Break Free
Posted in Things I Don't Understand on July 27th, 2007 by Erin DietrichWhy are we so hard on ourselves? While listening to a friend list all of her faults, plus some, I realized that if she could truly hear what she was saying about herself she would be appalled. It occurred to me, in a horrifying way, that she was in an abusive relationship – herself starring as both victim and abuser. I started paying attention, and was shocked to realize just how common angry, hurtful self-talk is.
Do any of these phrases sound familiar? “I’m not witty enough to talk to them.” “I’m too fat to be wearing that.” “I’m so lazy, no wonder I’m are not succeeding.” “No sense even trying, I’m a loser and she’ll never like me.” “Why bother, they’ll never hire someone like me.” Have you said such things to yourself? What else are you saying?
Imagine if a mate spoke to you this way. Really, go back over the list and picture the person you are closest with saying these same phrases to you. You would be appalled to have someone like this in your life. Friends and family would urge you to leave them immediately. If strangers overheard such a conversation they may even feel inclined to intervene. However, we let ourselves quietly get away with it.
I encourage you to truly listen to yourself. It may be horrifying the first time you hear what you are saying. It was for me. If you are brave, write them down, or better yet, try saying them out loud. This is an effective way to get a reality check. If you want to take it to the next level, tell a trusted friend all that you are saying to yourself. Watch their reaction. Shouldn’t you be alarmed too?
Really, try this. Just doing it for a day is enough to see how ridiculous it is. You should be your biggest advocate, not your worst enemy. What I can’t figure out is why we treat ourselves this way. Is it a deep seeded fear of being unworthy? Is it a fear that we do not belong in the world? Or, deeper yet, are we scared of our true power as human beings, and thus are trying to stifle it?
July 27th, 2007 at 6:31 am
A very good point and exercise. People are a lot more magnificent than they realize normally, and to beat up on yourself like that is practically inexcusable. The good news is that life gets a lot better when you finally smash that “broken record”.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:43 am
It can indeed be rather humorous to listen to our own justifications for certain behavior. For example, just ask yourself why you feel you need to be a certain weight, earn a certain amount of money, drive through the orange light before it turns red, get to the post office before closing, get revenge on someone who wronged you, and all those other things that you make up in your head. What if you told yourself all your reasoning was hogwash and you were simply creating another illusion?
July 27th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Friends and family would urge you to leave them immediately.
My friends and family would probably urge me to leave myself immediately, too, but it’s a lot harder to do!
Seriously, I am much harder on myself than anyone else is, or at least anyone else that I care about at all. I tend to take the blame for anything that goes wrong around me. Of course, according to subjective reality, apparently I am to blame.
It helps when you take your quiet time, but there are mental habits that you really need to break… it’s just that it’s not only hard to break them, it’s also hard to keep from reforming them even if you do break them. Plus it’s hard to figure out HOW to break them, and then gather the necessary mental energy to begin the process.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Erin, you are SO RIGHT about this!!
Imagine saying the things to a friend that we say to ourselves. And then there is the moping. We come home, feeling down on ourselves and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for ourselves. Imagine having your best friend over for dinner and doing the same. It’s insane! And yet we do this to ourselves every day, day in and day out.
Great post!
July 28th, 2007 at 1:19 am
Thanks Dan! Jenny and I were talking about this, and discussed the converse. Is it possible to fall in love with yourself all over again? Not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that we cherish and treat ourselves the way we want others to treat us. Why do we wait until we have that “special someone” to go to movies, get a new haircut, cook a special meal or watch the sunset. Can’t we do this with ourselves?
Yes Jon, it’s kind of like breaking that old record, isn’t it? It’s tough though when you know it so well.
Jason, I hear you on the difficulty of figuring out how to break them. Sometimes I find myself feeling like I’m chasing my tail. For me, how is one of the toughest parts.
July 28th, 2007 at 7:12 am
The idea that we all have potential to change is undeniable. However, its not as easy for each of us to see deeply enough into ourselves to recognize destructive patterns. People around us may tell us what is good or bad for us, but the trick is to listen to our inner voice and make decisions for ourselves that aren’t clouded by unhelpful bias.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
I agree Liara. However, when we are stuck in a place we want to change, sometimes that inner voice is hard to hear and decipher from the other voices. If we knew which one was the voice of reason, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves in the bind in the first place.
I use my friends often to help sort through this. (Okay, truth be told, it is usually Jenny). Not only can they help weed through the internal voices, especially when you are in a tough place, and have a hard time even trusting yourself, but can also be used as a sounding board to hear yourself talk. Often I have had great insight after just speaking words out loud.
July 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
When I’ve noticed the times when I criticise myself it’s usually in an attempt to talk myself into doing something that I think it is going to be painful. It seems to be a habitual form of “tough love”. I’m not sure why that would be because my parents were never that way to me. They pretty much gave me free rein. The first image that comes to mind is American sitcoms in which someone criticises themselves aloud in a humourous kind of way. I suspect it was the influence of mainstream media that conditioned my own self-criticism. Except I’m missing the canned laughter…
And it also doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how much I criticised myself I rarely changed my behaviour unless I found a reason to. I eventually realised this and gradually stopped criticising myself, at least in some situations.
It still happens, mainly when I’m being lazy. It still doesn’t help get me moving sometimes :p
July 29th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
[…] describing a study which looked into why we feel guilty. I noticed it because of Erin’s recent post asking why we criticise ourselves so […]
July 31st, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Mark, I agree that we often confuse criticism with motivation. I used to believe that if I wasn’t hard on myself I wouldn’t succeed. But this just isn’t true, ask any parent or teacher, praise it what motivates. So why is it so natural to act the other way?
July 31st, 2007 at 7:58 pm
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, as well as research to show that we experience negative emotions more than we do positive. And that negative emotions are necessary for normal development. Take pain as an example (not really an emotion, but still relevant). There are cases of people born without the ability to experience pain. They never learn to avoid doing things that break bones or burn skin, even after it happens a few times they keep doing it to themselves.
I think that at the most basic level, we put ourselves through suffering because we know we learn to avoid suffering by experiencing the pain it causes. Minor suffering may teach us to avoid major suffering, and personal experience of suffering is necessary for creating the automatic responses which drive us. But we lose track of what kinds of suffering are effective teachers, hence pointless self-criticism.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Very nicely put Mark, thank you.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:52 am
I agree, Mark, with your last comment, but it’s also not just that we lose track of what kinds of suffering are effective teachers, we also just get in the habit of causing ourselves to suffer, and forget that it’s only motivational/educational in SMALL doses. It’s not intended to be our normal state, it’s intended to be an occasional prod in the right direction.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:02 am
True Jason, it’s a prod towards our normal state.
Interestingly in uni today we looked at a study which hypothesised that negative emotions act as a prompt to change direction, while positive emotions act as an indication that you’re on the right course.
That’s possibly one reason we notice negative thoughts more than positive ones, because they prompt us to do something (or realise we’re not doing something) whereas the positive thoughts just say, “keep going”. In the latter case nothing changes so there’s less to draw our attention.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:16 pm
The problem is when we close our eyes and keep going forward, anyway. Pain, whether mental, physical, or emotional (and generally, negative emotions can be classified as “pain”) is an indication to stop what you’re doing and do something else. Inertia, on the other hand fights against this, as does the whole “overcoming obstacles mentality” (meaning the tendency to push on, to see changing course as admitting weakness).
So essentially, pain is an indicator to change course, as you said, but there are a couple of conflicting tendencies within us that cause us to stay in the pain instead.
August 5th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Jason, it is interesting you bring up pain. Jenny and I were just throwing around the idea this morning that pain may actually be an indicator that you should keep on going. Is it possible that the pain is indicating a need to push through something, and what one is actually feeling is the uncomfortable sensations associated with growth?
August 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Pain is almost never, if ever, a sign you should keep on going. Pain CAN be associated with growth, but it’s associated by means of telling you “Slow down, so you can heal up and absorb what you’ve already done”. Think of it in terms of working out… you work out to grow, but then if you feel pain, it’s your body saying it’s time to stop, so that it can heal and build new muscle. If you keep going, you over train and build no muscle, and can even lose muscle you already have.
The same goes for mental pain. It’s a sign that it’s time to stop and let your mind heal. For instance, you can feel pain when you lose a loved one. That pain is telling you it’s time to stop, allow yourself to heal, and then move forward once again. Same goes for depression… it’s a sign that you need to stop and deal with what you already have, particularly the stuff you have buried/suppressed.
The uncomfortable sensations associated with growth are from the need to have recovery from growth already sustained. They are NOT directly a part of the growth, their a sign you may be growing too fast. After all, you don’t hurt when you’re growing up from your normal growth, only when you have a really fast growth spurt, when your body is straining more than it can sustain.
I hope I didn’t sound repetitive there. I think you may have just inspired my next article, by the way.
August 5th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
By the way, how do you get so many comments? I mean, I realize I leave a lot of them, but I wish I got more on my blog. I even had an article go viral, and haven’t really gotten any comments
Maybe I don’t leave enough questions open or something. Oh well, one of these days I’ll figure out how to make more of my visitors comment and subscribe
August 5th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I think that uncomfortable sensations associated with growth may also be reluctance to put in the effort required to create that growth. In that case the mental pain *is* something to push through (in which case I agree with Erin). Either that, or re-evaluate your goal so that you’re motivated enough to no longer experience that mental pain (which could be considered letting the mind heal, depending on the circumstance).
August 6th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Jason,
You make some valid points. Extreme pain may be a sign to slow down in some cases. What comes to mind is Jenny’s recent bout with blisters. Yes, we let that pain stop our walking for the week; however, we are not letting us stop the overall walking dare. We are just figuring out how to readjust.
That being said, I still would argue that pain is a sign of progress, not the opposite. Does it come down to semantics? Maybe we just don’t have the right words.
Mark, I like the idea of re-evaluating a goal so motivation carries you past the mental pain. That seems to require a lot of upfront and intentional work, but pays off in the long run.
Regardless of if the pain is a signifier of growth or like Jason said an indication to stop, I think the key is to avoid making big decisions while amidst the pain. These choices seem to alway be somewhat frantic. I think it is important to allow the pain to settle so you have a clear head when trying to figure out the next step.
August 6th, 2007 at 7:39 am
P.S. Jason, I’m not sure why you don’t get comments. Your content is interesting and does pose great questions. I will have to do something thinking about that.
August 6th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Perhaps it is a matter of distinction between pain and discomfort? I know personally that I often don’t distinguish carefully when describing things such as an uncomfortable conversation or arguement for instance. Not so smart as they are actually radically different things. Possibly the same thing going on here with word choice?
August 7th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Here’s my explanation… we don’t really disagree, we’re just wording it differently (Yes, semantics :P).
The Truth About Pain
August 7th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Wow Jason, you are quick! Yes, it does look like it’s mainly semantics; however I am sticking to my guns on this one!
August 7th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
You’re sticking to your guns? Perhaps you should find some solvent and “break free”.
