It's hard to stop beating yourself up just for hurting
Hi there,
Do you have a particular stick you beat yourself up with when things go wrong?
I was having coffee with a friend and she said this is hers:
Tending to my own needs is selfish.
Oof. That’s a common one, right? And on one level we’re taught to perpetually self-talk ourselves out of it with enough affirmations like “I’m not selfish!” But that never works. Not if inside you’re actually still afraid it’s true.
“Still afraid.” That’s a clue.
The reason I think we can’t really argue ourselves out of core beliefs like this one is because most of us first have to accept: it probably was the truth for us at one time.
If there’s something I’ve learned, it’s that I’ll never win an argument with the child I used to be—not as long as I keep trying to argue against something that was at one time completely and totally true.
In many families thinking about yourself first was selfish, and there were strong consequences if you were. Shame, pain, and shunning are powerful ways of shaping human behavior. Especially in children. It’s easy to learn to go to the other extreme and try to prove you’re never selfish.
That means shutting down normal kid feelings and needs. Including the totally natural feeling of wanting things you probably can’t have (like another piece of cake! To stay up longer! To not want to share your favorite toy!) It might have been very bad simply to want things.
You just can’t risk it. The crappy upshot of this fear is that you spend the rest of your life being hyper-vigilant about everything you do. Feeling like you are constantly being monitored: do I look selfish right now or unselfish? But also—and this to me is the real wound—an obsession with:
How does everything I do look to other people?
Can never have anyone out there watching us and thinking wow that’s selfish! Sigh. What a lousy way to live.
What I’ve learned to do with the selfish taboo is to stop trying to forever fix myself. But instead to teach myself that if other people think stuff about me that I don’t like—yes it feels wrong and unfair, but it’s something I can actually live with.
It’s just hard. That’s all.
I don’t even have to set them straight if I don’t want to. People are allowed to think what they want about others. Anyway, I tend to use what people really think about me as information I probably need.
That coffee conversation got me thinking about my own particular beating-myself-up stick. Mine always boils down to this: there is something very wrong, shameful, and unlikeable about me. Other people see it. I must have been born with it because I don’t really know what it is but I have to try to hide it.
I still feel the strong wave of it when things go wrong sometimes. Which is understandable and okay. It just sucks.
But I’ve given up endlessly trying to run away from old feelings and fear when they return. Of course they’re always in there somewhere. I haven’t had amnesia—there are memories and experiences you don’t forget.
Here’s what I do instead. It involves a story about my old therapist and me when I was twenty-seven.