I am stupid: Reframing Negative Self-Talk- Part 1

Photo By: Harmony Lawrence Source: pixabay.com

Note from Sean/Unicorn: This article is provide for information on a specific topic and what help me. I am not a licensed doctor of any kind and while the goal of this post is to help, it should not be used to diagnose or treat any mental health challenges or any health concerns. If you have a mental health concern please seek help from a licensed professional. You can find one by going here: psychcentral.com, or here webmd.com/find-a-doctor. If you contemplating suicide please contact Suicide Prevention Life Line (click the text) and speak to someone. You are worth it and your life matters.

I am so stupid...

That was the taught that I had after a friend, unknowingly gave me a giant hint with HTB's invite challenge. A simple question helped me figure out what I was doing wrong. Without realizing it I blurted out to my-self "I am so stupid." Normally this is when someone would get really happy and excited but for me that admonishment of "I am so stupid" had caused enough damage that I was unable to enjoy my success.

It did not matter how much I had figured out or how I had done it, all the work I had done simply no longer matter as soon as I told myself that I was stupid. This was just another reason as to why I felt I was failing, at everything. Why stop at just being stupid at hacking when this clearly is an indication of how much I suck at finding a job, learning new skills, wood working, at <insert X here>.

It is a painful trap that I have seen and heard a lot of other InfoSec people fall into, even during presentations.

Tell me if you have heard this before: "I am not that good compared to <person X>." "<So and so> might have done it better." or "I was being dumb before I figured it out" or "The answer was right in face but I was too stupid at the time to see it."

This my friends is what we call Negative Self-Talk, something I have been guilty of doing and something that I have fought hard to over come. It is an emotional roller coaster from Hell that can be both mentality and physically draining.

But thankfully there was something that I was introduced to and taught that helped me break this negativity: Reframing.

Before begin we need to make sure we define what reframing and what self-talk is.

What is reframing?

In the most simplistic way it is just rephrasing what critical and/or negative statement you made about yourself so it is not negative.

For example, lets say you are struggling with hacking a customer's network and say to yourself "I am an idiot because I cannot figure out this out."

You could rephrase it saying "This is difficult but I am I can do it if I take break, relax, and come back with a fresh mindset."

Or you could say "This is difficult but I can do it. Maybe I can look at the problem differently."

Reframing is not meant to put a positive spin on things, it is a way to take negative comments made to yourself and state them so you are not being so negative. It is not changing the truth, it is just changing how you tell yourself the truth, nor is dismissing or diminishing a mistake that had been made. You are not making an excuse, you are just being nice to yourself and being less critical.

If used to write off a mistake then it is being used incorrectly.

What is self-talk

In the most simplistic terms it is when you talk to yourself, either in your head or aloud. All those time you told yourself you did a great job, or that you should eat the ice-cream, you were using self-talk.

You also use it when you have to calm yourself down or when you are trying to motivate yourself. Psychology Today defines self-talk as "...combining conscious thoughts and unconscious beliefs and biases, provides a way for the brain to interpret and process daily experiences."¹

I first viewed self-talk neither positive or negative. It is a conversation or just quick comments you have with yourself. This was a skewed and self serving view as it only contributed to my negative self-talk. By viewing it as something that was neither it allowed me to continue to speak poorly about myself to myself. Once I understood that it can be either negative or positive I started to understand most of my self-talk.

Unicorn Injection: Traditional wisdom might have it that talking to yourself is done by crazy people. According to Psychology Today talking to yourself can be beneficial to your health when used properly.¹.

What exactly is negative self-talk?

Negative self-talk is when you say bad things to yourself or are being overly critical of yourself such as:

"I am so stupid"
"nice going moron, you really screwed up."
"I suck and I am not going to get better."

These negative thoughts are neither helpful or they even remotely healthy. However, they happen to all of us, just more often for some of us.

Step 0, figuring out how to stop it

So now that we have that out of the way you might be wondering what can we do about negative self-talk.

Well, there is a 13 step process we need to start...just kidding. Seriously though, there are some steps but only a few and most appear to be universal. The one that was introduced to me is what I have dubbed the 4 step process and is the one I am sharing since I understand it the most.

Here are the steps that I started out with. I am also indicating the steps that seem to be universal:

Identify your negative self-talk (universal)
Write down your negative self-talk
Refrain the statement (universal)
Repeat your reframed self-talk

The great thing about this is that it can be tailored. The only two things that should not be changed are #1 and #3. Without them there is no point to this, at least that is my belief. In the beginning I modified it so it looked like this:

Identify my negative self-talk (and stop)
Write down my negative self-talk
Write down when it happened and the situation
Identity how I feel and write it down
Refrain the statement so that I acknowledge how I feel and it is constructive and not belittling to yourself

Eventually I was able to catch my moments and not need to write down the negative thoughts. Here is my process now:

Identify my negative self-talk (and stop)
Identify how I feel
Acknowledge how I feel and Refrain the statement so that it is constructive and not belittling

You might have noticed that I removed the "write down..." parts. I did this only because I had done it enough and practiced at admitting the negative self-talk. If you are going to try doing this I cannot stress importance of writing it down enough. Seeing it on paper (yes paper) forced me to see and admit how mean I was being to myself. Just do this step when you start, future you will thank you.

For the rest of this post I will explain my current process with the exception of including #3 "Write down when it happened and the situation." This data is invaluable in helping with prevention.

First, identify the negative self-talk

Sounds simple at first but for me this was pretty difficult because I had grown so use to do it. Luckily for me 91% of my negative self-talk was me calling myself stupid.

This feeling of being stupid is something that I had fought against for a long time and my first attempt at this process failed. It failed not because I was doing it wrong but because it was so ingrained in my self-talk. It was practically second nature to me and I was not hearing my negative self-talk.

The same mental health counselor who introduced me to Reframing helped me figure out why it was so ingrained. This was one of the benefits of working with a health professional on this, when I hit a wall he was able to use his knowledge and expertise to work out what was causing the issue. This is also another reason why I cannot stress enough that working with a professional is best course to take.

After resolving the core issue it was easier to identify the negative self-talk. They were things that I either said internally or aloud and ran along the following:

I am not getting this because I am so stupid
Only an idiot like me would miss that log entry that indicated the issue
I am so f&*king stupid that infected my own system instead of my VM
"I am sorry to bother you, but stupid here needs your help figuring this out."
"I need your help because I am too stupid to figure this out on my own."

This is just a small bit of what I said to myself on a daily basis. Mind you, I would not have allowed anyone else say this crap to me.

The key to being able to identify the negative self-talk is being able to identify negative talk. How did I know it was negative? If it was something I would not have been happy if someone else said it or would have angered me, that was a clue that it was negative. If it was negative I wrote it down. If you are unsure ask, just be careful of who you are asking and it is a trusted person (more on this later). Again, mental health professional is the best suited to help you.

It takes practice and time to see it, you might not catch every negative self-talk but catching some is far better. Sort of like threats. You want to be able to catch all the threats but you accept that some will slip through and there is some trust in other counter measures. This is no different.

Unicorn Injection: Not all negative self-talk is obvious. Saying you cannot do something is no different than saying "I should have been able to figure it out as well." or "I did not figure it out because I am not as good as Tom." These are considered guilt statements and they are very much part of negative self-talk.

Write it down

Unicorn Injection: I view writing it down a bit risky, as it risks helping to affirm the negative thoughts, but the risk is worth it and I manage the risk by writing down the reframed comment.

Turned out I was making a lot of negative self-talk and self-critical comments, it was, in itself a little depressing to see how much and how often I was being so mean to myself. I am not going to to lie, it was at times, very depressing. It was also difficult to accept and there was a lot of temptation to not record it and just write it off as "having a moment of frustration." But that would have been a lie, and lying to yourself is harmful. However, seeing it written down meant that I had to face it and work on accepting it, which helped more than I can express.

So what did I write? The statement that I had just made, exactly as I made it. If I said "Tom, I am too stupid to do this so I need your help." I wrote down "Tom, I am too stupid to do this so I need your help."

If I was talking to colleague and said "I cannot figure out how to get the PowerShell function to work because I am too stupid" I wrote down "I cannot figure out how to get the PowerShell function to work because I am too stupid"

Even if it was a simple comment I said in my head, such as "I am too stupid" I wrote that down.

Oh, and if you say it in a different language it still needs written down. It does not matter what language you say it in, it still is negative self-talk.

Why writing it down has helped

I am in InfoSec and like so many other people in InfoSec I love finding patterns and flags. Writing it down helped me spot patterns, better known as key phrases. This also helped me see that I was also comparing myself to other people and holding myself up to unreasonable expectations.

Unicorn Injection: Some recommend repeating the comment to yourself aloud. While similar to writing it down I found it actually backfired on me and made more difficult to process and harder to mitigate the damage.

Writing it down can not only be difficult but very uncomfortable, but it gave me a chance to see how much I was improving. It was a much needed rally.

There were times when reviewing what I wrote and working on reframing some of my harder comments that I would become a little depressed. I found talking to my wife helped with this. Talking about my feeling is not something I like doing and is difficult, with the exception of when I talk to my wife. I trust her not to use the information against me. If you try this and find yourself getting really sad about what you seeing, talk to your partner, friend, or a mental health professional. How you are feeling is important and is part of who you are, write it down, talk it over with someone you trust.

Writing down the situation and other metadata

I took an extra step in my process and also wrote down the situation I was in, where I was (meeting, desk, home, etc), what I was doing (coding, reading, etc), who I was with. This extra information helped me much later to also identify toxicity in my environment. Suffice to say I stopped talking to some people or I started talking to them only when I needed to.

It also helped me recognize when and where I said these things the most. This helped me after the process and during the prevention phase. If knew I was going into a meeting with specific people or if I was going to a specific event then I was able to create a strategy of what I would do to prevent the negative self-talk. For me, it was mini pep talks.

The feels

Something else I wrote was how I felt at the time. Because of my Asperger's it can be difficult to not only describe how I feel but it was even harder for me to look back at these comments and remember how I felt. I was also able to use this when I reframed my comments.

The part after this was to reframe, or rephrase, those statements. At first it was difficult to do and I struggled with it. Of course I attributed it to me being stupid. I did not really get it until I reframed the the question "Why am I so stupid" to "Why is this difficult for me?"

#include <chills.h>

Key Phrases/Patterns and Flags

Once I had enough data, i.e. entries/pages written, I was able to start looking for key phrases. I treated this like sifting through a log file in Splunk or a packet in WireShark.

Here are some other examples of statements that I made with key words and phrases underlined:

God, I am so stupid.
Nice one you moron.
I cannot figure out how to write this script because I am stupid
I have to ask for help because I am not as smart as person X
I could figure this out if I was not as stupid as I am
I should have done better, but I am too dumb
It did/is not work/working because I am too stupid to get it right
I forgot to do it because I am stupid, no one else would have messed this up

These are examples that I found myself saying the most often when I was speaking negatively to myself. These were my key phrases and key words, yours might be different.

Unicorn Injection: If you find yourself saying something like "Wow, these are idiotic statements" while reviewing your list, you will need to add that to your list. There is no room for exceptions. If you say, "wow, these are really mean", you do not need to write that down.

These key phrases and words served an important part, they became events that triggered a mental flag. When I heard them I stopped what I was thinking/saying and immediately started the process for reframing. If I could not start the processed right away because I was talking in a meeting, I made a note of it and addressed it later. This above all else is why writing what you say and think down is vital. Without this information it would have been next to impossible for me to do any reframing.

Armed with this new knowledge I was able to once again try and correct this behavior, but this time there was a twist. The twist was a concept that the counselor introduced to me: Reframing.

Links to resources used

The University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia published a quick hand out called "Reframing your thinking" that can be found here. There are additional examples of reframing and tips to help with it.

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