Dump Those Negative Tapes
Every time something doesn't go quite right (rather frequently
for some of us), we start berating ourselves. We can be the soul
of courtesy and forgiveness to those we care about and then turn
and savage ourselves in the most brutal fashion. How many times
have you told yourself: "I'm an absolute idiot!" What was I
thinking?" And that is just the start.
>From those immediate negative self-assessments, we dive deeper,
reinforced by old admonitions playing in our brain. We may be
adults, our parents and teachers perhaps long deceased, but
their deprecating, wounding, critical, even, at times, cruel or
abusive, remarks play over and over as if we were still
children, being scolded for "our own good."
With the help of those judgmental tapes playing repetitively in
the back of our minds, we easily move from annoyance at a simple
mistake anyone could have made to a global view of our own
ineptitude: "I always blow it . . . I can't do anything right .
. . Why am I such a failure?"
Why is it so much harder to forgive ourselves than to forgive
those we love? Is it because we don't love ourselves as much? Is
it because we expect more of ourselves? Or is it that we know
ourselves too well, painfully aware of our dark secret places
and our internal shortcomings? We are hard on ourselves because
we have a deep, subconscious, lifelong belief that we don't
quite measure up.
The maggot gnawing away at our core is made up of a long string
of events starting when we first became aware of the world and
began to hear the word "No!" It continued through a childhood of
making mistake after mistake, as we all do when learning new
skills, and through adulthood as we are judged by our bosses,
our spouses, our customers, with the heaviest emotional jolt of
being laid off, the ultimate rejection of our self-worth.
Psychologists have studied authority-child interactions in both
the home and in school. Remarkably, feedback to the child, in
both environments, is more than 70% negative with the remainder
either neutral or positive. Is it any wonder that we grow up to
view ourselves as not quite good enough, mess-ups, or even total
failures?
We have internalized all of that destructive feedback and face
the world with pride and self-composure that we know is only a
defensive fa