How to Go From Poison to Peace: Healing the Voice Inside Your Head

Issue 125. July 4, 2025 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

How to Purify the Well: From Negative Self-Talk to Loving Yourself

If you’ve heard me speak before, you may remember this metaphor: negative self-talk is like poison in the well. It seeps into everything. And when we stop the self-hate, the guilt, the critical voice in our heads, it’s like we stop adding more poison to that well.

But if we want to actually purify that well, not just stop the damage but actively heal it, we have to do more. That’s where affirmations come in. They act like a fast-track filtration system for your inner world.

I know. If you think affirmations sound cheesy or fake, I hear you. I used to think that too. But what I’ve learned in over a decade of recovery is this: just because I think something doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, the opposite is often true, especially when it comes to what I think about myself.

My Mind Still Makes Shit Up

Here’s an example. I’m in a deeply loving, functional, healthy romantic relationship. I mean it. And yet, my mind will still serve up thoughts that are total garbage, stories about my partner that have nothing to do with who he is or anything he’s ever done.

Like the time I woke up in the middle of the night, and the pillow I sleep with between my legs was missing. My first thought? “That fucker stole my pillow.” (Yes, really.)

Meanwhile, the guy was asleep. The pillow had just fallen on my side of the bed. But my mind is wired to blame, to create distance, to stay separate. That’s the disease talking.

In recovery, we sometimes say, “My disease wants me dead. And if it can’t have me dead, it will settle for me being miserable.” Because when we’re miserable, we’re a lot more likely to return to old coping mechanisms.

That’s why what I think isn’t always worth listening to.

Thoughts Are Not Facts

One of the biggest breakthroughs I’ve had in recovery is learning to talk to myself more than I listen to myself.

If I only ever listen to the background audio in my head, the old programming, the limiting beliefs, the fear, I will act like a victim. I’ll believe people are against me. I’ll start making things mean things they don’t.

Years ago, if someone gave me an unwrapped Christmas gift, I’d tell myself it meant they didn’t care. Today? When someone I love said, “I didn’t have time to wrap your gift,” I took it at face value. They were busy, and they cared enough to tell me ahead of time.

That shift, from making it about me to seeing it as something about them, is recovery in action.

Building a Relationship Without Wedges

Before recovery, I believed my thoughts and then acted as if they were true. If I thought someone disrespected me, I might shut them out or punish them in some subtle way. I built walls. I kept score. I distanced myself without ever checking if the story in my head was actually true.

Now, especially in my relationship, I speak up. I name things. If I’m having a rough day, I let my partner know — not to blame him, but to help him understand where I’m at. That way, if I seem short, he knows it’s not about him.

Doing this keeps the well between us clear. No sediment. No grit. No build-up.

It’s not enmeshment. We each have strong boundaries and independent lives. But there’s nothing hidden between us. I feel transparent, open, and truly known. That’s what intimacy can feel like when we clean up the well.

You Can Choose Your Thoughts

One of the things I teach my clients is that we can choose our thoughts. When we do, we move from being reactors to actors in our own lives.

Affirmations are one way to do that. You don’t have to believe them right away. You just have to say them consistently.

And if you’re rolling your eyes thinking, “But I don’t believe them,” here’s a tip I learned from Brooke Castillo: scaffold your way there.

If you’ve spent your whole life saying, “I hate my body,” it’s a huge leap to say “I love my body” and believe it. But you can start with something neutral like, “I have a body.”

That one small shift turns off the poison tap. It starts to filter the well. Over time, you might move from “I have a body,” to “My body carries me through life,” to “I’m learning to care for my body,” and eventually to “I love my body.”

The magic isn’t in faking it. The magic is in choosing to treat yourself as someone worth talking kindly to, even when you don’t believe it yet.

Mirror Work and Magic Moments

When I first started doing mirror work, I would cry. It felt awkward, raw, even shameful to look in the mirror and say, “I love you just the way you are.” But I did it anyway.

Now? I do it just about every day when I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I smile (this little impish smile) and I say it again: “I love you Barb, just the way you are.”

And I mean it.

I also have a photo of little me in a frame on my dresser with a sticky note that says, “I love you just the way you are.” I see it every morning. And every morning, I remind that little girl she is loved. I do that in my reparenting work in my mind just about every morning too.

That, my friends, is magic.

Loving Yourself Looks Like This

Loving myself now means I don’t put up with shitty behavior.

I don’t spend time with toxic people.

I take myself out of harm’s way. I spend time with people who love and like me. Because I believe I deserve that.