Six Nigative Stories You Tell Yourself And How To Change Them By Dr Tracy Marks

 

 Hi, I'm Dr.Tracy Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education articles. Today I'm talking about emotional programming, what it looks like and what it does to your thinking. Your early life experiences with your parents, siblings, and other people in your life, leave an imprint on you that carries over into your adult life. No one's life is perfect because we're all imperfect people and make mistakes. We say the wrong things, don't do enough of the right things, et cetera. So the imprint that you're left with is a mixture of positive and negative experiences. 

If you have enough positive experiences to fill your emotional cup, you can process the negative experiences and compartmentalize them in a way that they don't dictate every aspect of your adult life. The negative experiences have their place. It's not like you can't remember them, but you're able to shake them off and keep moving. 

If the sum total of your experiences were negative, or you had some early traumatic experiences that disrupted your emotional development, your imprint becomes predominantly  negative and affects the way that you interact in the present day. So when instead of having an emotional cup that's full most of the time, or is easy to refill, you have a hole in the bottom of your cup and you can't keep it full and it keeps getting depleted. 

So how does this affect your thoughts and outlook on the world? You develop what's called maladaptive schema in dialectical behavior therapy terms, but I'm gonna call it negative emotional programming that creates these distorted stories that you tell yourself. These stories keep building and strengthening when your emotional cup gets depleted and you're working hardto fill it back up.So here are six types of negative stories that you can come to believe and let guide your behavior. 

Number one is the abandonment story. This tends to develop from early experiences with people who were cold, distant, or critical. And like wise, you tend to end up in relationships with a similar dynamic, with people who are treating you similarly. With this story, you say things like people don't really care about me. No matter how good things seem, it never lasts. I'm destined to end up alone. I worry about people I care about leaving or dying. 

Ways to deconstruct and think through this is to ask yourself, do you have unrealistic expectations of how relationships should be? In what ways could you practice being vulnerable so that you can open yourself up to experiencing more joy in relationships? How can you focus on developing more trust in a relationship? Because of your early experience, your reflexive reaction is to close down and protect yourself from being hurt. 

So to work past that, you have to allow yourself to be more vulnerable. And what does that look like? I talk about being more emotionally vulnerable in relationships in this article on using conversation to create intimacy and combat loneliness. 

Next is the dependent story. You can develop this story from early experiences of being over protected in a way that didn't allow you to take appropriate risks and learn from your mistakes. If you were blocked from making your own decisions and not being allowed to fall down, you don't learn how to stand back up and be resilient.

 So you can say things like, I can't cope with being alone. I can't trust my own judgment. I need someone to take care of me and to make me happy. Life is too overwhelming to cope with on my own. To deconstruct this, ask yourself, what are some small ways that you can challenge yourself to do something outside of your company zone? How can you gradually build taking on more responsibilities? What can you do to enjoy your solitude more? You need to learn to be more comfortable with yourself so that you can be able to sooth yourself and break away from this pattern of being too dependent on someone else to meet your needs. 

Number three is the unworthy story. You can develop this kind of thinking if you felt the standards you had to meet were so.