Most of my negative self talk is self-injurious in nature so I won’t trouble you further with the exact content, but I’ve had difficulty finding a good substitute because I have a pretty strong aversion to the more flowery language a lot of positive self-affirmations use, but I still wanted something that rolled off the tongue as well as poetry so it sticks in my head better.
I really like common meter (think “because I could not stop for death”) and it turns out you can easily get it out of chat gpt by asking for 14-syllable couplets in iambic pentameter with natural word order, then splitting the lines at the 8-syllable mark and mixing and matching as-needed with a little supplementary help from a thesaurus. I asked for a few different versions and after some mixing and matching I got to:
"You make mistakes but take a breath
and let your torment go.
Forgive yourself for stuff you did,
and things you didn't know."
…so I’m gonna give myself a good ol’ cognitive-behavioral thought restructuring and try to at least repeat it after each self-abusive thought, then hopefully be able to replace them entirely. I’ll let you all know how it goes, but I wanted to share in case any of you wanted to try it with me!
That is an interesting and cool idea. Curious about how it goes!
Since you were nice enough to comment I later realized that most hymns are designed for a second verse:
Your errors make you who you are; they guide what you achieve. You know that you are worth enough, and soon you will believe.Honestly so far the biggest thing I’m noticing is that I’m still having the thoughts but it’s keeping me from dwelling as much which is already reducing my distress.
I also have a hymn for the void now (since chronic feelings of emptiness are actually one of the hallmarks of my disorder) but that one’s much longer.
I use mantras sometimes for a simmilar reason, I find just having something to interrupt the train of thought and give me something else to focus on helps.