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Are you hard on yourself?
The Practice:
Don’t beat yourself up.
Why?
A previous JOT – admit fault and move on – was about our relationship with other people. This JOT applies the same practice to ourselves.
Most people know they are less than wonderful qualities, such as too much ambition (or too little), a weakness for wine or cookies, something of a temper, or an annoying tendency to rattle on about pet interests. We usually know when we make mistakes, get the facts wrong, could be more skillful or deserve to feel remorseful.
Some people err on the side of denying or defending these faults (a word I use broadly here). But most people go to the other extreme, repeatedly criticizing themselves in the foreground of awareness or having a background sense of guilt, unworthiness, and low confidence.
It’s one thing to call yourself to task for a fault, try to understand what caused it, resolve to correct it, act accordingly, and move on. This is psychologically healthy and morally accountable. It’s another matter entirely to grind on yourself, to lambaste your character, to fasten on the negative and ignore the good in you, to find yourself wanting – in other words, to beat yourself up. This excessive inner criticism tears you down instead of building your strengths; it’s stressful and thus wears on your mood, health, and longevity.
Nor does beating up yourself help others. Most of the time, they don’t even know you’re doing it, and if they do, they usually wish you’d stop it. Harsh self-criticism can also be a way to avoid feeling genuine remorse, take responsibility, make amends for the past, and do the hard work of preventing the fault in the future.
Further, the charges and scorn we throw at ourselves are often based on nasty scoldings, shamings, rejections, and humiliations experienced as a child: bad enough that they did this to you back then, and even worse that you’re doing it to yourself today.
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