What are the Personas of Negative Self-Talk and How Anxiety Treatment can help

When working with clients on negative self-talk, it has been helpful to externalize and name the different modes of negative dialogue that invade our brains.  I like to think of them as characters in a play, with distinct themes and personalities.  

Keep in mind, some negative self talk is preconscious. Other times, negative self-talk is telegraphic, meaning it pops into the head with a phrase that we know is short-hand for a whole slew of negative thoughts.  

The first rule to deprogramming our negative self-talk is: Name it to Tame it.  

We label the self-talk as The Worrywart, The Perfectionist, The Victim, or The Disparager.  

Once labeled, anxiety treatment helps us separate ourselves from the self-talk voice.  It allows us to discount the self-talk as just words in our head.  We gain more control over how much attention we give it.  

The Worrywart

The worrywart creates panic.

This persona is the classic worrier, filling your heads with the what ifs, the catastrophic potential outcomes, and the lists of potential problems.  The dominant personality trait of the worrywart is hypervigilance.  The thoughts from Worrywart are: “This horrible thing might happen, and so I have to be very careful” “I must prevent this bad thing from happening” and “If I think about this enough, I can make it better.”  

How to Neutralize the Worrywart: We must focus on not allowing the worrywart to not scan for danger.  The worrywart will pick up on the most minute detail, escalate it, and create a worry cycle out of nowhere. 

Furthermore, the worrywart inflates our sense of responsibility for others, thus expanding our supposed circle of control. We feel we have to worry about everyone else in order to stop bad things from happening. 

The self-talk of the worrywart feels productive, even though it is anything but.  

The Perfectionist 

The perfectionist creates anxiety and burnout.  

The Perfectionist self-talk pushes our drive beyond what is healthy or humane, the perfectionist values product over process.  This is our most time inefficient form of negative self talk.  

The dominant personality trait of the perfectionist is rigidity.  

How to Neutralize the Perfectionist: Embrace mistakes and sometimes even purposefully make them! 

The Victim

The dominant personality trait of the victim is helplessness and hopelessness.  

The victim mentality causes feelings of depression and actually wrangles control away from the anxiety/OCD.  The individual may give up and feel that everyone is against them.  Victim self-talk can actually lead to the most unproductive of compulsions: negative rumination.  

How to Neutralize the Victim: Recognize the blaming statements as an intolerance of distress.  Know that every time we feel broken down, we are probably in a period of growth! All distress and pain can be productive if we utilize it to shore up our defenses and redirect our lives.   

The Disparager

The dominant personality trait of the disparager is negativity.  Also known as the “inner critic” this form of dialogue can deeply damage self-esteem.  

How to Neutralize the Disparager: This is a negative self-talk that is best to simply ignore.  If you try to debate with the disparager, you are actually reinforcing the original fear/belief.  The disparager will attack both sides of the same coin, so you simply do not interact.   

In addition to individual therapy, group therapy can be a powerful way to explore and transform your anxious self-talk. Check out our events and group offerings and please contact us if you are interested in learning more and in taming your inner worrywart, perfectionist, victim, and disparager.