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I Wouldn’t Talk to Someone Else the Way I Talk to Myself
“I’m pathetic. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me.” Bonnie looked stunned to hear herself say it, but there it was, her biggest fear. I guess I was a little surprised when she blurted it out in our first session, because it usually takes longer for clients to confide this secret thought. And when they do, they usually add something like, “I’m really different from other people,” “I’m kind of weird,” or “There’s something wrong with me.” One nineteen-year-old was more specific: “I can only allow others to get close to me physically, sexually. It’s okay for them to get to know my body, but if they got close enough to know the real me, I would disgust them.”
When Catherine gets disappointed or upset with people in her life, she starts hitting herself. On the shoulder, in the face, sometimes leaving red marks. She’s very unkind to herself; in fact, she’s mean to herself, in much the same way she remembers how her parents and older sisters “all used to pick on me, telling me what to do, what to say, what to wear. Now that I’m grown up it’s still the same when I go back to visit. On one visit home I wrapped my head in a silk scarf which was very stylish in California, but I guess not in North Dakota. They picked on me then, too, and kept asking if I had cancer or something, maybe my head was bald and that’s why I was wearing a scarf.”
Most likely the “picking” was because Catherine was different, not part of the family mold. Her family’s unspoken rule of “It’s not okay to be different” was interpreted by Catherine to mean, “I’m not okay, there’s something wrong with me.” And when I hypothesized that perhaps her family’s question about cancer was really out of concern for her health, she didn’t buy that idea at all. “Nope,” she insisted, “it wasn’t out of caring. It was out of meanness.”
A man I know says, “When something goes wrong, I call myself terrible names. I see myself as some defective thing. I feel flawed, like something’s missing.”
The issue of how we come to think of ourselves as so flawed and to reject ourselves so thoroughly will be addressed in chapters 6 and 7. For now, lets focus on the way in which these self-rejecting messages manifest themselves in our daily lives and how they’ve come to control our behaviors.
“I’d Like Myself Better If I Could Just Be Someone Else”
We often spend our days thinking about how much better life would be if only we could be smarter, more attractive, taller, more witty, and on and on. Are you really saying to yourself that you’re not good enough the way you are? Self-rejecting messages come in all shapes and sizes, just like the people who are thinking them.
How Self-Deprecating Can You Get?
What kinds of things do you tell yourself about yourself? Do you find fault with your looks? Do you think your ears are too big or too small? Your nose? Your chin? Are you always having a bad hair day? The list could go on and on.
Besides the physical messages, there might be a bunch of psychological messages you tell yourself too—such as calling yourself “stupid” for missing a turnoff on the freeway, or “idiot” for leaving home without those letters you meant to mail. Then there may be some social self-rejecting messages, such as feeling socially inept or unsophisticated—the “I can’t believe I said that (or did that)” variety.
The Big Blow-Up—Overgeneralizing
A woman I know sometimes daydreams on the bus, occasionally missing her stop. She realizes her mistake right away but freezes and can’t will her arm to pull the cord to get off at the next stop. She chides herself for missing her stop, putting so much energy into it that she rides miles out of her way. In the blink of an eye, she distorts her “mistake” into the “fact” she’s a bad person.
Another woman became upset when the date for RSVPing her wedding invitations had passed and only a few of her family, friends, and co-workers had responded. She began to imagine her wedding day with the groom’s family filling his side of the room, and only two rows of people on the bride’s side. “It feels like they’re all ignoring me,” she brooded. She “just knew” that no one would be there when the only information she had to date was that they hadn’t RSVPed on time. Didn’t she skip a step somewhere?
A man I know calls himself names whenever he makes even a small mistake. If he accidentally spills even a small drop of food on his shirt he mutters, “Dunce!” He’s overgeneralizing of course—blowing things way out of proportion. One drop of food does not a dunce make, but his reaction is very swift. Perhaps it’s true you made a mistake in a specific situation, but when you start to tell yourself you always make mistakes, and that you’re stupid for making mistakes, you’re overgeneralizing.
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda …
This brings us to the “shoulds”—those self-critical, second-guessing messages we manufacture. They include messages such as “I should have done it better, differently, more gracefully, more quietly, more quickly, more perfectly.” Yes, we do seem to keep trying to do it more and more perfectly, don’t we?
According to Susan Jeffers in End the Struggle and Dance with Life, “[‘shoulds’] make us worry. They make us do too much, think too much, plan too much. These shoulds pull us apart and make us lose our center.”
What about cutting some slack and lightening up about those “shoulds”? Maybe you can practice telling yourself, “This isn’t a should-have-done, it’s a might-do-later.”
Jeffers suggests writing down “as many shoulds and shouldn’ts you can think of that have become a chore instead of a joy. For example, you don’t have to make your bed every day … unless you want to. You don’t have to have a clean car … unless you want to.” And by the way, you don’t have to pick up the phone every time it rings, or exercise at least one half hour a day, or answer all your mail either—unless you want to.
Hindsight is a great learning tool if you don’t flagellate yourself with the “shoulds.” Why not ask, “What did I learn from this? How can I do this differently next time?” “Should have” is about the Past. “Next time” is about the Future. As one woman likes to say, “Shoulda, woulda, coulda. The fact is, I didn’t.”
Self-Blame—What Did I Do This Time?
In chapter 1 we looked at the Blame Game: when we take things personally, we expect to be blamed by others, and we often end up blaming ourselves.
Messages of self-blame can develop from a child’s view of separation or divorce. When a parent leaves the family, the children don’t always understand why and often blame themselves. The remaining parent is most likely too wrapped up in sadness and hurt to help the children understand that the parent didn’t leave because of them. Andrew remembers being very frightened when his dad left. He was four years old. “I remember sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the stove the day my dad stormed out in anger. I reached out toward my dad, crying for him to come back. But he never came back to live with us again. And he didn’t visit much either, he just sort of disappeared.” Andrew thought it was his fault his dad left. The reasons why varied from day to day—he did something wrong, or he should have done something differently, or he wasn’t good enough. He blamed himself for many years—well into his twenties. He still tries to hold things together for important people in his life—his mom, his best friends, his girlfriend because, “If I don’t hold it together for them, they’ll leave me too, just like Dad did.”
Taking things personally can mean expecting to be blamed by others—and we end up blaming ourselves.
Just Say Thank You
The importance of receiving compliments has already been touched on, but I want to make the point here that by rejecting compliments we’re also rejecting ourselves. Many of us put a lot of energy into not letting compliments in or pushing them away. We excel at making excuses or habitual self-deprecating responses. Sometimes we can’t even hear the words when something positive is being said. Do you remember my story in chapter 1 about how sometimes I’d see someone’s mouth moving but no words were coming out. I finally figured out that perhaps something nice was being said to me, but I sure wasn’t letting it come in. Ways for you to explore being attentive to compliments is discussed later in this chapter.
Do You Listen to the Things You Tell Yourself?
As children, when we don’t get what we want most—a responsive parent who gives unconditional love and caring—we don’t feel accepted. We feel that something is missing, as if there’s a huge hole inside of us.
Without a feeling of acceptance in childhood, we can grow up to become needy, dependent adults. While part of us keeps hoping that we’ll magically receive the love we want from others, another part still expects that people will disappoint us. If we grew up in an inconsistent and unpredictable world, we come to expect more of the same. It’s as if we need the predictability of unpredictability because it’s familiar.
[We prefer] the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.
—Sheldon Kopp
How you explained childhood rejection feelings to yourself, and what you told yourself when these experiences occurred, constitutes the messages you carry into your adult years. These messages become your beliefs about yourself and your world and the people in it. They’re an integral part of your being. As ridiculous as it sounds, we seem to hold on to these beliefs for dear life. Maintaining these negative expectations serves a useful purpose, offering a kind of security because they’re familiar and giving a sense of order and organization to our experiences. Without this sense of order we feel unbalanced, confused. It is often easier to hold on to an old belief than to change it. As Sheldon Kopp explains in If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! we prefer “the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.”
If we threaten the beliefs we’ve developed about ourselves, it could throw us off balance, so we learn not to allow new information in. New is risky. If we dare to let in favorable stuff from others, we might risk tremendous anxiety. The bottom line is that we’re more comfortable with our old beliefs. I know a screenwriter who says he is so used to rejection that he actually gets anxious when a producer likes his work. Acceptance is so foreign to him, it makes him nervous.
Because of this need to be comfortable, we develop a system that filters messages. We become selective about what we take in from others. From the time we’re little we learn to filter out messages that could threaten our belief system and upset our sense of order and organization. And how do we filter? By blocking or distorting messages.
Matters can be even more complicated if our parents were afraid we’d embarrass them by seeing things in certain ways. In order to protect themselves, they try to dismiss our perceptions, perhaps telling us we’re imagining things or we’re crazy. As a result, we learn to question or invalidate our own perceptions. (See chapter 6 for a look at what happens when a child’s perceptions are discounted by parents.)
We not only block out positive messages, but we add a constant static of negative messages as well, audio distortions that sound like “you’re bad” or “not good enough” or “not smart enough” or “can’t read your parents’ minds well enough.”
For example, if you tried to show your mom a drawing you made and she said she was too busy, did you tell yourself she was too busy for you? If you didn’t do something exactly the way a parent wanted, did you tell yourself you’re no good or not good enough? Now that you’re grown up, do you tell yourself some of the same things in your current relationships?
When one woman asked a co-worker to help out with a project, he responded, “I can’t do that, I don’t have time.” But in her head she heard him say, “I don’t have time for you,” and she felt turned down and rejected.
Collecting these kinds of beliefs about yourself is similar to filling an expandable carry-on suitcase. There’s lots of room to cram things in, but then you find out it’s too heavy to carry. It’s a big load. There are no built-in wheels and it no longer fits under the airplane seat. Sometimes it’s even too heavy to lift into the overhead compartment without help. In a similar way, messages from childhood pile up, infiltrating every nook and cranny of the soul. They become belief systems and expand into larger-than-life proportions. They get so overblown in fact, that before you know it, you’re taking messages personally and you begin to reject yourself. Self-acceptance doesn’t have much room to exist in the face of so much self-rejection. What a heavy burden to lug around—and it takes so much energy!
Once we begin to see ourselves as “worthless,” “unlovable,” “undesirable,” or “unacceptable,” we tend to get wedged in that space. It becomes difficult to take in positive, affirming messages. Especially in moments of anxiety, it becomes difficult to gain access to the compartment within us that contains the accepting messages. It’s as if we know it’s there but we just can’t get to it. It seems blocked off, closed up, not available.
Gaining access to the accepting part of ourselves is hard because we are so loaded down with encumbrances. Are we too weighed down by negativity to allow ourselves to open up to acceptance by others? How can we let in a positive flow of information, information we can really hear?
So here we are with carry-on baggage that’s bulging with old messages and erroneous explanations, and it’s slowing us down. Maybe we could strap on wheels that would transform unwieldy negative beliefs into positive self-acceptance, helping our maneuverability immensely. This would streamline our load; we would get rid of the weight of excess “stuff” we have collected over the years and begin to glide.
One of the most basic tools I know for practicing self-acceptance is to practice accepting compliments from others. For example, if someone says, “That’s a really nice shirt,” out of habit you might respond, “Oh, this? It’s been in the back of my closet for years.” When a compliment is offered to you, what about responding with a simple, “Thank you”? That’s it—just “thank you.” That’s all you have to say. Accepting a compliment from another person whether you agree with it or not can be difficult to do. It’s worth practicing until you get good at it. Accepting a compliment is an important first step toward self-acceptance. Would you consider giving it a try?
Mirrors are another key to self-acceptance. When you walk by a mirror do you look at yourself? Do you actually notice your reflection or are you faceless? A lot of adults who have felt rejected or invalidated as children become invisible to themselves. They are unable to notice their reflection much of the time. Or they focus in on separate parts of their faces, perhaps their lips, or one eye, or just their hair, as if they are just part of a person. As they learn to gain access to and accept the different parts of themselves, they report seeing more complete images in mirrors. Then they know they’re becoming a real person, a whole person. They’re learning to reject their self-rejecting messages.