Patricia, Author at The Powerful Woman | Women & Resilience

Join me for a fun and thoughtful interview about girly thoughts by two respected journalists

Giving as an Extension of You, Not Your Girly Thoughts

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

’Tis the season, with lots of expectations of what you should do, how you should look, and what you should give when gifting. No wonder your girly thoughts, that toxic self-talk that tells you what to do while simultaneously telling you you’re not doing it correctly, have a field day here.

In my latest book, The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power, I explain where your toxic self-talk comes from, how it affects you, and how to get rid of it. After all, who needs a voice inside her head telling her she’s a loser?

One way to challenge your girly thoughts, especially during the holidays, is to take planned, concrete action to defeat them, and what better way than to determine what you will and will not give your friends, family members, and co-workers.

Re-thinking What It Means to Give

Instead of scouring catalogues, spending hours you don’t have online, or waiting in endless lines in stores, think outside the girly thoughts box—the one that says your gift must be the latest fashion, expensive, in the right color. Instead, think about what is meaningful for you, and what is meaningful for the person you are gifting.

Consider giving a non-girly thoughts gift:

Membership in the recipient’s name in a national advocacy group. Consider one that may be less well known than others but will have more immediate meaning, such as the National Association of Children of Alcoholics (NACoA). As some of you know, I was a co-founder of this vital organization many years ago. NACoA reaches out, speaks up, and helps hurting children in need of comfort and support who live in silence and fear from their parent’s addiction, letting them know it is not their fault.

A donation in the recipient’s name to a program for kids. Want to give to small program that is developing a national model for helping kids heal? Check out Horses Healing Hearts (HHH) in Wellington, Florida, a wonderful organization whose advisory board I chair. “One horse, one child, one day at a time . . .” provides direct emotional support and education for young children whose lives have been torn apart by a parent’s death, incarceration, or abuse due to addiction. HHH teaches empowerment, life-coping skills, and helps children build self-confidence by learning about horse care and riding.

Give a gift that also gives a gift. My Twill.com, a new company you may not have yet heard about, provides a child in need with a comforting and inspiring blanket for every one purchased. Here is a beautiful, physical gift that keeps on giving.

Head off girly thoughts by giving the perfect mother/daughter gift that literally gets mothers and daughter on the same page in addressing how we women learn to disempower ourselves, our girly thoughts. Jane Collen, a lawyer turned children’s book author, has just released What More Can a Fairy Be?, her third book in the Enjella series: Each book is for a different age group, making it a perfect gift for girls from 3–15, and a perfect complement to the messages in my book, The Girly Thoughts 10 Day Detox Plan, for older teens and mothers of all ages.

Let the Gifts You Give Be a Reflection of the Best in YOU

Remember, your gifts are a reflection of you. Give yourself permission to think outside the box that your girly thoughts put you in. Be creative, have fun, and help others do the same—help them give themselves the gift of no more girly thoughts!

Learn more about helping your daughter and the other women in your life avoid internalizing her girly thoughts in my new book, The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power.

Find it on:

Amazon paperback, Kindle

Barnes & Noble paperback, Nook

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4 Ways You Can Help Your Daughter Measure Her True Self-Worth

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

@drogorman

Remember how awkward it felt to be a teen? Remember what it was like to worry each night when you went to bed if you would recognize the you who woke up in the morning? Budding breasts, growth spurts, and those terrible pimples were all potential minefields.

I know I can still feel how my dread on the first day of school in the fifth grade—I’d grown three inches over the summer and developed acne.

Birth of Our Girly Thoughts
As teens, we often felt betrayed by our changing bodies and by that feeling of not being good enough, of being defective. Why? Because as young girls, we felt required to be perfect, and we castigated ourselves because we were not.

We internalized those negative thoughts through a toxic, inner dialogue I call girly thoughts—a way of speaking to ourselves that begins in our teens and continues through our lives. Our girly thoughts chip away at our sense of self-worth until we take direct action to detox from this type of habitual, negative thinking.

Share and Share Alike
There’s a good reason we wouldn’t want to be teenagers again—not only did we not feel good about ourselves, but those negative thoughts were reinforced by our so-called friends, the media—even our own families.

But how did we know we weren’t everything we were supposed to be? Comments, looks, slam books, selective ostracizing—let me count the ways. Then we internalized those negative messages (“You’re not pretty enough.” “Don’t act too smart or the boys won’t like you.” “You aren’t wearing that, are you?”), and we continue to do this to our adult selves.

And the saddest part is that by listening to and acting on our girly thoughts, we inadvertently teach our daughters to do the same.

Girly Thoughts in the Digital Age

As challenging as your teenage years may have been, they pale in comparison to what our daughters are experiencing in feeling judged—not just by peers in the classroom, but also by peers on Facebook, Twitter, and especially Instagram, which a survey found 76 percent of teens chose as their go-to app.

In a stunning article about how to de-code our daughters’ communication on social media, Rachel Simmons, author and co-founder of Girls Leadership Institute writes,

Girls face increasing pressure not only to be smart and accomplished, but girly, sexy and social. . . . Instagram’s simplicity is also deceiving: look more closely, and you find the Rosetta Stone of girl angst: a way for tweens and teens to find out what their peers really think of them (Was that comment about my dress a joke or did she mean it?), who likes you (Why wasn’t I included in that picture?), even how many people like them (if you post and get too few likes, you might feel “Instashame,” as one young woman calls it.)

What To Do?
Now that this judging is so intense and so public, we need to give our daughters additional tools to help them:

Give your daughter a name for her negative self-talk: girly thoughts.
Having a name for something will help her wrap her mind around her experience and see this as something she is doing, not who she is. Helping her see her feelings as transitory and nothing to feel ashamed of will help her overcome the barrage of negativity that is part and parcel of being a teenage girl.

Help her challenge feeling like a victim. This is the end result of girly thoughts your daughter will feel she has no power and feel she is a victim at the mercy of her peers, and the world. Share with her in general terms how you have fought the same toxic self-talk she is fighting.

Encourage her to become involved in activities in which she feels proud of herself. Encourage her to sketch, sing, journal, join the Chess Club, Engineering Club, Babysitting Club, and Church Youth Group, to name just a few. The more positive activities she is involved in, the more she’ll have to post about the best in her.

Help her identify the girly thoughts of her friends. If she has a peer who is cyberbullying another girl because of her braces, breasts, pimples, or who she’s dating, help her see that this is how her peer is responding to her own girly thoughts that say there is only way, and it is the popular way.

The Payoff
It may be rough going at first, but the more your daughter (or granddaughter or niece) can learn to get in front of what is said about her now and learn to define herself, the easier her life will be—not only her teenage years, but for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, she will get a great deal of practice in needing to do this, so why not start now?

Learn more about helping your daughter avoid internalizing her girly thoughts in my new book, The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power.

Amazon paperback, Kindle

Barnes & Noble paperback, Nook

Find me on Facebook

5 Girly Thoughts™ that Increase Your Holiday Stress

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

Author of The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power (publication date 10.28.14) – a fun book about a serious topic

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

It’s almost the happy holiday season, and you’re already feeling the pressure. If you’re like most of us, you’re already hearing that inner voice that pushes you to do more, reminding you that it is up to you to make this a holiday season to remember while telling you that no matter what you’re doing, it is not enough.

How Your Girly Thoughts Turn Up the Holiday Pressure

I’ve named this toxic, negative self-talk your girly thoughts. Girly thoughts function as an internal gauge of perfection against which you measure yourself, and guess what? You find yourself falling short from where you feel you should be.

Here is what your girly thoughts are telling you and what you can do about them:

1. Everyone I know needs a card and a personal note from me. Let’s face it: in this day of digital communication, a handwritten note is a lovely indication of your caring. But having a self-expectation of sending a handwritten note to everyone you know when you now clearly do not send out notes regularly?

Consider writing a lovely email letter and sending this out instead.

2. I need to make home-cooked, memorable meals. The belief that every meal needs to be a masterpiece gets in the way of actually enjoying the meal. If you don’t enjoy it, neither will anyone else.

Instead, tell yourself: I need to make meals I will enjoy. Consider:
• Serving some ready-made foods
• Saying yes when guests ask if they can bring something
• Preparing simpler recipes

3. I must look fabulous. The pressure to look good is always with us; in fact, “I’m fat” is girly thought #1. Time to detox!

Change this to: I need to feel comfortable. Too tired after a day of working and an evening of cooking to wear those heels to the party? Ditch them.

4. I must attend every holiday event, concert, and party. Yes, this is the season of making merry, but that means you want to feel merry as well.

Consider setting reasonable limits on what you will and will not do. Notice the emphasis is not on what you can do but what you will do.

5. I must find the perfect gift that says I love them. Ah, the perfect gift. No pressure here.

Change this to acknowledging each recipient’s specialness, and stay tuned for a blog on gift giving.

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Give Yourself a Gift for the Holidays—Detox from Your Girly Thoughts

Girly thoughts act like a conduit through which all your discomfort, all the stresses of your life, are filtered, and the holidays just magnify that discomfort.

So this holiday season, give yourself a great gift: stop listening to that negative, toxic voice that tells you what you should do and instead look for ways to reduce your stress so you can experience all the joy of the season.

Even Victoria’s Secret No Longer Feels Your Body Has to Be Perfect—So Why Are You Still Listening to Your Girly Thoughts®?

Victoria’s Secret has seen the light—they’ve dropped the word perfect in their marketing.

What used to be “The Perfect Body” tagline has now become “A Body for Every Body.” This might seem like a small change, but it is an important one. Victoria’s Secret is telling us we do not need to be perfect. Maybe we can begin to believe that!

The power of your anger

Victoria’s Secret didn’t just make this major change on its own. The corporation had a pretty firm nudge—it was pressured to do this by a petition on Change.org that was organized by three British students who may have been tired of—perhaps even angry about—the relentless images of perfection that all women are supposed to strive toward.

I invite you to read the full petition at Change.org; you’ll get a real sense of the anger these young women felt about Victoria Secret’s Perfect marketing campaign, which, in the petitioners’ words, “fails to celebrate the amazing diversity of women’s bodies by choosing to call only one body type ‘perfect’.”

Perfect doesn’t need to be your goal

What did these young women do with their upset over the wording? Well, what they didn’t do was exercise more, go on a diet, and torture themselves with their toxic girly thoughts, those society driven, family reinforced negative messages that tells women they aren’t good enough.

Instead, these women used their annoyance and their anger to push for change and empower others to make their voices heard, and maybe they even had fun doing this together.

And they succeeded.

Baby steps can be powerful

The Victoria’s Secret models still look the same: super slim, very young, and wearing very little, but this change is still progress, even if measured in baby steps.

Changing the wording of a corporate tag line from something that is impossible to achieve to something that instead reflects the reality most of us face is movement toward a new norm, and that is what we all need and deserve.

What action can you take?

As I suggest in my recently released book, The Girly Thoughts 10 Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power, one way to put an end to toxic, negative self-talk is to find an ad with an oppressive message that makes you angry, one with an image so perfect it is unreal, or one you just find repressive.

Then write a letter to the manufacturer and tell them how you feel, what you want changed. Trust me, just writing it will make you feel better! You’ll realize how ridiculous it is internalize those negative messages, and you’ll feel empowered to detox from them and from the way they make you feel.

Then have fun with this! Share your letter with your friends. Mail it, or post it on the manufacturer’s website. Start a new petition if you’re so inclined—like the three young women who pressured Victoria’s Secret, you can help others detox from their girly thoughts!

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By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

True Kindness – No Girly Thoughts Here

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

Women focus on being kind to others, but do we ever stop to think about being kind to ourselves?

How Do You View Yourself?

When you look in the mirror, do you notice:

Your beautiful smile . . . or do you focus on where you need Botox®?
Your kind eyes . . . or do you tell yourself you need to get your eyebrows done?
Your curves . . . or do you fret about losing weight?
A capable and competent employee . . . or do you worry that you won’t be liked if you offer your opinion?
A valuable asset to your partner . . . or do you focus on being someone you think your partner wants you to be?

Girly Thoughts Teach Unkindness

Every single day you are cruel to the person who is the foundation of your life – yourself! Why? Because those societally driven, family-reinforced notions of how women should look and act – girly thoughts – cause you to see yourself (and other women as well) as not measuring up.

Think not? Listen to what you say, not only to yourself, but also about other women.

• “I can’t believe she got that promotion. She must be sleeping with the boss.”
• “If I just lose five more pounds, I bet I’ll get his attention.”
• “I wish she’d stop bragging about her daughter all the time.”

Your girly thoughts are a major distraction from important parts of your life—love, connection, and compassion, and they teach you to be critical instead of kind. They drain you. You only have so much energy; do you want to spend yours on negative, judgmental girly thoughts or on being kind to yourself and others?

Fighting Girly Thoughts with Kindness

Marisa had already decided to stop beating herself up over not having what society deemed the perfect body. But in a clothing store one day, she heard stifled sobs from the next fitting room, and her heart broke. In there was another a younger, tall, curvaceous woman who was distraught because she couldn’t find anything to wear to a friend’s wedding.

“I’m so fat,” she moaned. “No,” Marisa countered, “You’re a commanding presence!” The younger woman laughed, and Marisa helped her to find the perfect dress honoring her beautiful body.

Detox from Your Girly Thoughts

Want to be kind to yourself? Stop listening to your girly thoughts! Here are some tips from my new book, The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox:

1. Realize you’re not the only one who feels so inadequate. Having the right color lipstick or staying forever young are messages women hear every day.
2. Identify those self-defeating messages as girly thoughts. Having a name for something gives you power over it, and helps you say NO to self-defeating thoughts.
3. Get support for outing your girly thoughts. Have fun with friends at a Girls’ Night Out, or with your daughter or your mother to see who can find the most girly thoughts in a TV Show, a movie, or in ads.
4. Challenge your most annoying girly thought. Every time you hear it, name it and tell it to get lost.
5. Replace your girly thoughts with kind messages about yourself. Instead of being angry with your body, thank your “big bottom” for cushioning you as you sit; think of your stretch marks as your tiger stripes. Find the positive in the parts of you that demand your attention.
6. Say daily positive affirmations. I love my body; my body loves me; I like my spirit; I am capable and confident.

Getting rid of your girly thoughts—now that’s being kind to you!

Why Your Girly Thoughts Tell You to Be So Darn NICE at Work

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

One of the many girly thoughts you’ll read about in The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan is about the need so many women feel to be nice at work. And this thinking severely handicaps us because we fear, justifiably, that we will be judged for demonstrating our knowledge or offering contrary opinions.

Girly Thought #11: I Need to Be Seen as Nice at Work

So to preview Day 8, which will help you “out” your negative self-talk (aka girly thoughts) at work and change your thinking and actions so you can develop the confidence you deserve, let’s look at a recent Sunday New York Times essay that examined yet another study about women and work. That’s a subject I cover extensively on Day 8 in my new book, which will be released later this month.

Work Is Not a Level Playing Field

In an essay for the Sunday New York Times, author Tara Mohr wrote about a new study conducted for a Fortune 500 Company that looked at the differences in workplace performance reviews given to men and women. The study looked at 248 performance reviews from 28 different companies and found managers (both male and female) gave more negative feedback to women than to men!

The negative feedback wasn’t about performance but about personality. In fact, 76 percent of the negative feedback included judgments that the women being evaluated were abrasive, judgmental, or strident, while only 2 percent of the men reviewed received similar negative comments about their personalities.

We Deal with These Judgments by Not Creating Conflict

So what do we do to navigate this system? Yes, we act nice. We try to be acceptable because we know we will be judged for the way we do things and not just for what we do, and that judgment will be harsh. Yet we continue to consult our inner guide—our girly thoughts—about how to act at work—except, as you know, the advice from our girly thoughts is not getting us anywhere we want to be.

I believe this is one of the reasons the new TV show Madam Secretary is gaining such widespread support: it depicts a competent woman, who doesn’t feel she needs to be liked, making tough decisions and pushing back. Refreshing, isn’t it?

Getting Real

You know it’s impossible to always be seen as “nice” at work. And being competent means risking being called the B word or one of its euphemisms. But what’s the alternative? Letting those girly thoughts get the best of you and reining in your power?

What to do?

Find a mentor, someone who can help you navigate the politics of your employment.
Seek support from other women and men who understand both your work and how hard it might be to do your job while trying to win a personality contest.
Don’t take criticism personally. This is a major struggle for women on so many levels of an organization. Let other’s criticism of you be about them, not about you.
Remember: you were hired to do the job you are doing, so do it.

As women, we are at a new point in our history where we are moving away from traditional roles and traditional ways of doing these roles, and stepping into demonstrating our competency and, as a result, our power. This will have the effect of being seen differently at work. So challenge yourself to step outside of the comfort zone that those girly thoughts provide, and experiment with being competent at work as a first priority. This could be called being nice to YOU!

Learn how to detox from your negative self-talk in The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan available for preorder now at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, HCI Books, and wherever books are sold.

A Radical and Hilarious Solution for Equal Pay – No Girly Thoughts Here!

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

Even with my book The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan being released in just days, I couldn’t resist sharing with you this funny video on the wage gap between men and women. Yes, I know this is no laughing matter. But it is so common that many women have just given up trying to address it, preferring instead to do what Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella calls trusting in the natural order.

Do Your Girly Thoughts Really Bring Good Karma?

Here’s what Nadella actually said:

It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that, I think, might be one of the additional “superpowers” that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have because that’s good karma. It’ll come back (http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/10/355100973/microsoft-ceo-nadellas-remarks-add-to-techs-sexism-problem).

What Nadella forgot was to remind women to continue to put their baby teeth under their pillow for the tooth fairy and to continue to wait for Prince Charming.

Equal Pay For Women—A No Girly Thoughts Solution

But what happens when you address a long-term problem without being hampered by those societally driven notions of how you should act and how you should look—without your girly thoughts? Well, you could wind up with a novel way of thinking through a problem that makes an important point with intelligence, creativity, and humor.

“Equal Payback Project”

The answer, I believe, is in this hilarious and irreverent video that is not for the fainthearted. It features Sarah Silverman providing a truly out-of-the-box solution to the pay inequality situation. “Equal Payback Project” is aimed at closing the wage gap between men and women.

“The project, benefiting the National Women’s Law Center, which advocates for equal pay, is essentially a giant fundraiser, with a ludicrously lofty goal of raising almost $30 trillion—a figure calculated by multiplying the 69 million working women by the amount ($435,049) each one stands to lose, on average, to the wage gap over the course of her career.

Silverman explains the project in the amusing video below. But then, realizing that goal is unlikely to be met, she embarks on an even more drastic plan to get the money she deserves”(AdWeek.com).

Not Recommended for Your Young Daughters

This is not recommended for young children, but I highly recommend you share with your girlfriends.

Enjoy! http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-sarah-silverman-wants-equal-pay-failing-she-wants-penis-nsfw-160623

And after you’ve finished watching, ask yourself, “Do I still need to rely on my girly thoughts to help me this week at work? Learn more strategies for detoxing from your negative self-talk in my new book, The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power, available for preorder now at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, HCI Books, and wherever books are sold.

The “Rule of Thumb” and Your Girly Thoughts

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

Author of The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power (publication date 10.28.14) — a fun book about a serious topic

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

The recent public awareness of NFL player Adrian Peterson hitting his four-year son with a “switch” has begun a public dialogue of how appropriate it is to hit your child. But this conversation hasn’t reached everyone. Recently a parent told me he asked the local police if it was okay to hit his fifteen- year-old. The police allegedly told him it was okay if it was with an open hand.

Is Striking Your Child Ever Okay?
The next day I heard a caller on a radio show say that a switch is better than a hand because it is less likely to cause physical harm. Hmmm . . . this sounds to me like an issue of asserting power, maybe even venting some frustration, rather than actually teaching your child a lesson, all while you can be legitimately excused from taking responsibility if you go too far. As Adrian Peterson eloquently said, he should be not be seen as a “child abuser” because he didn’t mean to hurt his son.

This discussion of child abuse—for that is what the striking of a child is, whether with an open hand or a switch—made me think about the rule of thumb.

“Legal” Spousal Abuse
Rule of thumb is a term widely used today to refer to the standard way of doing something, but the origin of this term has a dark side. Rule of thumb once referred to the width of a stick you could use to hit your wife; it was recommended that it not be thicker than a man’s thumb. Yes, before we had the concept of domestic violence, it was a common practice to keep women in line by beating them. But not too hard. After all, they still had work to do.

Yes, it is shocking how common wife beating used to be. But has this changed? We recently saw Ray Rice caught on camera beating his wife and then proclaiming he is not a wife abuser because he loves his wife—implying that the two can’t go together.

What Does Have Love Have to Do with It?
“What’s Love Got to Do with It?” is a question singer/songwriter Tina Turner asked and answered. She is a woman who also knew about being beaten by a man she loved.

Tina Turner got out of her abusive relationship. But why do other women stay? Their girly thoughts tell them physical and emotional abuse are okay if he says:

“Sorry.”
“I love you.”

and best yet,

“I didn’t mean it.”

Girly thoughts tell an abused wife or girlfriend not to make him so angry next time. They tell abused women that they are the cause of that anger, and that message fits in beautifully with him blaming you. Girly thoughts tell these victims to try to make everything nice, even when it isn’t.

If You’re In an Abusive Situation

Don’t listen to your girly thoughts. Your girly thoughts tell you its okay to be hit and then blamed or apologized to.
Contact your local domestic violence agency to get support and begin to plan what to do. Don’t know how to contact your local agency? Check your phone book or contact http://www.thehotline.org, which is currently experiencing a large number of women calling due to the recent publicity of how widespread domestic abuse is.
If you’re concerned about whether the way your child was treated constitutes child abuse, call your local child abuse hotline (listed in information or your phone book). Check for symptoms of child abuse on http://www.childhelp.org/programs/entry/national-child-abuse-hotline/. They are the experts.

Don’t let your girly thoughts immobilize you. Get information. Take planned action.

Recover from Your Girly Thoughts

By Patricia O’Gorman, PhD

Author of The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide to Saying NO to Negative Self-Talk and YES to Personal Power (publication date 10.28.14)

The Resilient Woman: Mastering the 7 Steps to Personal Power (2013)

Healing Trauma Through Self-Parenting—The Codependency Connection (2012)

September is Recovery Month. We’ve had an entire month of reminders that we can change how we feel by changing our actions, our friends, even our diets. Hmmm?

Recovery is a different process than a cure, and much as we would like a cure for depression, addiction, and even our own negative thinking, there just isn’t one. But we have something that in some ways is even better.

Instead of being cured by something done to you, you get to do something to yourself that changes you and brings you into wellness. And you get to invite others into the party that is your wholeness.

Recovery involves paradoxes, one of which is that recovery is a process that only you can do, but you can’t do alone. Recovery involves utilizing your community to develop the support you need to make the changes you require to live the life you deserve. Recovery is so much better than a cure because it connects you to others who share the same struggles.

Detox From Your Inner Trash Talk (Girly Thoughts)

Your inner trash talk, your girly thoughts, are those societally informed thoughts that tell you if you are not perfect in your looks, in your actions, that any negative response you receive is your fault.

It’s time to detox from those and start your recovery! That recovery, too, is a paradox. Only you can do it, but you also can’t do it alone.

Yes, you need your girlfriends and even your guy friends, and maybe even your family, to support you in the process of:

Identifying those thoughts that tear you down and make you responsible for the poor actions of another, such as an abusive boyfriend or a mean boss
Naming these unproductive thinking as girly thoughts
Realizing that you are not the only person who is thinking them, so you can stop thinking you are nuts
Learning to replace this inner trash talk with thoughts that support you.

So as we approach the end of Recovery Month, celebrate by making recovery work for you. Join the process. Get support for feeling better by changing how you speak to the person closest to you: yourself. Recover from your girly thoughts!