Most of my negative self talk is self-injurious in nature so I won’t trouble you further with the exact content, but I’ve had difficulty finding a good substitute because I have a pretty strong aversion to the more flowery language a lot of positive self-affirmations use, but I still wanted something that rolled off the tongue as well as poetry so it sticks in my head better.
I really like common meter (think “because I could not stop for death”) and it turns out you can easily get it out of chat gpt by asking for 14-syllable couplets in iambic pentameter with natural word order, then splitting the lines at the 8-syllable mark and mixing and matching as-needed with a little supplementary help from a thesaurus. I asked for a few different versions and after some mixing and matching I got to:
"You make mistakes but take a breath
and let your torment go.
Forgive yourself for stuff you did,
and things you didn't know."
…so I’m gonna give myself a good ol’ cognitive-behavioral thought restructuring and try to at least repeat it after each self-abusive thought, then hopefully be able to replace them entirely. I’ll let you all know how it goes, but I wanted to share in case any of you wanted to try it with me!
That is an interesting and cool idea. Curious about how it goes!
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I use mantras sometimes for a simmilar reason, I find just having something to interrupt the train of thought and give me something else to focus on helps.