Guilt and Self-Loathing- Welcome to NYC
Friday, March 5, 2010 from Dr. DeMarco's blog (http://drdemarco.tumblr.com)...
It may surprise you how much of my job is spent dealing with guilt and self-hatred, which sometimes comes out as “I hurt myself today”. People beat themselves up for having too much sex, for not having enough sex, for lying, for losing their tempers, for having panic attacks- the list goes on and on. I’ve joked here before that rule number 1 in clinical sexology is whatever you can think of, someone gets off on it. I guess it’s rule number one of psychotherapy that whatever conflict you can think of, someone is blaming themselves which results in hurting themselves. How do we hurt ourselves? Well, again- you name it. Cutting, self-medicating, sabotaging our relationships, starving ourselves, repressing our true selves or things that we have done in the past - these are all behaviors that can stem of guilt and shame.
Why do we beat ourselves up so much? (“No No- we don’t go there.”) Who cares?! The trick is for us to figure out how to stop shoulding all over ourselves and just accept that everybody has their shit. I’ve talked before about the fallacy of perfection, but to me, that’s where all this self-loathing comes from. I should be this but I am that. I should have done this, but I did that. No room for mistakes. No room for corrections, even. Just an oversimplified either or belief that perpetuates our feeling bad about ourselves and the behaviors that come from…you guessed it- feeling bad about ourselves! The more we then do these behaviors (like cutting, or smoking crack, or shopping) then the more we beat ourselves up, and the more we behave and and and the cycle keeps going.
I’ve been reading Damon Jacobs’ book “Absolutely Should-less”, and I really like how he teaches folks to just reword what’s going on. Should implies this universal rule that is outside of ourselves we mistakenly believe holds true for everyone always. Giving a statement so much power is bound to result in some unhealthy negative emotions (like guilt). Take the statement “Argh- I shouldn’t have wasted all my time yesterday _______ing (fill in the blank- because whatever you can think of, someone is upsetting themselves about having done it.) As soon as you say you shouldn’t have done it, you’re not living in reality (because according to you, you DID waste all your time). You’re also implying that wasting time is bad, certainly wasting time blanking, because certainly no one else would ever want to spend time blanking instead of doing things they “should” be doing like immersing themselves in finishing their taxes from three years ago or prayer.
What would it be like to just reword the situation to “I could start budgeting my time” instead of “I shouldn’t have wasted all my time!”? This allows for - Ok, that happened. In the future, I can take responsibility for myself and instead of beating myself up over something I DID, I can learn to change the action and do something about it out of frustration and disappointment instead of sabotaging and hurting yourself out of guilt and self-downing. What if, when dealing with something happening to you instead of saying “FML, that awful thing shouldn’t have happened to me!” and you could reword it (and restyle your thinking about it) by saying “That sucks that this happened to me, but it could have happened to anyone!”? This simple rewording forces us to think about things in a different way, which really is the work your therapist is trying to get you to do.
Hurting yourself by not accepting your humanity makes for pretty songs and pretty emotional messes…and you can quote me on that.
MyTherapist.Info | Comments Off |
addiction,
cutting,
sex,
therapists in new york,
time management 














