.
Mind you, Inten-Sati is not a cult of worship around a group of charismatic leaders, although Patricia and other Inten-Sati instructors are lovely. Rather, because Inten-Sati is a combination of aerobics, yoga, and martial arts paired with positive affirmations, it becomes an hour where y'all move your body and your mind. Patricia has written nigh the do in her book The inten-Sati Method: 7 Principles to Thinner Peace. Each motion represents a state of being, such as enthusiasm, organized religion, willpower, and acceptance. When these exercises are put together in combinations, they are paired with catchy affirmations to affirm while performing the exercise series. Imagine being in a packed room of 30+ sweaty and energetic people moving to the beat and asserting, "I challenge myself to reach for something better. Yes! I will. It is my pleasure." I assure you information technology impossible to leave feeling grumpy.
Voice within
Other Means to Alter the Phonation
What the vox within of u.s. says to us informs everything we practise—how we attain for our goals, how we believe in ourselves, how we operate in the earth. In no way do I mean to imply that a single exercise class is the just means by which a person can identify or modify that vox.
Still, in that location is undoubtedly something compelling nigh combining physical action with blessing proclamations that seems to have a lasting bear upon on the angel or devil sitting on your shoulder. I suggest to fellow positive psychologists to keep investigating theses type of active interventions, ones that combine exercise with favorable personal manifestos, equally a way to assist shift the dialogue with the inner voice, actively combating any defeating self-talk it might want do. In my opinion, it is a very effective method to create an ongoing and essential conversation to keep the inner monologue hopeful, buoyant, and confident.
Images
As well many voices (Retentivity of a tree) courtesy of mugley
Dr. Aaron Brook from A Profile of Aaron Beck
Yoga courtesy of Dave Whelan
Martial arts courtesy of parhessiastes
Listening to the voice courtesy of Beverly and Pack
Source: https://positivepsychologynews.com/news/aren-cohen/2011062418341
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