I think this counts as one of those things that I am always trying to learn and never quite managing. The word “should”, every self-help book in the world will tell you, is evil. “Should” creates guilt, pressure, resistance, and ultimately stuck. So we should release our “shoulds” and turn them into “coulds”, into genuine choices that we make on a day-by-day basis.
Or at least – we could do that. We have that option.
The bad self-help books continue to bombard you with “shoulds” that are supposed to help you release the “shoulds” you already have. Sadly – for me, anyway – these things have a tendency to backfire. Throw me yet another “should” and I respond with more resistance and more stuck, and the book that was supposed to help me turns into another stick to beat myself with. I’ve mentioned this before. The mechanisms of self-sabotage are cold and hard and nasty and I find it very difficult to look at them without shame.
To me, shame means more stuck. Knowing about my own self-sabotage, my own failure, makes me feel paralyzed and lost. I have this image of what I should be, and it’s a country mile* from where I’m actually at. I would like to be funny. Vibrant. Active. Sociable. Talkative in all situations (not terrified of new people). Ridiculously prolific (not prone to staring at blank screens, or writing and deleting one sentence over and over again in the hopes of making the second sentence appear). Comfortable with my appearance and with my body (not horribly ashamed of both). Able to be angry when anger is called for, and far less terrified of being sad. I live in a little box in my head a lot of the time and I would like to get out, please.
But it’s important to know about the self-sabotage. And not blame myself for it.
Oh God, that last part is hard. The “meeting myself where I am” part (hello, Havi, I’m addicted to your techniques right now). The beginning of the Havi-style process is to just notice where I am without feeling the pressure to do anything about it, without judging myself for it, without analyzing it at first. (The analyzing comes later. In fact, Havi’s method of understanding what’s going on inside yourself is very far different from the round-in-circles type of thinking that comes to mind when I use the word “analysis”.) I’m struggling even with that, because to me the noticing comes attached to all these crazy little voices that all have things to tell me. They all talk at once, and I don’t know whether it’s useful to try to work out what they’re saying, or whether I should be trying to block them out.
Blocking them out feels rather like the “I must control myself!” kind of thinking that I’m trying to avoid, though (once again, a Havi-related thing), so where all this is supposed to get me, I’m not quite sure.
There’s another element to this, a reason that I’m talking about self-sabotage in the same breath as the word “should”. This post was partly inspired by a comment on one of my previous posts. As far as I can tell the comment’s from someone I didn’t previously know, and it’s about how people are responsible for their own feelings and physical symptoms for a reason (read: I am responsible for my own feelings and physical symptoms). And it’s the first time I’ve been able to read such a comment without my mind immediately going to the place where I blame myself wholly and completely for everything I am thinking, feeling and doing that is less than perfect. I don’t know if it was the content of the comment – which has some implication of there being a reason for the things that you choose to feel and even suffer – or because my head’s in a new place. But for the first time, when someone drew my attention to this concept, and pointed out that they were doing so out of compassion, I actually believed them.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve learned a new concept recently. I’ve been aware of the “you control your feelings” concept for some years, and it’s always been on the list of sticks to beat myself up with. I think that’s because I am quick to assign myself a motive for the things I do and feel, and quick to label that motive as being bad or wrong. If I’m missing work because of illness, I’ll attribute that to laziness. (In fact laziness is probably one of the top three things I beat myself up for – and yet I’m capable of being outstandingly productive, too, when I want to be.) The new concept is: “but just because there’s a reason for it doesn’t mean it’s my fault”. And wow – that’s a big thing.
Now I can be ill and wonder why instead of beating myself up about it. It’s still not easy, but it’s an option, it’s a “could”. I’m still working on the figuring-out-why part, but even being able to wonder is step along the road from deciding why (and choosing the worst-sounding reason possible) before even asking the question. (Hey – I wonder why I do that?)
I have so many unhelpful patterns and habits that I need to overcome or learn to work with. A lot of them, I don’t even know what they are. And some I do know what they are, but they’re so uncomfortable to think about that I avoid it like crazy. There are layers and layers to the human mind and I’m only playing on the very surface of my own, still scared that underneath there is nothing but dirty water and I won’t ever be able to get it clean.
I wonder why? As a question all by itself, it’s powerful. It’s not the whole process I need to go through in order to Sort Myself Out, but it’s a start, and maybe I never will Sort Myself Out, and maybe that’s okay. It’s something to play with, anyway, while I’m learning this whole new attitude of being able to play with this stuff at all.
It’s a possibility, anyway. It’s a “could”.
*Note for non-British readers: A long, long way.
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We have the “country mile” expression in the U.S. too by the way. As Eddie Izzard said we’re two countries divided by…. an ocean or something like that.
I completely agree with the point you made about “you control your own feelings.” It can definitely be a double-edged sword. The underlying concept, that you don’t have to feel like a victim of your own emotions, you can empower yourself by viewing negative emotions as things that belong to you rather than things that happen to you, is super useful. At the same time I never hear much talk about how ridiculously long and difficult a process it is to develop the cognitive skills necessary to break out of a self-shaming spiral or a nose dive into despair and look at the emotions objectively. As a “self mastery” junkie I see a sentence like “you control your emotions” and I think – all right I’ll go do that right this second, be back in five – and I feel so inadequate when it turns out not to be that simple.
Havi’s approach, where you don’t have to control your emotions, instead you can observe them and eventually interact with them in useful ways, is wonderful. It’s such an amazingly brilliant idea that I still haven’t been able to figure out a way to use it as a tool for self shaming, and that’s the thing I’m really good at.
Thanks for leaving comments on my blog by the way. It means a lot.
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