In low self-esteem, self-critical thinking follows the sense that negative beliefs about the self (the Bottom Line) have been confirmed by experience. It contributes to keeping low self-esteem going because it triggers feelings like guilt, shame and depression, and so perpetuates activation of the Bottom Line.
People with low self-esteem are hard on themselves. For them, self-criticism may be more or less a way of life. They call themselves names, tell themselves they should do better and put themselves down whenever things go wrong. They are on the lookout for every little weakness and mistake. These are not a part of normal frailty or natural human error – they are evidence of inadequacy or failure, a sign that one is simply not good enough. People with low self-esteem criticize themselves for all the things they should be doing and aren’t – and for all the things they should not be doing and are. They may even criticize themselves for being so critical.
People with low self-esteem notice some difficulty, or something wrong about themselves, and on that basis make judgments about themselves as whole people (‘stupid’, ‘incompetent’, ‘unattractive’, ‘rotten mother’, etc.). These judgments completely ignore the other side of the picture, aspects of themselves which are not consistent with the judgment. The end result is a biased point of view, rather than a balanced perspective. And the bias expresses itself in self-critical thoughts.
Self-critical thoughts result in painful feelings (sadness, disappointment, anger, guilt), and keep low self-esteem going. Take Jim, for example, the man who accidentally knocked down and killed a woman who stepped off the pavement in front of him (page 46). At one point, after several months of being troubled by what happened, Jim had a few days of feeling considerably better. The accident seemed to be playing on his mind rather less, and he had been feeling more relaxed, more on top of things and like his normal self.
Then, one day, his daughter was very late home from school. Jim was terrified. He was certain something terrible had happened to her. In fact, he had forgotten that she was going to a friend’s house. When she came in, he went ballistic. Afterwards, he felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. What a way to behave! ‘This proves it,’ he thought. ‘I am really losing it. I’m a total mess.’ He felt more and more upset. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he said to himself. ‘This is pathetic. Get a grip.’ The episode confirmed his worst suspicions about himself: he was a neurotic wreck, there was no doubt about it. And there seemed little chance of change. Jim was just about ready to give up.
You can get some sense of the emotional impact of self-critical thoughts by carrying out the following experiment. Read the list of words printed below, carefully, allowing each to sink in. Imagine they apply to you, and notice their impact on your confidence, and on your mood:
Self-critical thinking undermines any positive sense of self and pulls you down. Some of the words on the list may even be familiar to you, from your own self-critical thoughts. If so, underline them. What other words do you use to describe yourself when you are being self-critical? Make a note of them. These are words you will need to watch out for.
This chapter will move you towards a more balanced and accepting view of yourself by helping you to learn to notice when you are being self-critical, and to observe carefully the impact self-criticism has on your feelings and how you operate in day-to-day situations. This is the part of the vicious circle we shall be working on:
Figure 14 The vicious circle: The role of self-criticism in keeping low self-esteem going
You will learn how to question self-critical thoughts and search for alternatives, just as you learned to question your anxious predictions. You will also need to learn to become more aware of positive aspects of yourself, and to pay more attention to your strengths, assets, qualities and talents. You will find ideas on how to go about this in the next chapter.
In many cultures, self-criticism is viewed as a good and useful thing. This idea is captured in sayings like ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, which suggests that the road to growth is through correction and punishment. People sometimes fear that thinking well of yourself will lead to boasting and big-headedness (we will return to this idea later, in the chapter on enhancing self-acceptance). So children are taught to behave better and work harder by having their faults emphasized, rather than by having their virtues and successes highlighted and praised. Parents and teachers may spend their time pointing out what children have done wrong, instead of helping them to build on what they have done right. This may breed a sense that self-criticism is the only thing that keeps one on the straight and narrow – stop, and you could sink into a swamp of smug self-indulgence and never achieve anything worthwhile, ever again.
So self-critical thinking is often learned early in life. It becomes a habit, a knee-jerk reaction, of which you may not even be fully aware. You may even see it as helpful and constructive – the royal road to self-improvement. This idea is worth exploring in some detail. You will discover that, in fact, self-criticism has a number of serious disadvantages.
Imagine a person you know who is quite self-confident. Imagine following them around, pointing out every little mistake they make, telling them what they have done is all very well but could have been done better/faster/more effectively, calling them names and telling them to ignore or discount anything that went well, any successes or achievements. As the days and weeks went by, what impact would you expect this constant drip, drip, drip of criticism to have? How would they feel? How would it affect their confidence in their ability to cope and succeed in life? How would it influence their ability to make decisions and take initiatives? Would it make life easier for them or more difficult? Would you even consider doing this to a friend of yours? If not, why not?
If you have the habit of self-critical thinking, then this is probably what you are doing to yourself, perhaps without even being particularly aware of it. Self-critical thoughts are like a parrot on your shoulder, constantly squawking disapproval in your ear. Consider how this may be discouraging and demoralizing you, and paralyzing your efforts to change and grow.
Being self-critical means that you react to even small mistakes, failures or errors of judgment as if they told the whole story about you. Your radar for faults and weaknesses is highly sensitive and, when you detect one, you use it as a cue to write yourself off. You tell yourself you are bad, pathetic or stupid as a person. Is this fair?
In fact, you are made up of millions of actions, feelings and thoughts – some good, some bad and some indifferent. When you condemn yourself as a person on the basis of an error or something you regret, you are drawing a general conclusion about yourself on the basis of biased evidence, taking only negative aspects of yourself into account. Be realistic: give yourself credit for your assets and strengths as well as acknowledging that, like the rest of the human race, you have weaknesses and flaws.
Self-criticism undermines your confidence and makes you feel down, discouraged, demoralized and bad about yourself. Far from helping you to overcome problems, it prevents you from thinking clearly about yourself and your life and altering those aspects of yourself you genuinely want to change. Generally speaking, people learn more when their successes are rewarded, praised and encouraged than when they are criticized and punished for their failures. Self-criticism simply points you in the direction of what you did wrong and makes you feel bad – it does not give you any clues as to how to do better next time. If you only pay attention to what you do wrong, you lose the opportunity to learn from and repeat what you do right. Similarly, if you write yourself off every time you make an error, you lose the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and to work constructively on aspects of yourself that you wish to change.
When things go wrong, in addition to criticizing yourself for what you did, you probably tell yourself you should have acted differently. Perhaps you are right in thinking that acting differently would have been in your best interests. With hindsight, it is often easy to see how one could have handled things better. But how did things appear to you at the time? In reality, the chances are that you had good reasons for acting as you did, even if in the end your course of action turned out to be mistaken, misguided or regrettable. Given all the circumstances (you were tired, you were not thinking clearly, you did not have all the information you needed to deal with the situation in the best possible way), you should have acted exactly as you did.
This does not mean letting yourself off the hook if you genuinely did do something worthy of regret, or ignoring genuine mistakes you have made. If you can see things more clearly in retrospect, use your new insight to learn from the experience. Then, if a similar situation arises again, you will have a different perspective on how to deal with it. But brooding on the past and using things you regret as a stick to beat your back with will only make you feel bad and paralyze you. It will not help you to think more clearly and do better next time.
People sometimes demoralize themselves and reduce their confidence still further by criticizing themselves for being unconfident, unassertive, anxious or depressed. But these are common problems, and could probably affect most (or indeed, all) of us, given the right circumstances.
As we have seen, personal difficulties are often a natural reaction to stressful events, and, generally speaking, are an understandable product of early learning. They do not mean there is anything fundamentally wrong with you. In all probability, anyone who had had the experiences you have had would see themselves as you do, and with the same impact on daily living. With the help of this book, and other resources if need be, you will be able to find ways to manage self-doubt and its consequences more successfully. What is certain is that criticizing yourself for having difficulties will not help you to resolve them.
Now that we have established how harmful self-critical thoughts can be, how can you set about dealing with them? The skills involved are very similar to those you used when you were learning how to question and test anxious predictions (Chapter 4). They are:
Each of these steps will now be explored in greater detail.
Becoming more conscious of your own self-critical thoughts is not always as easy as it sounds. Particularly if you have been lacking in self-esteem for a long time, self-criticism may have become a habit of which you are hardly aware – a routine part of how you think about yourself. So the first step is to learn to notice when you put yourself down, and to observe what impact it has on how you feel and how you go about the business of living.
When you are self-critical, your feelings will be affected. Changes in your emotional state are often your best cue that self-critical thinking is going on, especially if self-criticism is a well-rehearsed habit of which you are not fully aware. The emotions you experience when you are hard on yourself are probably different from the anxiety, apprehension, fear or panic that are triggered when you are predicting that things are about to go wrong. You are more likely to feel:
As you know, from working with anxious predictions, the first step towards changing old habits of thinking is to be able to spot them when they occur. Instead of being swept away by the feelings that go with self-criticism, you can learn to use them as a cue for action. Using the record sheet, ‘Spotting Self-Critical Thoughts’ on page 130 is a helpful way of doing this. Using the sheet will prompt you to notice what is running through your mind when you feel bad about yourself, and to understand more clearly how these thoughts affect your life and how they keep the vicious circle of low self-esteem going. You may well find that the same thoughts (or very similar ones) occur again and again.
Over the course of a few days, you will become more sensitive to changes in your feelings, and to the self-critical thoughts that spark them off. Make sure that you bear in mind that these thoughts are a matter of opinion or an old habit, not a reflection of the person you really are. In this way, you can begin to distance yourself from them, even before you begin the process of questioning them systematically.
The record sheet is designed to encourage self-awareness, to help you to tune into self-critical thoughts, as a first step to questioning them and searching for more helpful and realistic alternatives. You will see a blank example on page 130, and a completed example on page 131; additional blank copies are provided in the Appendix.
As with anxious predictions, a structured record sheet with headings may be more helpful to you than a daily narrative diary. It will help you to start thinking clearly about what is going on, instead of getting lost in telling the story or in your being upset. This is particularly important now that you are working on self-criticism, because self-critical thoughts are often quite close reflections of the Bottom Line and so may appear especially convincing to you.
The best way to become more aware of self-critical thoughts is to make a note of them as soon as they occur. You will see that the headings on the record sheet are very similar to the headings on the ‘Predictions and Precautions Record Sheet’ (page 92). You will need to write down:
When did you feel bad about yourself? Use this information to pick up patterns over time, as you did with your negative predictions.
What was happening at the moment you began to feel bad about yourself? Where were you? Who were you with? What were you doing? Briefly describe what was going on (e.g. ‘asked a girl for a dance – she turned me down’ or ‘boss asked me to rewrite a report’). It may be that you were not doing anything in particular (e.g. washing up, watching television) and that what triggered self-critical thinking was not what was going on around you but rather something in your own general train of thought. In this case, write down the general topic you were focusing on (e.g. ‘thinking about my ex-husband taking the children for the weekend’ or ‘remembering being bullied at school’). Your exact thoughts, word for word, belong in the ‘Self-Critical Thoughts’ column.
You may have felt only one main emotion (e.g. sadness). Or you may have experienced a mixture of emotions (e.g. not only sadness, but also guilt and anger). As with anxiety, you may also have experienced changes in your body state (e.g. a sinking feeling, a churning stomach or a weight on your shoulders). Write each emotion and body sensation down, and give it a rating between 0 and 100 according to how strong it was. Remember: a rating of 5 would mean just a very faint emotional reaction or physical change; a rating of 50 would mean a moderate level of distress; and a rating of 100 would mean the emotion or sensation was as strong as it could possibly be. You could score anywhere between 0 and 100.
What was running through your mind when you began to feel bad about yourself? Just as with anxiety, your thoughts may have been in words, like a conversation or commentary in your mind. You may have been calling yourself names, for example, or telling yourself you should have done better. Write your thoughts down, as far as possible, word for word. On the other hand, some of your thoughts may take the form of images in your mind’s eye. Geoff, for example, the boy whose energy and curiosity got him into trouble as a child, saw his father’s angry, disapproving face. Briefly describe the image, just as you saw it. If you can, note down the message the image is giving you (for Geoff, the message was that he had got it wrong yet again).
There may be times when you find yourself feeling upset but cannot identify any thoughts or images as such. If so, ask yourself what the meaning of the situation is. What does it tell you about yourself? What kind of person would find him- or herself in that situation, or would act that way? What implications does it have for what others think of you? What does it say about your future? This may give you a clue as to why the situation is upsetting you. A disagreement, for example, might mean that another person does not like you. A friend telling you about a new love affair might mean that, unlike other more worthy people, you will not find someone to love you. Reflect on the situation in which you began to feel bad about yourself, explore its meaning and, when you have found it, write it down. You will be able to question images and meanings and find alternatives to them, just as you can question and find alternatives to thoughts in words.
As with anxious predictions, give each self-critical thought, image or meaning a rating between 0 per cent and 100 per cent, according to how far you believed it when it occurred. One hundred per cent would mean you believed it completely, with no shadow of doubt; 50 per cent would mean you were in two minds; 5 per cent would mean you only believed it slightly. Again, you could score anywhere between 0 per cent and 100 per cent.
What impact did your self-critical thoughts have on your behavior? Self-critical thoughts not only affect how people feel; they also affect how they act. They can lead you to behave in ways that are not in your best interests, and that will tend to keep your low self-esteem going.
In the last column of the diary sheet, make a note of anything you did, or did not do, as a result of the thoughts. For example, did you apologize for yourself? Or withdraw into your shell? Or avoid asking for something you needed? Did you allow yourself to be treated like a doormat or discounted? Did you avoid an opportunity that you might otherwise have taken?
Why not just make a mental note of what happens when you experience self-critical thoughts? Christine Padesky, a cognitive therapist from California, says: ‘If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.’ This highlights how having a record in black and white can help you. It means you have something concrete to think about and reflect on, and that incidents have less chance of being forgotten. You can notice repeating patterns, consider how thoughts affect your behavior in different situations and become aware of the exact words you use to yourself when you are being self-critical.
Equally, people often find that writing the thoughts down encourages distance from them. It takes them out of your head (so to speak), where it is difficult to question their truth because they seem so much a part of you, and puts them ‘out there’ on paper, where you can start to stand back from them, take a good look at them and gain a different perspective. This will help you to move towards the point where you can begin to say, ‘Uh oh, there’s another one of those,’ and to see them as something you do, rather than a true reflection of yourself.
Continue for as long as it takes to gain a clear understanding of your self-critical thinking and its impact on your emotional state and your behavior. You could start by noting one or two examples a day. Try to get a representative sample of self-critical thoughts. When you feel you have reached the point where noticing them and observing their impact has become fairly automatic, you are ready to move on to finding alternatives to your thoughts. This may take you just a few days. But if your habit of self-critical thinking is well dug in and mainly out of your awareness, it may take you longer.
As with anxious predictions, the ideal is to write down your self-critical thoughts as soon as they occur. This will mean keeping your diary sheet with you for a few days. The reason for this is that, although self-critical thoughts can have a very powerful effect when they actually occur, it may be hard afterwards to remember exactly what ran through your mind. This will make life difficult for you when you come to question the thoughts and look for alternatives to them.
But, of course, the ideal is not always possible. You may be in a meeting, or at a party, or changing the baby, or driving down a busy motorway. If you cannot write down what happened at the time, make sure that at least you make a mental note of what upset you, or jot down a reminder on any handy piece of paper (such as the back of an envelope, your diary or your shopping list). Then set aside time later to make a proper, detailed written record. Run through an ‘action replay’ in your mind – remember as vividly as you can where you were and what you were doing, the moment when you started to feel bad about yourself: what was running through your mind at that moment, and what you did in response to your thoughts.
Meeting your thoughts face to face may seem like a daunting prospect, especially if they closely reflect your Bottom Line and seem very convincing to you, and if the habit of self-criticism has been with you for a long time. You may be tempted to avoid looking at them too closely. Perhaps you are afraid that they will upset you. And what if they turn out to be true? Or perhaps part of you already knows that they are biased or exaggerated, and you feel you should be able to dismiss them rather than continuing to be distressed and restricted by them.
It is natural to want to avoid focusing on upsetting ideas, especially if one suspects they may be true. You may feel understandably reluctant to commit these damning judgments of yourself to paper. But if you want to combat your self-critical thoughts effectively, it is necessary first to look them straight in the face. You need to know the nature of the enemy. So beware of excuses (‘I’ll do it later’, ‘It doesn’t do to dwell on things’). If you act on them, you will deprive yourself of a chance to develop a more kindly perspective on yourself. And ignoring the thoughts will not make them go away.
Developing awareness of your self-critical thoughts is the first step towards questioning them, instead of simply accepting them as a reflection of how things really are. You have already practised this skill when you were learning to check out your anxious predictions (remember the questions on page 105). The aim here is to stop taking your self-critical thoughts as if they were statements of the truth about yourself, and to begin to find alternative perspectives which will provide you with a more balanced view.
On page 138 you will find a blank record sheet called ‘Combating Self-Critical Thoughts’; additional blank copies are provided in the Appendix. A completed example is on page 139. You will see that the first four columns of this sheet are identical to ‘Spotting Self-Critical Thoughts’ (date/time; situation; emotions/body state; self-critical thoughts). How-ever, the new sheet does not stop there. It also asks you to record ‘Alternative Perspectives’, and to assess the impact these have on what you originally thought and felt. Finally, it asks you to decide on a plan of action to test out how helpful the alternative perspectives are.
In addition to continuing to collect the information you have been noting on ‘Spotting Self-Critical Thoughts’, you will need to write down:
You will not have to snatch alternatives to your self-critical thoughts out of thin air. You can use the series of questions summarized on page 149 and discussed in detail later in the chapter, to help you generate alternatives and look at your thoughts from fresh angles. Rate each one according to how far you believe it, just as you rated the original self-critical thoughts (100 per cent if you believe it completely, 0 per cent if you do not believe it at all, and so on). You do not have to believe all your answers 100 per cent. They should, however, be sufficiently convincing to make at least some difference to how you feel.
Go, back to your original emotions and body sensations. How strong are they now? Rate each one out of 100. Then go back to your original self-critical thoughts. Now that you have found alternatives to them, how far do you believe them? Give each one a new rating out of 100. If your answers have been effective, you should find that your belief in the self-critical thoughts, together with the painful emotions that go with them, have lessened to some extent.
Here we return to the idea of experiments that was explored in Chapter 4. Work out what you need to do in order to test out your new perspectives in the real world, rather than leaving them on paper or in your mind. Experience is the best teacher: you will find your alternatives most convincing if you have discovered for yourself what impact they have, and how they change your feelings and the possibilities open to you.
Questioning your self-critical thoughts and searching for alternative perspectives is probably not something you are in the habit of doing. At first, you may find the same old thoughts cropping up again and again. It may be difficult to free up your thinking and find alternatives that make much difference to how you see yourself or how you feel (though some people find it makes a noticeable difference right away). Don’t rush things – give yourself plenty of opportunity to practise, learn from your mistakes and develop your skill.
The habit of self-criticism takes time to break. Changing your thinking is rather like taking up a form of exercise you have never tried before. You are being asked to develop mental muscles you do not normally use. They will complain and feel awkward and uncomfortable. But, with regular practice, they will become strong, flexible and able to do what you require of them. And the exercise itself will feel good, let alone its results.
The objective of this stage is to reach the point where you automatically notice, answer and dismiss self-critical thoughts so that they no longer influence your feelings or how you act. Regular daily practice (one or two written examples a day) is the best way to achieve this. Later, you will be able to find answers to self-critical thoughts in your head without needing to write anything down. Eventually, you may find that most of the time you do not even need to answer thoughts in your head – they no longer occur very much. Even so, you may still find the record sheet helpful to deal with particularly tough thoughts, or at times when you are pressurized or unhappy for some reason. The record sheet is something you will always have in your ‘tool kit’ to deal with future difficulties and tough situations. But regular daily recordings need only go on until you achieve the objective of dealing with self-critical thoughts without a written prompt.
If something happens that upsets you deeply, you will probably find it very difficult indeed to find alternatives to your self-critical thoughts. Instead of grasping that this is a common, natural difficulty, you may fall into the trap of seeing it as yet another reason to criticize yourself. The most helpful thing to do is simply to make a note of what happened to upset you, and your feelings and thoughts, but then to leave the search for alternatives until you are feeling calmer. You will be in a better position to see things clearly after you have weathered the storm.
Many people with low self-esteem are perfectionists who expect the highest possible standard in everything they do. ‘Good enough’ is not good enough. We shall be returning to perfectionist rules in Chapter 7. For the time being, however, it is important to bear in mind the purpose of the record: increasing self-awareness and increasing flexibility in your thinking. Approaching the record with a perfectionist stance will not help you to achieve this – it will create pressure to perform, and stifle creativity. Your record does not have to be a literary masterpiece, or a perfect piece of writing with every ‘i’ dotted and ‘t’ crossed. You do not have to find the one right answer, or the answer which you think you should put. The ‘right’ answer is the answer that works for you – the answer that makes sense to you, changes your feelings for the better, and opens up avenues for constructive action. No one answer, however sensible it may seem, will work for everyone. You need to find the one that works best for you.
Sometimes people find that the answers they come up with do not have the desired effect – they make little difference to how they feel, and they do not help them to operate differently. If this is the case for you, it may be that you are disqualifying the answer in some way – telling yourself it is just a rationalization, perhaps, or that it might apply to other people, but not to you. If you have ‘yes, buts’ like this, write them down in the ‘Self-Critical Thoughts’ column and question them.
Do not expect your belief in the old thoughts and your painful feelings to shrink to zero right away, especially if they reflect beliefs about yourself which have been in place for many years. Self-critical thinking may be like a pair of old shoes – not very pleasant, but you are used to them and they are moulded to your shape. New perspectives, in contrast, are like new shoes – unfamiliar and stiff, and not at first a comfortable fit. You will need time and practice to strengthen the kinder view, and you will also need to experiment repeatedly with acting differently so that you learn on a gut level that self-acceptance works better for you than self-criticism.
Don’t allow yourself to get caught in the trap of self-criticism while you are recording your self-critical thoughts. Changing how you think about yourself is no easy task. It takes time and practice to build the skill. So beware of being hard on yourself when you find the going tough. If you had a friend who was trying to tackle something difficult, what would you consider would be more helpful to them? Criticism and punishment? Or encouragement and praise? You may catch yourself thinking ‘I must be really stupid to think this way’ or ‘I’m not doing enough of this’ or ‘I will never get the hang of this’. If you do spot thoughts like these – write them down and answer them.
People rarely manage to come up with alternatives to self-critical thoughts right away. The questions summarized on page 149 and detailed below are designed to help you explore fresh perspectives and recognize how your self-critical thoughts are subject to bias and distortion. You may find it helpful initially to use the list as a whole to help you get into the swing of questioning your self-critical thoughts. As you go along, notice which questions seem particularly helpful in tackling your own personal style of self-critical thinking (for example, you may find that you have a habit of taking the blame for things that are not your responsibility, or that considering what you would say to another person in your situation opens up new ideas for you). You could write down these especially helpful questions on a card small enough to carry in your wallet or purse, and use them to free up your thinking when self-critical thoughts strike. With practice, useful questions will become part of your mental furniture. At this point, you will no longer need a written prompt.
Just because you believe something to be true, it does not follow that it is. I could believe that I was giraffe. But would that make me one? Your self-critical thoughts may be opinions based on unfortunate learning experiences you have had, not a reflection of your true self.
What are you going on, when you judge yourself critically? What actual evidence do you have to support what you think of yourself? What facts or observations (rather than ideas or opinions) back up your self-critical thoughts?
Can you think of anything that suggests your poor opinion of yourself is not completely true? Or indeed contradicts it? For example, if you have criticized yourself for being stupid, can you think of anything about you, past and present, that does not fit the idea you are stupid?
Finding counter-evidence may not be easy, because you will tend to screen it out or discount it. This does mean it does not exist.
Any situation can be viewed from many different angles. How would you see this particular situation on a day when you were feeling more confident and on top of things? How do you think you will view it in ten years’ time? What would you say if a friend of yours came to you with this problem? If your loss of confidence has been relatively recent, how would you have viewed the situation before the difficulty began? Remember to check out alternative perspectives against available evidence. An alternative with absolutely no basis in reality will not be helpful to you.
In this specific situation, what do you want? What are your goals or objectives? Remember the earlier discussion on the pros and cons of self-critical thinking. Right now, do its disadvantages outweigh its advantages? Is it the best way to get what you want out of the situation, or would a more balanced, kindly, encouraging perspective be more helpful? Are your self-critical thoughts helping you to handle things constructively, or are they encouraging self-defeating behavior?
This means deciding how things are without proper evidence to support your point of view – for example, concluding that the fact someone didn’t call you means that you have done something to offend them, when actually you have no idea what might be behind their behavior. People with low self-esteem typically jump to whatever conclusion reflects badly on themselves. Is this a habit of yours? If so, remember to review the evidence, the facts. When you look at the bigger picture, you may discover your critical conclusion about yourself is incorrect.
Figure 19 Key questions to help you find alternatives to self-critical thoughts
What is the evidence?
• Am I confusing a thought with a fact?
• What is the evidence in favour of what I think about myself?
• What is the evidence against what I think about myself?
What alternative perspectives are there?
• Am I assuming my perspective is the only one possible?
• What evidence do I have to support alternative perspectives?
What is the effect of thinking the way I do about myself?
• Are these self-critical thoughts helpful to me, or are they getting in my way?
• What perspective might be more helpful to me?
What are the biases in my thinking about myself?
• Am I jumping to conclusions?
• Am I using a double standard?
• Am I thinking in all-or-nothing terms?
• Am I condemning myself as a total person on the basis of a single event?
• Am I concentrating on my weaknesses and forgetting my strengths?
• Am I blaming myself for things which are not really my fault?
• Am I expecting myself to be perfect?
What can I do?
• How can I put a new, kinder perspective into practice?
• Is there anything I need to do to change the situation? Even if not, what can I do to change my own thinking about it in future?
• How can I experiment with acting in a less self-defeating way?
People with low self-esteem are often much harder on themselves than they would be on anyone else. Their standards for themselves are much higher, more rigid and more unattainable than the standards they expect other people to meet. Are you expecting more of yourself than you would of other people? Would you be so hard on them?
To find out if you are using a double standard, ask yourself what your reaction would be if someone you cared about came to you with a problem. Would you tell them that they were weak or stupid or pathetic, or that they should know better? Or would you be encouraging and sympathetic and try to help them to get the problem into perspective and look for constructive ways of dealing with it? People with low self-esteem sometimes fear that if they become kinder to themselves, they will cease to make anything of their lives. In fact, the reverse is probably true. Think of a child learning to walk and talk. If the child’s parents shouted at it, and criticized it and called it names every time it fell over or said a word wrong, what impact would you expect that to have? Would you treat a child that way? If not, how come you are doing it to yourself?
How about trying a different policy? Take a step back from your usual critical and disapproving stance and be kind, sympathetic and encouraging to yourself, just as you would to another person. You may find that, if you treat yourself more kindly, you will feel better and be better able to think clearly and act constructively.
All-or-nothing (or ‘black-and-white’) thinking oversimplifies things. Nearly everything is relative (sometimes, not always or never; somewhat, not completely or not at all; some, not all or none). So, for example, people are not usually all good or all bad, but a mixture of the two. Events are not usually complete disasters or total bliss, but somewhere in the middle. Are you thinking about yourself in black-and-white terms? The words you use may be a clue here. Watch out for extreme words (always/never, everyone/no one, everything/nothing). They may reflect black-and-white thinking. In fact, things are probably less clear-cut than that. So look for the shades of grey.
People with low self-esteem commonly make global judgments about themselves on the basis of one thing they said or did, one problem they have, one sole aspect of themselves. They take difficulties to mean that they have no worth or value at all as a person. Are you making this kind of blanket judgment of yourself? One person dislikes you, and it must mean there is something wrong with you? One mistake, and you are a failure? One, missed phone call, and you are irresponsible and selfish? Judging yourself as a total person on the basis of any one single thing you do does not make sense. Supposing you did one thing really well – would that make you totally wonderful as a person? Probably you would not even dream of thinking so. But when it comes to your weaknesses, failures and mistakes, you may be only too ready to write yourself off.
You need to look at the bigger picture. And remember especially that when you are feeling bad about yourself, or down, you will be homing in on anything that fits with your poor opinion of yourself, and screening out anything that does not fit. This skews your judgment even more. So hold back from making global judgments, unless you are sure that you are taking all the evidence into account.
Low self-esteem makes you focus on your weaknesses and ignore your assets. People with low self-esteem commonly overlook problems they have successfully handled in the past, forget resources that could help them to overcome current difficulties and screen out their strengths and qualities. Instead, they focus on failures and weaknesses. On a day-to-day basis, this may mean noting and remembering everything that goes wrong during the day, and forgetting or discounting things you have enjoyed or achieved. It may be difficult at bad times to think of a single good quality or talent.
It is important to try to keep a balanced view of yourself. Of course, there are things you are not very good at, things you have done that you regret, and things about yourself that you would prefer to change. This is true for everyone. But what about the other side of the equation? What are the things you are good at? What do other people appreciate about you? What do you like about yourself? How have you coped with difficulties and stresses in your life? What are your strengths qualities and resources? (We will return to this point in more detail in Chapter 6.)
Burka and Yuen (1983) have a clever way of describing this tendency to focus on the bad and ignore the good. They suggest that people who are down on themselves have an extremely vigilant, powerful and effective ‘inner prosecutor’ who is alert for every flaw and weakness and ready to condemn at the drop of a hat. An equally strong ‘inner protector’ is needed, who will present the evidence for the defence. And, most importantly, an ‘inner judge’ must be developed who, like a real judge, will take all the evidence into account and come to a fair and balanced view, rather than condemning solely on the basis of evidence presented by the prosecution.
When things go wrong, do you consider all the possible reasons why this might be so, or do you tend immediately to assume that it must be due to some lack in yourself? If a friend stands you up, for example, do you automatically assume that you must have done something to annoy them, or that they do not want to know you any more?
There are all kinds of reasons why things do not work out. Sometimes, of course, it will indeed be a result of something you did. But often, other factors are involved. For example, your friend might have forgotten, or been exceptionally busy, or have misunderstood your arrangements. If you automatically assume responsibility when things go wrong, you will not be in the best position to discover the real reasons for what happened. If a friend of yours was in this situation, how would you explain what had happened? How many possible reasons can you think of? If you remain open-minded and ask yourself what other explanations there might be, you may discover that you are less to blame than you thought – in fact, what happened may have had absolutely nothing to do with you.
As we have said, people with low self-esteem often set very high standards for themselves (we shall return to the question of standards in Chapter 7). For example, they may think they should be able to deal calmly and competently with everything life throws at them. Or they may believe that everything they do should be done to the highest standard, regardless of circumstances and personal cost. This is simply not realistic, and opens the floodgates to self-criticism and painful feelings of guilt, depression and inadequacy. It is just not possible to get everything 100 per cent right all the time. If you expect to do so, you are setting yourself up to fail.
Accepting that you cannot be perfect does not mean you have to give up even attempting to do things well. But it means you can set realistic targets for yourself, and give yourself credit when you reach them, even if they were less than perfect. This will encourage you to feel better about yourself, and so motivate you to keep going and try again. It also means you can learn from your difficulties and mistakes, rather than being upset and even paralyzed by them. Remember what Gary Emery, an American cognitive therapist, says: ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.’
What can you do to put your new, kinder perspective into practice? How could you find out for yourself if it works better for you? Is there anything you can do to change the situation that sparked the self-critical thoughts (for example, changing or leaving a job where you are not valued, or ending a relationship with a person who feeds into your negative view of yourself)? Or is there something about your own reactions you could change? Old habits die hard – what will you do if in future you find yourself thinking, feeling and acting in the same old way? How would you like to handle the situation differently, next time it occurs?
This will include spotting and dealing with self-critical thoughts. It may also involve experimenting with behaving in new ways that are less self-defeating (accepting compliments gracefully, not apologizing for yourself, taking opportunities, asserting your own needs, etc.). Write down your ideas on the sheet, and then take every opportunity to try them out, to develop and strengthen new perspectives on yourself.
