Originally Posted by
LifeRecovery 
A lot of your list I have done (and had it work for me).
That's helpful to hear.
I just wanted to name that the part I had to do first was acknowledge it, but also get curious about it. What exactly is it saying?
Someone in my former AA group who had very strong recovery used to do this, too. I never really understood what it meant to "get curious about it." Where did you learn to do this?
I am notorious for having delayed reactions to things (so a lot of my negative talk was from hours, days or weeks before. What is the time frame that it is actually responding to? Who had said something like that to me before? Where had I gotten that message?
That's very interesting. The majority of my negative self talk was from childhood messages that still replayed. I am so curious to hear how you learned to ask yourself these questions.
In my step work, I was taught that the self-critical messages were "lies I told myself", put there by spiritually sick people and that these messages were not of God. That helped a lot at the time.
That did not mean I could "fix" it right away, but it allowed me to continue to ask why and that regularly lead me to unexpected places which in the big picture allowed me to fix it.
Is that CBT? I vaguely remember doing something like this in therapy with getting to the root of negative self talk by asking questions. I also found it wasn't as easy to fix as just doing it once. I had to practice.