@Frith2013 whose voice is this telling you this stuff? You could be me sometimes, you really could. Yep, obviously it’s your voice in your head, and I do believe there’s DNA for the extent to which we worry/ overthink stuff, but you learned most of this externally from one source or another. Parents, relatives, teachers, the so-called ‘cool’ kids at school, insecure work colleagues/ bosses who made themselves feel ‘more than’ by making others feel ‘less than’…. we picked up lots of false beliefs about ourselves along the way and we use those voices to attack ourselves as proof of our unworthiness at low times, and we can also end up on constantly on the alert to avoid the (actually really rare and usually perceived, not actual ) disapproval or criticism of others and collection of yet more voices to thrash ourselves with. “Did I park the car ok? What if this dress makes me look like a twat? They waved at me and smiled but are they secretly hoping that Frith doesn’t talk to them?” Who are you asking these questions of Frith? Are you saying “Did I park the car ok Mum/ Mrs Smith, that cow if a geography teacher I had in the fourth form/ Sally Ann Snootybum from up the road when I was ten who called me fat?” Who are you asking and why is their opinion important? What are the range of possible answers?
I can hear that you’re probably sick to death of therapy but I had cognitive behaviour therapy (mindfulness based cognitive behavioural therapy is really helpful, I found, with stuff like this) and with hard work (you really, really have to work at this) it helps. A lot.
I’m still a work in progress and I, too, have to check I haven’t parked like a dick. ‘Dick’ not meaning ‘blocked a drive’ or massively inconvenienced anyone, oh no. That’s the standard for other people. For Wookie, not parking like a dick means ‘parked absolutely straight and in the middle of the space with preferably the same distance between each side of the white lines and my car’.
🙄 At some point we’ve set our bars higher than we do for other people and set ridiculous standards for ourselves that again, we’d never set for others. We check to make sure we’re meeting these standards and if other people (oh horror of horrors) have noticed. It’s also far easier for us to ‘fail’ than other people, because we rarely meet the stupidly high standards we’ve set ourselves.
Did they notice? Most likely answer? No, they didn’t. They’ve got their own crap to deal with and we, and our parking and our clothes and our sparkling conversations (or lack of them) are nowhere near that big a deal to anyone except us. We need to cut ourselves some serious slack!
This guy? Of course you know he’s an unsuitable man! But when we have low self esteem or just feel a bit down on ourselves and are on the alert for criticism or negative contact with others, the ones who say the right things and pay us positive attention and counter the negative voices in our head might as well be crack cocaine, frith. We want men who make us feel like this to be ‘suitable’ because it feels good and we long for it. So on go the blinkers and we tell ourselves all sorts of stuff to excuse shit treatment etc until we feel so bad that we can’t deny it any more, but we’re hooked because maybe, just maybe, he’ll call/ text some magic words and smile that smile and the sun will come up again. Unless, of course, the sun actually does disappear every time they sit down, it doesn’t shine out of their arses and we know it.
Think in terms of addiction, if you’ve been using this to add excitement and feel good even though you know it’s not good for you, you also know you need to stop. The good news is you can. Look at the AA 12 step program which works for most addictions with a few tweaks. Find a good cognitive behavioural therapist for self esteem issues, and write down those negative thoughts and alternative answers. Therapy is hard work, but get a good therapist (or even a book) and put the time in and results do happen. I’m way better than I was, and I’ve dialled my negative voices down to a one or a two, ten having been when it was pretty much constant.
It took years but it’s worth it.