"I do my best and I am enough." ~ Unknown
I don't know about you, but I've realized that historically I've treated myself harsher than anyone – and I've been in my share of abusive relationships.
I have adhered to ridiculous standards, pushed myself to do and do more than I can reasonably be able to do, and fought myself over minor mistakes as if I didn't deserve my own respect or compassion. As a result of this emotional abuse, I have physically abused myself through bulimia, binge drinking, and smoking – all in an attempt to numb the pain of my past and my punishing inner voice.
I know that I'm not alone with this. And I also know that it is not our fault that we have been conditioned to treat ourselves so cruelly, but it is our responsibility to recognize the wounds that have formed us and do the work to heal .
The first step is to understand why and when we judge ourselves, and from there to take steps to change how we talk to ourselves – which ultimately changes the way we talk about ourselves treat yourself. Why do we judge ourselves?
8 reasons why we judge ourselves
1. We have an idea of who and where we should be, and we blame ourselves when our reality does not match – as if we are solely responsible for everything we experience in life.
In a world with rigid definitions of success and constant exposure to everyone else's accomplishments, it is easy to believe that you are failing and falling behind – and it is all your fault.
Especially if you live in an individualistic culture like the US, you might feel that you have to be special to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and be successful on a large scale – with an endless feed of #nofilter selfies to to prove that you live a good life.
The alternative is to recognize that we alone are not responsible for our "success". There are many factors that are beyond our control, and we each have different advantages and disadvantages.
Also, nobody who is traditionally successful came there alone. Lots of "successful" people have hundreds of fingerprints on their bootstraps – you just don't hear about them in interviews that mostly focus on all the things that a person did to get them where they are today.
The next time you are tempted to compare your life to this ideal that looks good on paper – which may not even make you happy if it does not match your personal values and priorities – remind yourself that you can only control your efforts ;; The result is not in your hands and is not a reflection of you personally.
And your happiness does not depend on performance, otherwise there would not be so many rich and powerful people struggling with depression and addiction. Your happiness depends on how you experience that day – what activities you choose, what time you spend with people you love, and how kind you are to yourself in your head.
Instead of beating yourself up for not “living your best life,” instead take the shortcut to happiness and make the most of the life you are living now.
2. We judge our worth based on our performance and our mistakes, as if we are what we do.
Building on the previous point, we think we need to prove our worth through success and worry that our worst moments will define us.
This is a habit that I know all too well. I grew up hungry for the approval I got when I succeeded and desperate to avoid the disappointment that came with falling short.
I learned that if I failed or made a mistake, it was not because I did something wrong, but because I was wrong. I didn't feel guilty about what I'd done or failed to do, I was ashamed of being the kind of person who kept messing things up.
Ironically, I then learned to punish myself when I was ashamed, which then led to shame-inducing behaviors – like binge drinking to numb my pain, and then feeling bad about how I behaved when drunk , and then binge eating to numb me that shame.
A vicious circle arises that we can only break if we learn to separate our actions and efforts from our identity and to recognize that "good" people sometimes make "bad" decisions or have "bad" moments – and Love and empathy still deserve.
It is a practice, not a one-time change of thinking, and it gets easier when we work on …
3. We have difficulty accepting ourselves for who we are because we are based on the false belief that we are not good enough.
Perhaps you developed this belief because it looked like nothing you did as an adult was right – either because your parents were difficult to please or because they constantly compared you to a high performing sibling.
Or maybe someone told you directly that you are not good enough. Emotional abuse has normalized a bit because it's a pattern that people repeat based on what they experienced as adults. And because it doesn't leave any visible scars, it's easy to justify cruelty as necessary to maintain control and encourage "good" behavior.
Realize that this belief is not a fact. And it has nothing to do with who you are. A little Buddha associate named Marie once wrote about her revelation when she realized that she would have treated her the same way if her mother had had another child. So it wasn't that Marie wasn't good enough. it was that her mother just couldn't love her the way she deserved.
When you can begin to try this new belief in greatness, you can change the monologue in your head from the cruel voice of someone who mistreated you to the loving voice you deserve to hear – a sensitive one Answer after another.
4. We think we have to be perfect in order to be lovable, and every sign of imperfection triggers the fear of losing love.
Traditional parenting promotes the idea of withholding affection when children are "misbehaving" (which is often just a misguided attempt to process their feelings and meet their needs).
In the extreme, this could mean corporal punishment, but even tastier disciplinary approaches like “time off” can feel like a loss of love – as if our parents tell us that we don't deserve attention or affection if our behavior disappoints them.
And it is not just the parent-child relationship that teaches us that only acceptable behaviors bring us love. You may have learned the same thing in a relationship with an emotionally abusive person where you were blocked from saying or doing the "wrong" thing.
There is no coating: some people will reject us if we do not meet their expectations, as we have seen in the past. So the goal is not to reverse the belief that if we are imperfect we may lose love. It's about loving ourselves even when other people don't or don't act like that.
This is not easy when we constantly go against the belief that we deserve to be abused (for this is how our younger brains understood the pain we have suffered).
I remember a line from a movie that I really liked: The daughter of a father who left her said something like, “The crazy thing is you don't grow up and wonder :, What's wrong with him? "You wonder," What's wrong with me? "
Isn't that what most of us do? Look at the way people treated us and wonder what we did to deserve it. As a result, self-hatred and / or self-flagellation becomes a deeply ingrained habit that brings me to my next point …
5. We believe that self-judgment and self-labeling are effective tools to motivate us to get better.
We have adjusted to believe that we have to beat ourselves up to do better – maybe because we are repeating the pattern we lived in our youth (failure -> punishment -> expectation of improvement).
This reminds me of a quote that has guided my educational philosophy:
“How did we ever get the crazy idea that children have to feel worse first in order to be better? Think about the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like working together or doing better? "~ Jane Nelson
At least for me the answer is no! I never feel like doing better when I am deeply ashamed. But that's how I feel when I lie down. I suspect the same is true of you.
Even if we manage to encourage some positive change through self-assessment and complacency, we are unlikely to feel good about it because we will judge those changes with the same inner cruelty – because we think our progress is not good enough or not going fast enough.
The alternative is to motivate ourselves as we would motivate someone we never want to hurt. I find it helpful to visualize the five year old version of myself. That innocent little girl who did her best and always feared it wasn't good enough.
I imagine myself holding her, looking into her tear-filled eyes and telling her that everything is fine. It's okay that she screwed up. It's okay if it's not perfect. It's okay to be exactly who and where she is because I'm going to love her anyway. And that love will help her grow.
6. We have adopted beliefs about what is good and bad and right and wrong – e.g. B: Good people don't get angry, it's wrong to put yourself first – and we judge ourselves if we don't conform to these beliefs.
We all believe what is good and right, which is due to our previous conditioning, and because we want to be good people (to be worthy, to be loved, to belong), we experience immense inner discomfort when we think we & # 39; do something "wrong".
In the end, we stuff our feelings down and ignore our needs – while judging ourselves for everything we are desperately trying to suppress.
These feelings and needs do not go away. As Little Buddha Contributor Marlena Tillhon wrote, when we are ashamed and oppressed, feelings of anger show up in other ways. This allows us to feel intense fear instead of communicating our frustration to someone, or we can feel depressed instead of setting boundaries with people who are disrespectful to us.
And as far as our needs are concerned, if we do not meet them, we end up feeling angry with other people and situations, instead of having the fears that lead us to neglect ourselves and our responsibility for overcoming them.
Now we are judging ourselves while navigating an emotional land mine to avoid feeling bad or wrong.
The alternative is to recognize the beliefs that guide us, acknowledge that they are not facts, and overcome the discomfort of possessing our feelings and needs.
I know it's not an easy task – I often feel guilty about fear because at a young age I assumed the belief that fear was a sign of weakness, which brings me to my next point …
7. We bought into social stigmas – that mental health problems aren't real, or addicts are weak – and fought each other for our struggles.
We live in a world of judgment, so it is only natural that we join these scars and judge ourselves harshly.
Questioning these scars can feel like swimming against a current. We have to allow ourselves to believe that the majority (or what feels like the majority) is wrong. And we need to learn to give less weight to what other people think about us in general.
For a long time struggling with bulimia, I exacerbated my self-loathing by telling myself that bulimics were gross – something I had internalized from outside messages I had received. I believed binging was a sign of my lack of self-control, and flushing was a sign of my inherent repulsive power.
I remember curling up in a pouch of vomit on my first day of art therapy in a long term treatment program. Because that's how I saw myself: disgusting … disposable … garbage.
It was impossible to heal with these beliefs that drove my self-awareness. Until I empathized with myself, I would keep hurting myself one way or another because I would keep believing that I deserved to be hurt.
It was a great revelation for me when I realized that part of me actually wanted to be hurt, which brings me to my final point …
8. We are addicted to feeling bad and have essentially repetitively trained our brains to think negatively about ourselves.
Normally, in the case of addiction, our reward system is activated when we experience a dopamine intoxication, which is why we repeat the behavior over and over again. Not feeling bad in any way feels good, but it may feel familiar, and it can be our default mode because we've reinforced it through repetition.
If you keep telling yourself that you are a failure, then when you do something hard – then create a self-fulfilling prophecy by letting your insecurities hold you back – you feel nervous about doing something hard – that basically you are entangled in a cycle of beliefs that influence behavior that then strengthens belief.
I've been here many times, especially in relation to social situations. I was bullied as a kid and in response an authority figure said, "If I were your age, I wouldn't be your friend." So I learned to believe that nobody would like me and this resulted in a social awkwardness that made it difficult to get in touch with people.
Because I thought people would not like me, I made it difficult to get to know me and no one had a chance to like me. But that felt safe. Because if they didn't know me, they couldn't hurt me. Unfortunately, I could still get hurt – and would keep hurting myself until I decided I didn't have to live the story that I was not lovable. And I didn't have to reinforce myself by treating myself that way.
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Overcoming self-judgment is hard work and is not carried out overnight. It can take years to recognize and change our beliefs and patterns, and it can be a process of two steps forward, one step back – or maybe one step forward, five steps back.
The beauty of the difficulty inherent in this process is that it gives us countless opportunities to practice loving ourselves – or at least being kind to ourselves – through struggle.
So celebrate your victories, no matter how small, and see the chance in your missteps, no matter how big they are. It's the whole path to healing, which can be incredibly dark and scary, even though it leads to light. So we deserve a lot of credit for being brave enough to take it.
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This is the final post in a five-part letting go series that repeats the themes of my $ 99 Guided Meditation / EFT Tapping Package – now available as a FREE bonus with Tiny Buddha's Mindfulness Kit (which is now available for $ 39). The first post to introduce the series is here, the second post on letting go of approval here, the third post on letting go of the need to control people and life here, and the final post on letting go of stress and pressure here.
The Mindfulness Kit contains four aromatherapy-based products, a guide for daily meditation practice and three digital guides for daily rest .
Are you ready to find peace in your busy mind? Get the Mindfulness Kit and get instant access to the meditations and digital bonuses here.
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