Healing
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By Matt W. Sandford, LMHC
If you tend towards being hard on yourself or often put pressure on yourself, or struggle with anxiety about your performance, then this article is for you. I’d like to offer four strategies to countering your negative or perfectionistic-based thinking, and to help you to develop a new approach that can boost your self esteem and lighten heavy loads of negativity.
How to Shift Your Thinking
1. Increase your awareness of your self talk
This just means you have to see just how much of this negative, harsh, self belittling talk you do and come to see how unfair you really are towards yourself. (I realize you may not believe right now that you are being unfair). Begin to track it by keeping a list. Don’t trust yourself to merely remember. Track the ways you characterize yourself and the terms your use most often. You may surprise yourself when you see it in written form, or if you read it back to yourself out loud.
2. Challenge your Critic by seeking evidence
Once you realize that you are self critical, you probably are still convinced that you for the most part deserve it and like I said in part one, that it is helpful and motivating to you. So, you need to challenge your assumptions. Up to now, they have taken root as conclusions, but they ended up there undeveloped. And so now is the time to consider and weigh the evidence. Is it really true that I am stupid, lazy, unforgivable, behind others my age, uninteresting, dull, or too this or that? You see, these types of statements are simply globalizing insults – they aren’t statements involving facts. But I would wager you will try to convince me that they are true b/c you can find one to 3 persons who are way better than you at this or that. My counter would be that you have certainly not cast your net very widely. To make an accurate comparison you would need to compare yourself to a minimum of 50 other people and they need to be a cross section of the general public. The point is that you need to begin aiming for accuracy, rather than aiming for proof of something you have already bought into believing – because sure, you can find it, but you haven’t proven anything. Practice catching your globalizing self statements and then checking them for evidence.
Now, go back to your journal with your list of self talk. Below that I want you to do an exercise which I synthesized from material by two authors, David Burns and Matthew McKay. Draw a line down the middle. On the left side write down a critical statement you have made about yourself. On the right side, I’d like you to rewrite the statement from a more objective point of view. For example, if the critical statement is, “I am fat.” On the right side you would write something like, “I am 20 lbs. overweight.” Or, if the critical statement is, “Nobody likes me.”, you could rewrite that statement to say something like, “The last few interactions I’ve had with people have not been encouraging.”, or “When so-and-so said that hurtful thing to me that I felt unloved and began to think of other times that people have been uncaring.”
3. Develop self empathy
Making self critical statements comes easy for you. But what about forgiving, empathetic statements? Is it comfortable for you to say it’s okay when you forgot to call back that friend, got a speeding ticket, sat watching TV instead of checking something off your list, missed one of your kid’s birthdays? Do you believe that what you do is somehow worse than what others do, less forgivable? Well, what you’re telling me is that you really don’t like yourself very much. Which is what happens when you live under performance. You can only accept yourself as much as others will accept you – and you believe that must be based on what you can do. But I am willing to bet that you don’t live this way. Do you love someone? Maybe even a dog or cat? Do you love them only when they do the right things or do enough of the right things? When they fail, do you stop loving them? In extreme violations, I would say we would, but frankly we usually forgive a lot in those we love. Love and forgiveness we know go together. So, if you want to feel better about yourself, you’ll need to practice forgiving yourself. Learn to see yourself in balance – full of the capacity to mess up and also the capacity to learn and grow – which is why we mess up in the first place (meaning messing up facilitates the process of learning and growth).
4. Embrace grace from God and others
Struggling with the reality that we are far from perfect is really a spiritual encounter. God is perfect. And we hate that we are not. We experience shame and embarrassment at our frailties and we want to hide. This lack of acknowledgement and affirmation we received in our families not only damages our sense of worth, but also warps our perceptions of God. We believe he also does not accept us. Throw that together with teachings of judgment and hell and we’re set up to see God as the ultimate Critic.
But what if…
What if God is not the harsh judge, but it’s just us? And we’ve projected our perfectionism onto God? What if God thinks about you very differently than you do or than you think that he does? What if God sees and knows you completely – and accepts you??!!
That is the whole purpose of Jesus and the gospel, by the way!
He accepts us and then through Christ he frees us!
We can experience freedom from our Critic when we come out of hiding. And that means, dare to let trustworthy others into your struggles. Bring your harsh criticisms before God and experience his graciousness. Find someone you can open up with about your self condemnations and receive healthy feedback from a few trusted friends. Receiving grace and understanding from others is normalizing and healing.
I know that that is really scary. Everything inside you and in your experience is telling you that you’ll be misunderstood and shamed if you let down. That’s why you’re trying so hard to perform! To cover up your weaknesses or at least not let anyone see or know about them!
Go to God first and ask for his help on this. I know you long to be accepted not for what you can perform but for who you are. You’ll never get that kind of acceptance through performing.
I invite you to try on these four approaches to letting go of your inner critic.
May God shine his grace on you!
If you would like to schedule a counseling appointment with Matt, please call our office at 407-647-7005.
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