“Talk to me like I’m someone you love…”
This saying is something my husband and I use when one of us is approaching the other in an agitated state. It’s something we started doing some years ago. We got married young, we had no clue what a healthy marriage looked like, so we spent the early years of our marriage struggling to connect or disagree in a healthy manner. The saying is actually a book by Nancy Dreyfus, and while I don’t remember ever reading it, I may have, or I may have simply heard the saying and considered it worth holding on to. This saying has ended a lot of potential fights before they gained enough momentum to spiral in a negative direction. It’s our stop sign. A reminder that whatever is happening, we are on the same team and love each other.
For us it’s a reminder, a calm, gentle reminder that our approach in a specific moment is less than desirable! Ego leaves quickly with this reminder. The need to be right or place blame loses it’s steam. We take a moment to reset, to start again, this time we approach the situation with love. The moment of reset allowing us to reconsider what and how we are saying something.
It is easy, in the day to day, in the moments of frustration, the flashes of anger, to put aside love and move in a way that doesn’t get us the results we truly desire. When we put aside the frustration and anger, the blame and the hurt, we are often left with lost opportunities for connection. One of our most basic needs, according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, is love and belonging. When this need is not met, we feel that loss of connection deeply and may try to protect ourselves and to reach out to the other person but from that place of hurt we so often fail to create what we want most and instead our approach has the opposite effect, leaving us with another lost opportunity for connection.
Talk to me like I’m someone you love is a mantra, a reminder, a push towards approaching with love and kindness and the benefit of believing that the intention was not to harm or hurt.
Recently, I was reminded that this saying can be applied to our self-talk. It’s easy to be reminded to be kind to others, but so often, we are not kind to ourselves in our self-talk. This can stem from many things, but in the end our mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s really said and what’s thought. We manage to hurt our own feelings with our thoughts, and we certainly damage our mental well-being when we are unkind to ourselves in our internal dialogues. Too frequently we approach ourselves with thoughts that are not very kind, with thoughts that lack the amount of grace we might give to a stranger. Why are we so mean to ourselves?
I have a friend who always gives me the sweetest reminder, when I say something mean about myself out loud. She responds by saying “Don’t talk about my friend Patty that way!” She is great at reminding me to talk kindly to myself. We are all our own biggest critics but in the same way we would approach someone we love when something doesn’t go the way they had hoped or when they stumble or make a mistake, remind yourself each day that you are worth talking to like you are someone that you love!
When you inevitably forget to do that, in a moment of frustration with yourself, and the negative self-talk begins change the script and use my friends line “Don’t talk about my friend that way!” Be kind to yourself. Life is hard. People may not always be kind to you - be kind to yourself and talk to yourself like you’re someone that you love!
