Tag Archives: Therapy

Call Yourself Out Without Calling Yourself Names

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I feel like this is a public service announcement:

“Folks, there are other ways of calling yourself out if you’ve done something wrong than calling yourself nasty names!”

I can’t count how many times I have had this conversation with my clients:

Me: It seems that you are constantly calling yourself mean names – telling yourself you are stupid, unworthy, a bad person, a slob… Why is that?

Client: You psychologists always talk about being nice to yourself. But what about the higher values of not doing wrong, not harming others, not being a burden on others – what about those things? If I was constantly “nice” to myself and only used the sweetest language to talk to myself, how would I keep from being a dishonorable and useless burden on society?

First of all – Good God! Wouldn’t you think that a few extra steps would be required to go from getting some negative feedback at work to becoming a “useless burden”. But let’s put that aside – that one demands its own separate blog entry. The main point I am trying to make here is this:

Who says that being nice to yourself and being permissive with yourself are the same thing? Think for example of a school teacher (think of a good one). If a child comes to school without their homework, of course a teacher would not be happy about this. Of course, they are likely to have a talk with that child and impress upon them that they should do their homework in future. But could you imagine a good teacher telling this child that they are a “useless, lazy, hopeless idiot”, or that they do not deserve the teacher’s attention? Absolutely not!

So why is it that so many people seem to struggle even imagining any way to call themselves out for bad behavior without using extremely critical and damaging epithets? And yes – I said bad behavior. It is absolutely okay to live in the real world and be okay with the fact that some of our behavior sometimes is not great. However, why does it have to be:

“I am a horrible person and a terrible friend and I don’t even deserve to have friends”.

What’s wrong with saying something like:

“I regret that I behaved in this way. I am a good person and a good friend and this thing I did is not how a good friend behaves. I feel sorry that I behaved this way and I will apologize and behave better next time”.

This last example of self-talk is not permissive, in the sense that it does not absolve you of responsibility. But it is nice and compassionate. Some people believe that they would be more likely to remain good people if they treat themselves as harshly as possible for any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, some people have come to believe this because that is how they were raised and disciplined as kids (not everyone had good teachers). But the reality is quite the opposite. The more someone berates and shames themselves the higher the probability that this person will react with retracting. It is much harder to apologize to your friend, for example, if you have convinced yourself that you are unworthy of forgiveness, and in fact, many people might choose not to apologize and rather to withdraw from the friendship. On the other hand, if someone is in the habit of emphasizing not the bad in themselves but the good – their previous record of good behavior, their solid higher values (like being a good friend and an honest person), it might be easier for them to approach another and ask for forgiveness. Also, this is actually a very strong motivator for future behavior: If you believe that you are a good person you might think twice before acting in a way that you don’t think a good person would behave because that action might actually seem incongruous to you.

In short, I recommend that you consider how you talk to yourself when you have done something wrong and, if you struggle to come up with a nice way to call yourself out, imagine how a good teacher might do. At the absolute minimum – if a teacher would get fired for saying or doing what you are about to say or do to yourself, then you definitely should not be saying or doing it!

11/02/2024

Copyright © 2024 Anna Braverman

On Blaming the Parents

I want to share a brief insight that I had while working with one of my clients recently. First, some background:
Quietly in the shadows of all my clinical work of the past few years has been a struggle to reconcile one of the oldest clichés in clinical psychology – that whatever ails you is your mother’s fault, with my own fervent hope that I wouldn’t one day be blamed for all the ills in my children’s lives. Of course – the real hope is that I wouldn’t BE the cause of ills in their lives, but since I inevitably will be the cause of some ills, I do hope for some compassion and leniency when the day arrives for them to realize this. Meanwhile, if we approach some psychological theories unscrupulously they do seem to suggest that the work of a psychologist entails uncovering just how the clients’ parents have traumatized them, and then coaching the client to take the shame, pain and rage they may have been turning inward, and turn it outward and back toward their parents. Then they get to walk away from the scene of the train wreck lighter and healthier, leaving the trauma (and their ignoble parents) in the past.

This is a major, shameless and odious exaggeration and “cartoonization” of therapy (I believe this is a new word – you’re welcome), but the point is that this image of therapy does exist out there, and while I would love to say that social media, regular media, and whoever else I might conjure is to blame, this is not strictly true. We, mental health professionals, bear some blame for this too. Some of our writing and case presentations and discourse is unkind to parents and I am as guilty of this as the next person.

So with this background in mind, here is my dilemma represented as A vs. B.


A. It is undeniable that a good number of people I see in my work are suffering now in direct consequence of poor treatment, erroneous lessons, harsh speech, general meanness, various forms of deprivation, and general lack of foresight that was practiced by their parents when they were young. When people do not appreciate that certain wrongs were done to them through no fault of their own, they tend to blame themselves for things they have no culpability for, so understanding the circumstances of childhood would appear to be very important.

VS.

B. I am starting to have serious doubts that diving too deep into our childhood experiences is as useful as I once believed it was on the grounds that I think it might inspire people to rewrite their memories in the spirit of trauma and victimhood and it might inspire people to sever some emotional ties with their parents that would have served them better if they were whole. A caveat: I have seen some people who were terribly abused by their parents and what I say here does not apply to them. There are people for whom healing calls for the severing of ties with abusers. However, thankfully, this is not true for the majority of people.

I have been pondering how to reconcile these two observations and this brings me to the insight I had recently during a session with a person whose family had been severely dysfunctional and traumatizing in many ways, but who has a beautiful way of maintaining love in her heart for individual members of her family:

A parent’s love is a great gift for a child. In simple terms, it is the gift of esteem – of knowing that you are worthy of good things in your life and that you have value to others. The trick is that, just as with any physical gift, having it is not enough. You have to actually give a gift to the person for whom it was intended. If you have it but you don’t deliver it – you might as well have not had it to begin with.
To give a regular gift you need to purchase it, wrap it and find a way to physically transfer it into the intended receiver’s possession, maybe by mailing it, or by bringing it over and giving it to them. Well, in order to give the gift of love you need to create a loving environment. A loving environment is the conduit by which love travels from the heart of the one who has it and into the psyche of the one intended to receive it. In the case of a child, once a parent’s love travels, by means of a loving environment, and arrives into the child’s psyche, it settles there and causes the child to feel worthy, safe and deserving of good things.
Unfortunately, there are many parents out there who have love for their children, but they were not able to create a loving environment and so the gift was available, but it was never delivered. It is still lying around in the parents’ basement collecting dust.


The insight I had is that it is okay to go back and explore the shortcomings of one’s childhood environment as long as the purpose of this exploration is to lead us back to this love that was never delivered. I personally feel a lot better conducting therapy when I view my job this way and it feels much less likely to descend into cold and needless condemnation of the parents (again, if no love was ever there – if this was an abusive household for example, then it is a different, but fortunately rather rare situation).
I am now starting to view therapy like this: Somewhere in a dark basement lies a gift of love that was intended for this person in front of me but was never delivered. The conduit for love, the road that would make it possible for this love to travel into this person’s psyche – the loving environment – just wasn’t there. Our job then is to travel back far enough that we can find this dusty package and help the client take it. Maybe they are going to have to steal it – that’s okay. It is fair that it should go to them. Once they retrieve it though, and once they start being able to see more clearly that they were worthy all along and deserving all along, they don’t really have to go back to the basement anymore. They certainly can, and they might, but we don’t really have to keep going back there in order to do good therapy.

Copyright © 2024 Anna Braverman