Trick 1 – rewrite your thoughts
This is deeply sad, so trigger warning, but it’s an important premise for the topic:
I spent the majority of my life wholeheartedly believing that no one loves me or cares about me. This is because of emotional abuse as a child (from a friend, not from my family), repeated trauma from unintentional abandonment, and from being a domestic violence victim (now survivor) in my 20s.
I truly, 100% believed this was a fact until I was in my late 30’s, and I’m now in my early 40’s.
So, thinking people might actually like me, care about me, or even love me is very new, and I have worked so incredibly hard to get myself there. I was depressed my whole life, and sometimes suicidal, and I attempted suicide more than once in my 20s. I am not those things now because I put in the years of consistent, practical, spiritual and science-based self healing work. This is how I know, and I am direct evidence, that reframing your habits of thinking is the key to healing your mental health.
Here is how I did it:
- Pay attention to and log the thoughts you have that cause you pain. Catch them in real time, put them down in writing if you can.
- Take those thoughts and rewrite them completely. Either mentally or literally write the new thoughts.
- Rinse and repeat.
That’s literally it!
This sounds really simple but what you are doing is rewiring your brain’s muscle memory and building new synapses while simultaneously no longer feeding the old synapses. You’re taking the muscle memory of one thought and rewiring it to another thought that eventually replaces the first thought automatically if you do this frequently and for a long time.
So for example:
“no one loves me” –> “that was always a lie, people do love me. my mom and my kids love me.”
“no one cares about me” -> “my family, friends, and coworkers care about me.”
“I am poor” –> “I am building my financial portfolio”
“bad things happen to me –> “bad things happen to everyone and I am not alone”
“people don’t like me” –> “some people like me and some don’t. It’s ok if someone doesn’t like me. I like myself”
etc
It took me some years to get to the point of being able to see and believe my replacement thoughts automatically and subconsciously, but I did get there. And you can too.
Trick 2 – reframe how you interpret others
Building on my previous point that other people’s behavior has nothing to do with you, and that people tend to internalize others’ behavior as being a negative about them – for good mental health we need to reframe how we interpret their behavior. So what we do here is take our interpretation and reframe it to remove ourselves from the picture. For example:
“He doesn’t care about me” –> “He doesn’t care.” (it’s not about me)
“He cheats bc I’m not good enough” –> “He cheated.” (it’s not about me)
“They left me” –> “They left” (it’s not about me)
“They yelled at me” –> “They yelled.” (it’s not about me)
“They ghosted me” –> “They ghosted” (it’s not about me)
“They talk trash about me” –> “They talked trash.” (it’s not about me)
Does this make sense? It’s about them, not you. So make your interpretation about them and who they are, and not about you. Remove yourself from the equation, and do it every time.
And for me: “He doesn’t love me” –> “He doesn’t feel love.” (it’s not about me)
Edit: I would like to add to this that most of the time we do not know why people behave how they do. Most of the time the person themselves doesn’t know. Or they do know and they are struggling. The statements above are a bit judgey, and judging people negatively can also hurt our own mental health. So I am adding one more, super important tip to this.
Trick 3: Judge others positively. Make positive assumptions.
They may have bad habits and do hurtful things. They may even be violent and dangerous. But the one common thread amongst all destructive behavior from all people is that the person is acting from a place of pain. They are operating from a place of pain. They may not love, and they don’t love because of their own pain. It’s not about us at all, reframe it to be about them, with compassion.
A lot of the time our perception of others’ is incorrect. We think they do something for one reason but it’s actually another. Maybe they do love and we aren’t getting the memo. A lot of the time we can’t even speculate on why people do and say the things they do and say. We aren’t there in their mind, we have no way of knowing. We think they must feel one way but actually it’s another. If someone has shown they care about you try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are on your side.
That doesn’t mean let people hurt you. Always uphold your boundaries and protect yourself within your means. But it does mean when we look at other peoples’ actions, look at it through the lens of curiosity and compassion, and judge them from a place of love and acceptance. He hurt me, but he did that because he is scared or triggered or something like that, not because of anything else. Or he did that because I was acting emotional, or maybe I hurt him, or maybe it literally has nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t know why he did what he did. But we are on the same team, right?
It really hurts a lot less when you make positive assumptions and judge others with compassion.
That is going to look something like: wow they really hurt me so much, and I want to set boundaries and protect myself so I will, but they didn’t do that because of me, they did it because of their own suffering, or for reasons I can’t even think of, so I want to grant them some compassion too.
Trick 4 – be scientific about it
It’s really difficult for me to interpret people’s behavior and emotions accurately, especially when it comes to being loved, because of trauma and neurodivergence. So I looked up the indicators of love and saw that my recent now-ex-boyfriend hit almost none of these. But I thought that he loved me because of love bombing and a few other things. Here are the indicators of love:
- Consistent emotional support
- Active listening
- Respect for boundaries
- Shared life
- Warm body language
- Unprompted check-ins
Knowing these indicators helps me to identify love from manipulation. My recent ex may have felt like he loved me, and he spent 3.5 years telling me he does, and maybe he even did – but he was manipulating me more so than loving me. He even set dates for our engagement and starting a future together, when he had no intention of following through. His “love” was covering and distracting from deceit and betrayal. He was creating some fantasy land for us instead of letting me engage with reality how it truly is. Then at the very end of our relationship he gave me a cold narc discard as if I never mattered, and he even started saying he never loved me or wanted me. I have no way of knowing whats what. I know that he actively chose to hurt me and make me cry on numerous occasions, and that is not love. I also know he came to my rescue and looked out for me on numerous occasions, and that *is* love. I suppose it’s possible for someone to feel more than one thing. Love and care, attachment and admiration and attraction, and also shame and wanting to manipulate reality to get something from them, and also lack empathy and demonize them and what have you.
Moving forward, I will be looking for these indicators and nothing else to know if someone loves me.
This spills over into other things. Want to know if someone is attracted? Check their pupils for dilation, see if they mirror your body language and words, see if they turn their legs or feet towards you, see if they blush when you compliment them. These are all biological indicators of attraction.
Or lying. People tend to have biological indicators of lying as well. They nod when they say no or shake their head when they say yes, they repeat the question when you ask it, they purse their lips, they even smile and laugh when lying.
Be scientific about it, believe their body and not their words. Believe their actions and not their promises. And believe that they act that way because something is wrong with them, not because something is wrong with you. Then tell yourself that repeatedly and often until you genuinely believe it.
Being scientific about it also empowers you and removes you from the scenario a bit so you can have more of an outside perspective rather than one based on your fears and insecurities and trauma. It enables you to be analytical and activates the parts of your brain that use reason (the prefrontal cortex), while deactivating the part of your brain that fires off alarms and puts you in fight/flight/freeze (the amygdala).
Trick 5 – nurture yourself
To feel okay when you are not okay, you need these ingredients:
- validation
- acceptance
- nurturing and goodness directed towards you
So first step here is to validate your own feelings. Tell yourself things like “of course you feel this way” and “it’s okay to make mistakes”.
Next accept and sit with the bad feelings. Think of it like a physical injury that hurts right now but will heal over time. All you have to do is let it hurt and let it play out. Don’t run, don’t avoid, don’t distract, don’t do any of that. Let your feelings exist. To do this you may need to name the feeling i.e. “I am really sad right now” and then go ahead and follow up with “its totally understandable to feel sad right now” and “I will let myself be sad until it passes”. and from there move into nurturing.
Do the nice things for yourself that you would do for others. Buy yourself gifts, take bubble baths, get some tea and go sit by the ocean, wrap yourself in a blanket, give yourself a hug. Eat healthy foods, take yourself to the gym, go on fun missions, make art, do yoga, touch grass, pet dogs, go for walks, or go ahead and bed rot if you need to. Whatever you need, give it to yourself. You deserve nice things. Never ever deny yourself of nice things.
This also means using words to nurture yourself, like positive affirmations. For example:
I like myself, I like ABC about me
I think I am pretty and so do others
It’s okay for me to make mistakes
I am blessed in XYZ ways
I am so lucky that _______
I deserve nice things
etc etc
And if you find yourself thinking or saying mean things to yourself, go back to the first trick and start there.
Trick 6 – Fill your world with good experiences
This one is pretty strait forward and is similar to the previous one but this is really about adding more goodness to your pool of experience, which then dilutes, and eventually replaces, the bad experiences. So go do the fun thing you want to do. Go to the spa, go on the trips, go see the friends, go out to dinner, take the classes, look at the beautiful landscape, etc. The most effective one for me is giving myself a massage. This is free and it is readily available to me at any time, and it feels nice. So next time you feel bad just rub your shoulders or your feet or head or all of the above to dilute the bad feelings by adding good ones. Things may not be perfect but there is still goodness readily available to you.
It’s much harder to feel bad when theres something in the here and now making you feel good.
All of this does take effort, but these processes have really changed my life for the better in significant ways, and I hope they can change yours for the better too. 🙂