Why Do I Believe the Worst About Myself?
Those harsh verdicts about yourself can feel like the truth. They can also be changed.
For a long stretch of my own life, I kept chasing something I was never going to get. As a kid, I wanted to be liked and included by the cool kids, the ones with the approval and the belonging, and mostly I wasn’t. Then, as an adult, I kept right on looking for it, from people who were a lot like those cool kids and who were never going to hand it over either. It took me a long time to see the belief sitting underneath all that chasing. Somewhere way down deep, I had decided that if they didn’t want me, it was because something was wrong with me.
That belief didn’t feel like a belief. It felt like a fact.
Here’s what I eventually understood. The meaning of a thing is not actually in the thing. We add it. Something happens, a person does whatever they do, and we decide what it means, and very often what it means about us. And because we’re the ones adding the meaning, we have some say over it. More than it feels like, most days.
Our sense of who we are is also layered. There’s often a surface belief, I’m okay, I’m fine, sitting right on top of a much older and harsher one way down deep: no, I’m bad. And it’s situational. In a work setting, you might think, oh yeah, I’m pretty good, I’m pretty capable here. Then you get dropped into a relationship where you depend on somebody, and a very different view of yourself can show up, something like damaged goods, not really someone another person would want to care for and love. Same person, different room, and a completely different verdict.
Most of these hard beliefs got laid down a long time ago, and back then a lot of them made sense. Something painful happened, once or over and over, and a young mind did what young minds do and drew a conclusion. A reasonable one, from the evidence it had at the time. The trouble is we carry that conclusion forward for thirty or forty years, keep applying it to a life that has completely changed, and rarely go back to check whether it’s still true, or was ever the whole story.
A friend of mine said something to another person once that stuck with me. “I’m sorry I push your buttons,” he said, “but I did not install them.” So much of believing the worst about yourself is exactly that. You take on the blame for buttons somebody else installed long before you got there. Their upset becomes your badness, their reaction, which has a whole history that has nothing to do with you, gets treated as a verdict on you.
This is a lot of what my Change Your Mind course is really about: getting clear on the thoughts that run us, and then learning how to work with them. It starts August 8, and there’s a code, SUBSTACK10, for 10% off if you’d like it. You can find it here.
What I want to give you now is the practice I use for this, more or less the way I’d walk you through it in person. It isn’t complicated. But you have to actually do it, not just read it.
