Use Your Damn Skills

 

 

On a very basic level, we think by asking and answering questions of ourselves.

See, right there, I made an assertion. Your brain immediately responded to it by asking a question. “Is he right?” “What does that mean?” “Why did he begin his blog that way?”

Whatever that question was, it was an illustration of the way our brains work: we’re constantly forming and testing hypotheses about the world. We’re always asking questions, then evaluating the evidence for what we think are valid answers.

It’s such a basic part of the way we think, that we barely even notice it. Even after our attention is called to it, we’re automatically doing it. Listen in on your own thought process right now, and you’ll see: right now you’re asking yourself “Really? Is he right? Am I doing this right now? Woah, how did he know that?”

(Spoiler: it’s not because I can read minds.)

This basic question-and-answer format forms such a fundamental part of our neuropsychology, our process of perception and reasoning, that we often forget that the answers we receive to any given question often depend strongly on the question itself.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s take this blog for example.

If you’ve been following the Facebook page of Dr. Glenn Doyle, and reading the comments that pop up whenever I post a link to a new entry here on Use Your Damn Skills, you may have noticed that there is a wide range of reactions people have had to some entries.

Some people have said, “AMEN! THANK YOU!”

Some have said, “I think you’re full of it, Doc.”

Some have said, “You need to get right with Jesus.”

Some have said, “This is perfectly applicable to my life right now.”

Some have said…well, you get the idea.

Partly, the diverse reactions to my writing have been because people approach the subjects about which I write— self-esteem, relationships, personal growth— from very different perspectives. Some people think all this personal development stuff is crap. Some people think it’s the key to the next step in their evolution. Some people approach personal development materials with skepticism because they’ve heard bad things about the self-help industry from the media. Some people believe self-help runs counter to what they’ve been taught from their spiritual tradition.

The way people arrive at such different perspectives, and such different reactions? They ask radically different questions.

Same material, mind you. It’s still the same blog, whatever your approach to it, or personal development in general, is. But your reaction depends almost entirely on the questions you ask yourself about that material.

The person who asks, “How is this applicable to me?” often has a different reaction than the person who asks, “What would my mom and dad (or my spouse, or my high school football coach, or my ex) say about this material?”

The person who asks, “In what was does this material potentially contradict what I’ve been taught in my spiritual tradition?” will have a different reaction from the person who asks, “In what way does this complement what I’ve been taught in my spiritual tradition?”

The person who asks, “Even if I don’t agree with everything this guy says, is there anything useful here for me?” will have a different reaction than the person who asks, “Since that part of what he wrote doesn’t apply to me, how can he possibly have anything useful to say?”

I’m not the first personal development or “self help” writer to point out the significance of questions. The reason why is because asking better questions is so essential to living a better life,. Real self-improvement is impossible without learning to ask questions that are more useful, more empowering, more beautiful than the questions we’ve seen asking.

See, this is why I love even the people who show up in my comments with negative things to say. Every time I post a blog, I’m putting something out there for you, my readers, to chew on, think about, ask questions about. When commenters respond, we get to see the questions they’ve clearly asked themselves about this material— and we get to observe the roads down which certain questions take us, as opposed to others.

People will show you exactly who they are— and what questions they like to ask— in the comments.

“How empty is the glass?”

“How full is the glass?”

No matter what the situation, how much pain is present, how much struggle, how much frustration, how much loss is involved: there is a productive question that can be asked about it.

That is, a better question that will lead to a better answer.

What kinds of questions do you like to ask? Are they helpful? Do they make you feel better, or worse? Do they open up possibilities, or shut them down?

Our brains will always, always answer the questions we ask it. It’s on us to make them good ones.

 

It’s an annoying, and uniquely human, quirk of our neuropsychology that we spend so much time thinking about what we’d like to do over.

Animals, which presumably lack our level of conscious awareness, or at least our level of conscious self-awareness, don’t seem to have this problem.

When something doesn’t go as planned, you rarely see your dog or cat berating themselves, fantasizing about doing something over, obsessing over that one special, specific point where it all went wrong, plotting retrospectively about how they’d do it differently if given the chance.

Yet we humans do that all the time. We’re blessed with a level of neurodevelopment that makes us conscious of ourselves, and aware of the past and the future as concepts. So naturally we humans regularly use our big, overdeveloped brains to replaying the past, or hypothetically constructing the future.

This isn’t always bad, mind you. There’s a lot to be said for remembering the past. In fact, I highly encourage my patients to remember some parts of the past, particularly moments when they felt powerful, capable, and clear-headed. Reliving those times can put us in incredibly powerful states of mind.

Likewise, imagining the future isn’t necessarily bad, either. Particularly when we’ve hit a rough spot in our current lives, fast forwarding in our heads to a more pleasant time to come is often how we make it through. I use this technique while running— often times, running up a hill is no fun, but you can do it if you stay focused on how nice it’ll feel to run down the hill and finish the race.

Imagination can be a powerful tool. So why is it we humans insist so often on using that tool to tear down our confidence and self-esteem, rather than building it up?

Imagining “do-overs,” as I call them, is particularly dangerous. That is, using your gift of imagination to go over something that hasn’t gone well in your life, and for which you blame yourself. We’ve all done this— imagined what we would “do over” if we had the opportunity. It’s an almost irresistible impulse to do this.

Unfortunately, it’s also a particularly fraught impulse to compulsively imagine “do-over” scenarios. Because, no matter how vividly we imagine doing something over differently? We can’t.

“But Doc,” you might say, “By imagining what I might have done differently the last time, I might figure out what to do next time! I might learn something by examining my mistakes!”

Yes, it’s true that, as the famous quote instructs us, “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat history.” I would never tell anyone to not take what lessons they could from how things went in the past. Examining our failures in particular can provide important insights into how we function, how we work under pressure, how we respond when things go haywire.

But there comes a point where obsessively reflecting on the past, and imagining a different outcome, can consume us. There’s a point at which it becomes a literal waste of energy, insofar as no amount of energy directed toward a fantasized “do-over” will bring that exact opportunity back around again.

No matter how much we wish, no matter how much we want, no matter how much we pray, we can’t go back and have a better past.

What we can do, though, is the next right thing.

The next constructive thing. The next thing that, having examined our past with compassion and realism, we’ve determined will be beneficial to our goals.

Both successes and failures use their imaginations to envision the future and relive the past. The difference is that successful people do so with the explicit purpose of enhancing the present moment. They resist the urge to get lost in either what happened last, or what will happen next.

Developing high-self esteem demands us to live neither in the past or the future. Our self-appraisal  will notice if we’re trying to escape the present moment, and it’ll want to know why.

How are you using your imagination? Are you trying to go back and do the right thing in a past moment?

Stop.

Take a deep breath.

And do the next right thing.

 

One of the keys to having realistic, healthy self-esteem is letting go.

I know, I know. We hear a lot about “letting go,” it seems.

We’re urged to let go of negative feelings. We’re told to let go of the past. We’re lectured about letting go of resentments.

Everywhere we turn, it seems people are full of advice about how we have to “let go,” and what we have to let go of, in order to be happy.

And sure, I suppose it’s a good idea to let go of feelings that don’t serve you well. Or to not focus on or ruminate about parts of the past that don’t make you feel good. And letting go of resentments certainly is a good idea, if all they’re doing is taking up space in your brain that could be devoted to more empowering things.

But that’s the easy, obvious stuff. Of course you should let go of things that don’t make you feel good. Most everybody wants to let go of that stuff.

That’s not the type of “letting go” I had in mind.

Sometimes, in order to be the person we can be— in order to be a person with confidence; a person who can take criticism well; a person who can clearly define their values and serve their priorities effectively— we have to let go of some things that, well, we’d kinda rather hang on to.

Specifically, we often have to let go our fantasies and ideas about what life was “supposed” to be, what kind of person we were “supposed” to become when we grew up, how the world is “supposed” to work.

Those…are a little tougher to let go of than negative feelings, or negative memories, or other stuff that we want to get rid of anyway.

Last week on this blog many were disturbed to discover they were not mind-readers. (Of course, the point of that article had little to nothing to do with actual telekenesis; it was about how we invalidate and risk hurting the people around us when we become too attached to our own ideas about what somebody may be thinking. But that’s beside the point.)

This week, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you again, because the fact is: we’re not fortune-tellers. We don’t know the future.

We want to know the future, though. Just like we want the certainty, the reduction of anxiety, that might come with being able to read someone’s mind? We’d also love the certainty, the reduction in anxiety, that might come from knowing what the future will bring.

The fact is, however, we just don’t know. We can form some hypotheses, take some reasonable guesses, but in the end, we just don’t know. Life turns on a dime, the unexpected happens way more often than we, uh, expect, and ten years pass in the blink of an eye.

How many times have you had the experience of kind of blinking, looking around at your life, and saying to yourself, “How on earth did I arrive here? Doing this?  With this person?

Life, as John Lennon once sang, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. And this tends to alarm us, quite a bit.

Life is SUPPOSED to go a certain way, right?

I’m SUPPOSED to be a certain person, right?

I’m SUPPOSED to be doing this thing, especially by THIS time in my life, I’m SUPPOSED to have X many children, I’m SUPPOSED to have this degree, I’m SUPPOSED to be in this sort of relationship, I’m SUPPOSED to have traveled to these countries, I’m SUPPOSED to make this much money, I’m SUPPOSED to be this weight.

I’m SUPPOSED to have, you know, figured out this whole life thing by now, right? Aren’t I?

Those, our “supposed-to’s”, are the things we’re not so hot on letting go of.

It’s as if we let go of them, it feels like we’re giving up on all those beautiful, aspirational “supposed-to’s.” It feels, in a way, like we’ve failed.

Oof. Now there’s a word. “Failed.”

No wonder we don’t want to give up our beloved “supposed-to’s,” even if they’re making us miserable. We definitely don’t like to feel like we’ve failed.

But what if that’s not the case?

What if the fact that our “supposed-to’s” haven’t materialized in our life doesn’t mean we’ve failed?

What if it simply means that, well, when we came up with those “supposed-to’s”, we lacked the ability to see the future, who we would become, who we would meet, what experiences we would have, what circumstances we would endure?

What if it means that when we came up with those “supposed-to’s”, we were responding largely to other peoples’ ideas of what our life was “supposed to” look like? And just like us, they didn’t know who we would eventually become, what would be important to us, pleasurable to us, essential to us, irrelevant to us?

“Supposed to’s’” are ideas that are rigid. They lock us in to one vision of what our life “should” be like.

They rob us of the ability to be flexible about our goals and priorities.

They also rob us of something that is absolutely essential to healthy self-esteem: the capacity to perceive and acknowledge when our needs have changed, and to change our life plans and expectations in order to accommodate those changes.

By all means, hang on to your “supposed to’s” if you feel they’re enhancing your life. I’m not the one lugging them around, I don’t get a vote on what you hang on to or let go of.

But you can, you know. Let go of those “supposed-to’s.”

If you want to.

So why does criticism destroy us like it does, anyway?

We don’t have to deny that it does.

I mean, you may be reading this, right now, thinking, “Criticism doesn’t destroy me. I’m as cool as a cucumber. I can take criticism in stride. I’m a grown up about it. There’s no way the Doc is talking about me.”

To which I respectfully respond: yeah, right.

Criticism wounds all of us.

Some of us have learned skills with which to handle it a little better than we otherwise might, and some of us have learned how to not let it show outwardly how much it stings. But for the vast majority of people, it hurts to be criticized.

Really. There’s no need to pretend it doesn’t. We’re all in the same boat, here.

To be stung by criticism is to be human. Whether we acknowledge it or not (and, if you’re in the business of building healthy self-esteem, you’d better be in the business of acknowledging your emotions with empathy and accuracy, by the way), it hurts.

But why does it hurt? And why does it hurt so much sometimes?

After all, we can agree, most of the time, most of the stuff we get criticized for, doesn’t really matter all THAT much.

Sure, sometimes it does matter. For example, to be repeatedly criticized about one’s job performance might be an indication that your employment status may be in jeopardy. Or to be regularly or harshly criticized by our romantic partner about how we choose to interact with them might be an indication that we’re on the fast track to being single. It’s not the case that criticism NEVER matters.

But that kind of criticism usually builds up to a boiling point, after which something happens— we get fired, we get dumped. That kind of criticism is corrective, it has an actionable POINT. That’s constructive criticism, useful feedback; that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about the kind of criticism that tends to get offered by people who don’t seem to have any stake in criticizing you.

Nor do they seem to have any interest in helping you make any kind of improvement.

Nor do they seem to care whether the impact of their criticism knocks you off your game and makes it impossible to focus on what’s right about you, because they’ve brought your attention to what’s wrong with you.

Most of the criticism we get of this variety doesn’t matter. It comes from sources that don’t matter, people who don’t matter, who have opinions that don’t matter.

And yet, it still hurts. It hijacks our mental focus by magnifying our real or imagined flaws. It makes us insecure, afraid to speak our minds. It inhibits us from being ourselves because we’re afraid of what someone might find to attack.

It sucks. But our psychological evolution, as a species, does offer some answers.

Criticism hurts us mostly because we, as human beings, have learned to overvalue the opinions of other people. It’s an artifact of the socialization process that needed to happen in order for us to evolve to cohesive societies of human beings that got along and weren’t always trying to kill each other and mate with each others’ life partners.

Understand, this is mostly a good thing. The trait of valuing other humans’ opinions— and feeling bad when we violated other peoples’ expectations— was selected for by Mother Nature, and thank goodness it was. It’s important that we get along with our fellow humans, for the most part.

However, in internalizing and conditioning this mostly positive trait of valuing others’ opinions, we forgot how to nurture true self-esteem.

The esteem of others will not, cannot, ever take the place of authentic self-esteem. The reputation we acquire with others only holds for those others. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD thinks you’re awesome, in other words, you still have the task of convincing YOURSELF you’re awesome. 

It was in becoming over reliant on the opinions of others, and forgetting how to nurture self-esteem, that we also developed this acute vulnerability to the criticism of others. Which makes sense, when you think about it: if others are our primary source of esteem, they can yank that esteem at any time— which leaves us devastated, because we didn’t work at developing something to put in its place if it disappeared.

So, what now?

If criticism destroys us, it should be a loud and clear wake-up call: We need to develop authentic, unshakeable, internally-generated self-esteem.

Society isn’t going to help us with that. We have to choose that on our own.

Part of which involves learning to keep non-constructive criticism in its proper place: as an interesting artifact of human socialization. No more, no less.

Screw ‘em, in other words.

I have a feeling we’ll be returning to this subject on UseYourDamnSkills.com.

 

You are your behaviors, not your intentions.

Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say: to other people, you are your behaviors, not your intentions.

It’s an inconvenient fact, I’ll grant you, made unavoidable by the fact that we human beings are ill-equipped to read minds.

Now, I realize this comes as a shock to a subset of my readers, who seem thoroughly convinced that they can, in fact, read minds.

For that matter, if often seems to be the case that people assume they know whats going on inside other peoples’ heads. They form judgments about what motivates other people; they leap to conclusions about what other people want or need; sometimes they’re so confident in their abilities that they actually label themselves “psychic” or “telekinetic.”

(Because labels make things more official and convincing, see.)

A lot of us put a lot of stock in our non-existent ability to read others’ minds.

This leads, of course, to a lot of us feeling misunderstood and invisible when other people shockingly fail to accurately discern our intentions, motivations, or needs.

I’ll ruin the suspense: you can’t read other peoples’ minds. Even if it really, really, really feels like you can. Even if you feel SO SURE you know what they’re thinking: you don’t.

What you can do, however, is observe other peoples’ behaviors, and form hypotheses about what’s going on in their heads.

Taking educated guesses as to what other people are thinking, feeling, and needing— that’s a good thing, an adaptive thing. That’s a thing that requires sensitivity to others’ reactions and cues, it requires us to pay attention to other peoples’ contexts and histories, it requires us to hone our ability to observe and ask “what if.”

Observation and the generation of hypotheses are at the core of this wacky thing we call the “scientific method.”

Thing is, though? We can’t allow ourselves to get too attached to our own hypotheses. Once we decide that a hypothesis is true, because we’ve decided its sufficiently supported by the data we have available, and we stop trying to test that hypothesis? Then we’re no longer scientists.

What differentiates science from superstition is the willingness to keep questioning, even those things we’re pretty sure are true.

The thing is, just like we can’t read other peoples’ minds? They can’t read yours, either.

Understand, they, just like you, think they can read your mind— but what they’re really doing is exactly what you’re doing: they’re observing your behavior and making inferences.

Those inferences may be accurate or wildly inaccurate, because—here’s another thing some people may have difficulty swallowing— sometimes, for whatever reason, our behaviors don’t match up with our intentions.

I KNOW. Blows your mind, right?

But, like it or not, in the absence of actual mind-reading ability, all any of us have to go on in understanding other peoples’ motivations, intentions, needs— that is to say, understanding other people? Is their behavior. What they say (communicating is a behavior), what they do, what they don’t do— that’s the entire body of data we have to work with.

It’s also the only data other people trying to understand you have to work with.

All of which is to say: if you don’t wish to be misunderstood, unfairly and inaccurately judged, held responsible for things you don’t actually think, need, want, or intend? Then it’s really important to take your own behavior seriously.

What does your behavior communicate to the world about who you are? What motivates you? What’s important or unimportant to you? What signals are you sending by what you say and do— or what you refrain from saying and doing?

We can’t read minds. So when we’re trying to understand other people, or other people are trying to understand us, we’re gonna get it wrong sometimes. It’s inevitable— it’s going to happen. We can’t keep misunderstandings from happening.

What we can do is do everything we can to make sure our behavior is aligned with who we really are and what we really want.

Which just so happens, not incidentally, to be the basis of genuine self-esteem.

Believe it or not, there is an Internet full of people hoping you’ll do exactly what the title of this post says— don’t actually read their work, just have an emotional reaction to their title. They’d also appreciate it if you “liked” and “forwarded” it, if it’s not too much trouble.

That’s kind of the world in which we live. Content creators (writers, producers, social media strategists, all the people who actually write the words in these blog posts and quote pictures we forward around our Facebooks) often don’t churn out their products so they’ll actually get read, or thought about, or, God forbid, somehow change peoples’ lives. They put things on the Internet to build brand awareness; to gain attention; to get as popular as is practical without you catching on that that’s what they’re doing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. There’s nothing wrong with building brand awareness on the Internet. Hell, that’s part of what this blog, and what my professional Facebook page are all about. The more people who see and like my things on Facebook, the more people I have paying attention to the things I say, the more lives I can positively affect. That is consistent with my personal and professional life goals.

That said: it’s really, really important, as we like and love and forward and repost things we come across online, that we’re actually reading and digesting what we’re forwarding and commenting upon and giving a “thumbs up.”

Why?

Well, for starters, we can end up looking kind of silly if we don’t read something, but instead just post a gut-level emotional reaction to its title in a comments section.

For example, last Tuesday, my blog post was titled, “Suck it up and mourn your losses.” Those who actually read the article know that my title was actually making fun of people who approach loss and mourning with a “suck it up” attitude; that, instead, we have to give ourselves time, space, and compassion to mourn our losses, even the little ones. But there was a subset of people who chose to comment on that blog entry, not realizing that its title was tongue-in-cheek; and, consequently, ended up informing the world, via their comments, that they were the type of people who couldn’t be bothered to read past the title (but could be bothered to post a comment).

But another, really important reason we need to be carefully reading and digesting the things we like and forward and repost online is because our self-esteem is inextricably entwined with the degree to which we think for ourselves as opposed to just parroting someone else’s thoughts or views.

“Self esteem,” when we break it down, is not a complicated concept. It is the esteem in which we hold ourselves. The reputation we acquire of ourselves. The opinions we form about what kind of a person we are, what we deserve, what we should and shouldn’t tolerate for ourselves.

Our self-esteem is important, because if we develop low self-esteem— if we come to dislike and disrespect ourselves— we will be resistant to doing the things we need to do to improve our lives and reach our goals.

Nobody is particularly inclined to work hard on behalf of someone we dislike or disrespect. People with low self-esteem settle for less than they deserve; they aren’t motivated to use their talents and skills; and, since they often feel they don’t “deserve” happiness, won’t do the things that need to be done to become and remain happy.

Self-esteem has many components, but one of its most basic principles is: our brains pay attention to how we behave. We observe ourselves all the time, and those observations inform the esteem in which we hold ourselves, the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

If we behave in ways that we wouldn’t respect in others, if we behave in ways that violate our own values system, it takes a toll on our self-esteem, whether we know it or not in the moment.

Actually reading and thinking about things, especially the things that are shoved at us online, is one of those behaviors our brains pay attention to. People who struggle with self-esteem distrust their own judgment, so they often look to others to tell them how to think, what to think, what to believe. They’re immensely relieved when they come across something online that seems to remove the necessity of actually thinking— something they can just like, or forward, or comment on, even though they’ve only read the post title.

Your brain notices your choices, whether to think or not think. Your self-esteem registers it.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I often go out of my way to challenge you. I don’t just write snappy titles that lead to easily-swallowed platitudes. Half of my blog entries make people angry enough to write me emails or leave nasty comments, some of which are reflective of my blog’s actual content, some of which seem to be knee-jerk reactions to their titles. But my goal, always, whether you agree with what I have to say or not, is to get you to THINK— because in getting you to think, rather than just existing on autopilot, I’m forcing you to perform one of the basic tasks that self-esteem requires.

Yes, yes, you’re welcome.

Now. Let’s go see how many commenters actually think I meant the title of this blog entry literally. If you read this far, way to go— we’re in this fight for self-esteem together.

Somewhere along the way, someone convinced a lot of us that it’s not okay to mourn.

To be, you know, sad when we experience loss. To take time to feel that loss. Figure out what that loss means. Figure out how our lives might need to change after that loss.

To feel angry that we have to figure any of that out at all. To experience confusion and resentment about the fact that we even live in a world where we HAVE to figure out what to do when loss hits us.

It’s a drag. As much of a drag as loss itself is, it’s a drag that so many people feel weird about mourning losses when they occur. And they occur a lot more often than many of us think.

Actually, I suppose I should be fair: most of us have been taught that to mourn in SOME settings is okay. Like, most of us acknowledge that when someone close to us dies, that’s a loss that’s okay to mourn. The death of a pet, okay, that usually gets a pass. In our culture, the concept of “mourning” physical, bodily death is generally accepted.

If only that were the only kinds of significant losses we humans experience.

The way we humans work is, we look for patterns and get into grooves. We form beliefs about how the world works (in cognitive psychotherapy, these beliefs are called “schemas”), and we use these patterns and grooves and beliefs to navigate the world around us. It saves us from having to wake up every morning and learn all over again what the world is all about, what human beings are all about, what we’re supposed to be doing, how we’re supposed to be living.

When these grooves and patterns and beliefs get interrupted, however, we experience loss. Physical, bodily death is one way those grooves and patterns and beliefs can get interrupted, yes, but there are literally hundreds of other ways they can get shattered. As John Lennon once sang, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

Getting fired, or otherwise forced into a career change, is a loss.

Something happening to someone close to you in such a way that both yours and their life patterns are significantly interrupted, is a loss.

Loss can even come about as a result of positive change in life— getting promoted, moving into a new residence, having a breakthrough in psychotherapy. The common denominator of “loss” isn’t that it’s always a bad thing. The common denominator is that it requires an adjustment in how we think, believe, and behave in the world. It interrupts the grooves, patterns, and beliefs that we’ve formed in order to live effectively. And most adjustments come with discomfort.

That’s why we need to mourn. Even the little losses.

We kind of live in a “suck it up” culture. As I noted above, it’s generally acknowledged by others that the physical death of someone close to us should throw us for a loop, and most people will give us some leeway to not have our shit together for awhile afterward. For awhile, anyway.

(Though it’s my observation that many people have some pretty concrete ideas about how long people are “entitled” to mourn even after a physical death. But we’ll tackle that in another blog post.)

But when it comes to other, smaller losses, especially losses that are perceived to be (or, maybe actually are) our fault? Many people in our culture are far less tolerant of the kind of mourning that is appropriate or allowable after those losses.

Why?

Eh, there are a lot of reasons, and they’re varied. But, as a therapist, I can tell you that most of them boil down to: we generally don’t like thinking about loss in our culture.

We don’t like acknowledging it. We certainly don’t like acknowledging the necessity of mourning anything short of physical death— that might open us up to feeling things we don’t want to feel.

Things like vulnerability. Things like anger. Things like sadness. Things like confusion.

No, we don’t like to feel those things at all. So we solve that problem by treating loss and mourning with a suck it up sensibility. An attitude that, look, everyone experiences loss, and who do you think you are to need some time and space and, God forbid, some compassion to come to terms with your own losses, ESPECIALLY if your loss doesn’t EVEN involve a death?!?

Who do you think you are, indeed.

I’ll tell you who you should think you are. You should think you’re a human being, who was built with a certain set of emotional needs. Among those needs happen to be the need to mourn loses when they occur.

That’s right: I said mourning losses is a human need, not an indulgence or luxury.

We need to mourn losses, big and small, when they occur. Anyone who tells ya different doesn’t care about how effectively you’re coping with your loss (or even how effectively you’re living your life); they care about protecting themselves from uncomfortable feelings.

Mourning losses doesn’t have to consume your entire life. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic, emotional breakdown. A lot of the time, you don’t even need to cry to mourn a loss.

What you do need to do is treat yourself with empathy.

To acknowledge a loss has occurred, and that means your life needs to change.

To acknowledge that change is uncomfortable, that we were attached to our old grooves and patterns and beliefs.

To commit to giving yourself the time, space, and compassion you need to process what this loss— whether big or small, private or public— means for your life.

Giving yourself permission to mourn a loss is essential to your self-esteem. When we respect someone, we acknowledge their right to feel what they feel, and give them space to do what they need to do to get their needs met.

It’s hard to respect yourself if you’re not treating your own emotional needs with respect.

You have my permission to honor and mourn your losses.

(But, you don’t need it.)

Last week, one of the commenters on my Facebook page opined that, while she more or less dug where I was coming from, man, she didn’t see why I needed to use so much ffffffrigging profanity in my blog posts. She said it made me come off as, well, angry. And why should I be angry?

I mean, first of all, certainly, my long-term patients can tell you: profanity isn’t necessarily an indication of, like, anger on my part. I’m just a fan of the colorful metaphors profanity makes possible. See, I got into psychology because of Tony Robbins, and one of Tony’s main shticks is how we have to somehow interrupt all these negative patterns we’ve gotten ourselves into. I’ve found that dropping a good F-bomb every now and then in therapy is an effective way to do that, because, well, you just don’t fucking expect your therapist to drop the F-bomb.

(Unless your therapist is Albert Ellis, and he’s, well, fucking dead. So.)

I will say, though, that commenter who opined that I sounded angry to her? Wasn’t entirely wrong.

The truth is, I am angry.

Some might say the more applicable term is “passionate,” I suppose. But, you know what? I think “angry” is actually more apt.

You bet I’m angry.

I’m angry because, in my career as a therapist, I’ve met people who have been brainwashed into thinking they are somehow not enough, just on their own, without, say,  losing ten pounds. Or making more money. Or being more successful with potential romantic partners.

I’ve met people who have been betrayed, abandoned, and belittled by the people who should have supported them most.

I’ve met people who have been convinced that because they feel hopeless, there is in fact no hope for them.

I’ve met people who have become convinced that life is literally not worth living because they’ve not lived up to some arbitrary standard someone else has taught them is important.

I’ve met people who honestly believe their past is more important than their future.

I’ve met people who have come to believe that God has “given up on them” because they’ve somehow failed to live a perfect life.

I’ve met people who have been bullied into imagining their responsibilities to abusive relationship partners are more important than their responsibilities to their self-respect, self-safety, and self-esteem.

I’ve met people who have not only bought into, but been sold the idea that they’re too broken to be anything but a professional patient. And I’ve met therapists who have actively enabled this delusion, whether through incompetence, arrogance, indifference, or greed.

I’ve met people who have come to believe that because they’ve been betrayed in relationships before, they can never trust anyone enough to be in a relationship again.

I’ve met people who have come to believe that they’re too old to do something meaningful with their lives. Or too tired. Or too unintelligent. Or too untalented.

All of which is to say, in my career as a therapist, I’ve met literally hundreds of people who have come to feel imprisoned in their own heads, in their own souls. And the thing that makes me angriest about it? The people and institutions who should have taught them that they don’t need to exist in those prisons have utterly failed them. People have been left feeling alone, unwanted, unloved, unvalued– and they think it’s their own fault.

In therapy, we spend hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months and years undoing the damage done when people have spent years developing false beliefs about their inferiority. These are people who are smart; people who are warm; people who are kind; people who are creative; people who are generous. These are people who were created to make a difference in the world– and instead they’ve become convinced that they’re powerless, useless, purposeless.

Yes. This makes me angry.

Sorry, not sorry.

 

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I’m a liar.

So are you, probably.

I mean, don’t feel too bad about it, or anything. We’re human. It’s kinda what we do. How we’re wired.

I’m not even really talking about lying to other people, though we humans do that a lot, if we’re gonna be completely honest (ha!). But the lies we tell other people usually don’t hold a candle to the consistent, profound, and pernicious lies we tell ourselves.

Why do we lie to ourselves? Why would we lie to ourselves?

Usually, for the same reasons we lie to other people: because the truth is often difficult.

Truth can hurt.

Truth can have jagged edges that resist our attempts to smooth them over. We get afraid of those jagged edges. Afraid they’ll cut us. Afraid they’ll cut people we care about.

Maybe we get afraid that the jagged edges truth sometimes has will slice open our career. Or gouge a potential romantic interest. Or rip open garbage bag full of denial that we’ve been careful not to puncture, because if we smelled the pungent truth within, we’d have no choice but to take out the trash.

I mean, what can I say? Sometimes we’re not ready to take out the trash.

Or we don’t feel ready, anyway. Sometimes that garbage bag of denial feels too heavy, too squishy, too gross to mess with. We’d prefer to just keep the jagged edges of truth away from it, so we can let it go on fermenting and not have to worry about how overfull it’s getting.

I’m a psychologist. And I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that almost everybody I’ve ever worked with is in therapy because, on some level, they are either unwilling or unable to accept something that is either true, or something that they’re deathly afraid is true. They know or suspect  that the truth might very well have jagged edges, and they can’t wrap their brains around what to do when those edges threaten to wound them.

At the same time, though, they’ve realized that their only other option is to continue lying to themselves– and if they’re in my office, they’ve usually also realized that the price of lying has simply become too damn high.

I’ll let you in on a secret we psychologists, going waaaaaaay back to Sigmund Freud, have always known: the cost of lying is always too damn high.

And when it comes to lying to ourselves, especially to protect ourselves from the imagined consequences of truth? No one ever stops at little lies.

No self-deception goes unnoticed by our self-esteem. You just can’t respect someone who you know bullshits you on the regular.

How, then, do we stop lying to ourselves? How do we even come to grips with everything we might be lying to ourselves about– out of fear, out of habit, out of idealism, out of ego?

Ironically, it usually takes the help of another person to quit lying to ourselves. A therapist, an AA sponsor, a doctor, a lover, a friend.

(A real friend, not the fake kind. But that’s a subject for another blog.)

If you read the first two sentences of this blog and indignantly declared, “HE DOESN’T KNOW ME! I’M NO LIAR!”, I invite you to wait until you’re by yourself, find a mirror, and look at yourself for a loooooong few minutes. Then say that– “I’m not a liar”– to your reflection, out loud.

Do it five times.

Do it slowly.

Make real eye contact with yourself. If you really believe you don’t lie to yourself, come face to fucking face with yourself and affirm that.

If you could do it, God bless ya. You’re someone who doesn’t have a whole lot in common with me or, really, anybody else reading this blog. Feel free to be on your way, I’ve got nuthin’ for ya.
If you couldn’t do it– good job. You’ve taken a step toward being fucking honest with yourself. 

And as the saying goes, journeys begin with first steps.

Today’s lesson: nobody cares about your regrets.

Maybe you feel you’ve wasted too much time in your life. Not lived up to your potential. Squandered your potential talents. Frittered away your opportunities to leave your mark on the world.

One of my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies is often quoted as saying, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars…but we won’t.”

Maybe you feel Tyler Durden is talking about you right there.

Do you have regrets? Thoughts that keep you up at night, to the tune of, “I could’ve been…”, “I could’ve done…”, “If only I’d…”? Fantasies of a different life, the life that might have happened had you just, you know, gotten your shit together, gotten off your ass, stayed the course, buckled down, found your focus? Do you have your late-night list of “By now, I could be/do/have (fill in the blank)”s?

Guess what? No one cares.

Except you, I mean. Of course you care.

No? You’re going to argue with me on this one?

You’re going to say that you’re beyond all that, that even if you have those thoughts in the middle of the night, you’re a grown up, you’ve moved past it, life is what it is, you’re not haunted by all those minutes having tick, tick, ticked by, all those opportunities that’ve slipped through your fingers? That somewhere, in the back of your mind, you’re not haunted by those third grade fantasies of being an astronaut, a world champion, president of the United States, king of the world?

Well, maybe you’ve moved past those third grade fantasies, I’ll give you that. But you’re haunted, all right. Almost no one, myself included, is immune to the kinds of thoughts I’m talking about here.

“I’ve wasted so much time, it’d look pathetic if I started now.”

“I could’ve done that when I was younger, but now I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“You can’t date at my age, it’s either happened for you by now or it hasn’t.”

Go ahead. Deny it in the front of your brain, if you must. But you know somewhere right now your stomach is tightening into just a little bit of a knot. You know that somewhere you can start to feel just that little twitch, right at the corner of your eye, that is the first indication that a tear might be trying to form.

Let me tell you something– again–  about those regrets: no one cares.

To quote one of my favorite television characters, “The universe is indifferent.”

(I assure you, Don Draper was absolutely talking about you when he said that.)

There is no one, at least no one who matters,  patrolling your current-day behavior to make sure you’re not “pathetic.” There is no one who matters tsk-tsking you for trying to do something that might usually be attempted by someone younger than you.

Oh, sure, there might be people out there judging you. But they’re not judging you because they care. They’re judging you because that’s what a certain type of person does. Believe me when I say that their activity of judging you is but a drop in a huge, heavy bucket of judgment they lug around with them all day long. They may judge you, but they don’t devote any more thought to you than a traffic camera does to the dozens and dozens and dozens of cars that zoom by it every day. They don’t give a shit.

More to the point, they don’t have to live with the ongoing consequences of your refusal to act. They don’t have to stay up at night as you think those thoughts. They’re not stakeholders in your life and happiness.

That’s all on you.

Your regrets simply don’t matter. If we had a time machine, they might. But, barring Doc Brown appearing in a DeLorean (and if he does so appear, I preemptively offer my sincerest apologies), they simply don’t matter.

All they can do is keep you from doing something potentially good now. Here, in this moment. You know, this moment? The only moment in which you have any kind of ability to affect anything?

The past doesn’t give a shit. Time doesn’t give a shit. The universe doesn’t give a shit. Your abusers don’t give a shit. Your exes don’t give a shit.

You henceforth have my permission to stop pretending that they do.

C’mon. Take a deep breath. You remember how.

Now. Let’s go start the rest of your life. Right. Fucking. Now.

That’s it for today, kids. See you on Tuesday.

 

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