This amazing guest post was written by Tammy Catania, a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, and Certified Holistic Life Coach! You can check out her website here!

You don’t deserve to be happy. You’re not smart enough to do that. Have you looked in the mirror lately? How can anyone take you seriously when you are so stupid? Look at you; you are so ugly you’ll never find love.

Sound familiar? We’re all our worst enemy, and the voice in our head is more powerful than we think. That voice in our head can be so negative that it affects our everyday life, stops us from making our dreams reality and prevents us from true happiness. You don’t really think you deserve true happiness, right? See that inner voice again.

We all have a critical inner voice, but what really is a critical inner voice?  It’s a well-integrated pattern of destructive thoughts towards ourselves. These destructive thoughts can create an anti-self that can discourage you from living your best life.

Your critical inner voice affects numerous areas of your life including self-esteem, self-confidence, your personal relationship with others and your performance and accomplishments in school and the workplace. They can also undermine our positive feelings about ourselves and others plus foster distrust, self-denial and can prevent us from breaking addictions or even help create addictions.

Now, this negative, nagging inner voice must have started somewhere. Most of the time it comes from early life experiences that we internalize. This often stems from our parents or peers, as children we pick up the negative attitudes that our parents not only have towards us but also towards themselves and others.

Our critical inner voice is normally degrading and punishing and can lead us to make unhealthy decisions and can cause us to feel separated from the rest of the world and the people close to us.

At some point this negative inner voice has us spiraling out of control and sabotaging ever aspect of our life. When this happens, we set ourselves up for some serious depression that seems never to get better. Over time our mind is set in a pattern of thinking only negative thoughts and our life seems to be going nowhere. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it?

How to Retrain Your Inner Voice

Now the good news is that the critical inner voice is learned, it’s not something we are born with. It is very possible to learn to tune out that negative critical voice and take back your life and inner peace.

Yes, you can do this because you are amazing and you have it in you to be the best you can be. So here is how you can fight the voice, because you can do I know you have it in you.

1. Learn where these voices stem from (our parents, an old relationship, our siblings or peers, or maybe bullies at school when you were a child) Once you know where the issues started you know where the healing process needs to start.

2. We need to forgive ourselves for all the horrible things we say to our inner selves. A great way to do this is with forgiving affirmations. Every morning stand in the mirror, look yourself right in the eyes and say one of these: “I forgive myself for not believing in me” “I forgive myself for the self-hatred I feel every day” “I forgive my inner voice for being so horrible and negative” Or use one that feels right to you.

3. Understand how our negative voice is affecting our lives. Where you’re about to apply to the job of your dreams but the inner voice told you that you weren’t smart enough to even get an interview so you didn’t even try to apply. Sounds familiar, right? That would be your inner voice affecting your life in a negative way.

4. We need to learn to identify that voice when it starts. “You know that you’re not good enough right?” STOP right there! That inner voice has started again.

5. When we have identified that voice when it occurs, we need to replace those thoughts with a positive inner voice.

Here are a few negative phrases you probably say to yourself and here is the positive phases you should be replacing them with:

“You’re so stupid”                                                         “You are remarkably intelligent.”

“Wow you are so fat”                                                     “You have such beautiful skin.”

“You’re not good enough”                                             “You are amazing.”

“You are never going to accomplish anything”         “You are going to create an amazing life.”

“How could anyone love you?”                                      “I absolutely love myself.”  

“You do not deserve happiness”                                     “I deserve all the happiness in the world.”

Whatever your inner voice is telling you just remember that you are beautiful, amazing, smart, and completely loved. You deserve all the happiness in the world, and you truly can live the best life possible just kick that inner critic out of your head and replace it with inner love.  

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