It's Good to Talk To Yourself. Just Don't do it Aloud on The Bus.

When people are over-stressed or when bad or unpleasant things happen to them, the unconscious mind automatically causes the body to react to compensate - and the first line of defence it’s likely to come up with is an increased need to talk.

Verbalizing what you’re thinking or feeling about yourself or your situation or the unpleasant things that happened to you today, or yesterday, or even long ago, will allow you to achieve several very important things:

• You can clarify, realise and understand what EXACTLY has made you so upset, so stressed, or so angry.


• You can get things out of your system.


• You can neutralise unpleasant situations.


• You can turn your internal pressures down - or off.


• You can dissipate your anger and avoid negative mental activity.

And no, you don’t need a therapist or even a friend to talk to in order to get the benefit of saying everything you want or need to say, because the essential element of the ‘talker plus listener‘ equation is the act of putting thoughts and feelings into words, and not the fact of having another human being to talk to. Listeners – even (and perhaps particularly) professional listeners - are comforting to have, conducive to communication, and encourage the development of ideas by asking questions, but they aren’t essential to the defining, cathartic process of verbalising thoughts and feelings.

The cheapest, most efficient, and most private way of talking is to talk to yourself – in writing. And the ‘private’ part of that is very important, because most of us have some things locked away inside us that we would never want to reveal to another person – even a professional ‘listener’ - and which therefore might otherwise never be verbalised at all.

If you don’t want to commit those particularly private thoughts to paper – and I can understand why you might not want to take the risk of having someone read what you’ve written either now or in the future - there’s always the cat, the dog or a tree in the park. You can talk to any one of them, because none of them ever tell tales – and you’ll still have said what you wanted or needed to say.

Everyone needs to talk often – actually everyone needs to talk every day – about the things that have annoyed or upset them that day. And, of course, they also need to finally come out with all those things that have been niggling away at them for months (or even years) and which can sometimes add the emotional weight of past events to present problems.

Diaries – real ones as opposed to the ones that remind you that you need to go to the dentist next Wednesday – have gone out of fashion. That’s a pity. Garbage is something that needs to be thrown out – and you can offload an awful lot of it into a very small, very cheap book.

Talk to yourself often! It’s good for you. Things tend not to get quite so out of proportion if you do.

Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com