Rational Self Counselling

This is a post to follow up on the Rational and Irrational Thoughts post last week.  Our belief systems are the basis of self-talk. Our belief systems can change but have been building up throughout our life.  What we believe comes from our upbringing, spiritual beliefs, events, traumas, and from various other influences.  Therefore what we believe about ourselves and others may need to be challenged.  In my case an entire overhaul was needed.  What I believed determined my feelings and it played out like this:
AN EVENT --   BELIEF SYSTEM  --  FEELINGS  (--  ACTION/ NO ACTION)

There would be an event, let's say a criticism.  Then my belief system kicks in which is my self talk and my irrational thinking (she's always on my back, everyone's trying to drag me down, no one understands me, they're jealous).  After that comes my feelings and based on that self-talk and thinking I have a feelings of anger, betrayal, "not good enough", maybe even hate?  Often we can act on these feelings by saying or doing something we later regret.
Now let's switch it up; we're going to change the self-talk and have rational thinking:
So, the same event; a criticism. Then my belief system kicks which is my self-talk and rational thinking (I agree I need to work on that, what are their motivations for saying that? she's trying to help me, she is my friend so it's from a good place, that must have been hard for her to say, ... or they don't know me and just because they say it doesn't make it true). Then come the feeling which could be anywhere from embarrassed to thankful to neutral, depending on the criticism and the person delivering it.
So, to recap: EVENT  --  BELIEF SYSTEM  --  FEELINGS   then comes the choice to act or not.  So by being mindful of our beliefs and then challenging them and feelings we can change how we feeling and then our response or lack of response.
I spent a lot of time looking for an opportunity to be insulted. It was just my belief that the world was against me and life's only good for other people. Because of the traumas and events in my life I had no real self esteem. Well it took a lot of mindfulness, meditating, writing about my feelings, talking about them. I started to try and wait before responding in situations, being mindful of my self-talk.  Nothing worthwhile is easy but this was so worthwhile to me. Changing my belief system will take the rest of my life, funny, that's just how long I have.  <3 Bonnie J