Counseling can help you become more aware of repetitive patterns of behavior and beliefs that lead to undesired outcomes. Self-defeating behavior is usually unconscious.
Therapy brings these behaviors into awareness and helps you learn new ways of thinking and behaving by using positive self-talk and imagery to respond to emotional distress in a more healthy way.
Negative self-talk becomes so ingrained that it reinforces a vicious cycle of eliciting evidence from the world that confirms and maintains negative ideas about the self. By exaggerating the experience of self-deprecation and judgment, individuals create more distress for themselves which actually prevents them from correcting what is believed to be the cause of their discontent.
