The Lies We Believe

by Dr. Chris Thurman

  Someone who believes “to err is human” approaches mistakes and failure differently. The minute he messes up, his internal reaction is something like this:

  I just messed up. I don’t like it, but I did. This will take some time to correct, so I’d better get started. I see people make this sort of mistake all the time. This isn’t the end of the world. After all, I am only human. What can I learn from making this mistake so I don’t make it as often in the future?

  The emotional volume control for “to err is human” people stays at a reasonable level, a level that doesn’t get in the way of correcting mistakes and moving on. These people don’t inflict unnecessary pain on themselves just because of a mistake. The mistake itself was painful and costly enough. Creating further damage via emotional self-abuse makes no sense. These people are not at odds with human frailty; they face it, even accept it, and then move on. And that’s emotionally healthy.

  “To err is stupid” people feel so bad about themselves, they believe the only way they can conquer their problem is to go to the other extreme: to try to be perfect. Of course, trying to do this only exacerbates the problem. They can never be perfect, and each new mistake they make underscores this point. They become even more self-condemning, and their emotional turmoil intensifies. The cycle is vicious and endless.

  Mistakes and Anger: Frequent Bedfellows

  Alicia, one of my clients, struggles on a very deep level with accepting the truth that to err is, indeed, very human. She has spent her whole life believing just the opposite and, thus, hating herself every time she makes any kind of mistake. By exploring her past, I learned she was severely criticized as a child whenever she made a mistake. Her parents indoctrinated her to believe that personal errors were intolerable. Now as an adult, she has continued to follow that early, destructive path.

  Problems with anger and depression caused Alicia to seek counseling, but she often used our sessions to defend her belief that mistakes could be the norm for everyone but her. I challenged her on this as often as I could, hoping to knock down the wall she had built to hide her humanity. Here is an example of how one of our sessions went:

  “What would you like to talk about today?” I asked.

  “I’ve been feeling really angry this week. Toward everything. The littlest thing can set me off,” said Alicia.

  “Tell me more.”

  “Some things at work haven’t been going well. I messed up a letter I was supposed to do for my boss. That was really stupid. Then when I got home, I yelled at my husband for not doing something he said he would do for me.”

  “What do you think is causing your anger?” I prodded.

  “I don’t know. You’re the doctor. You tell me,” Alicia answered half jokingly, not really wanting to look at herself.

  “Come on, Alicia, give it a try. I think you know what’s going on, don’t you?”

  “You want me to admit that I don’t let myself or anyone else around me make mistakes and that when I do, or they do, my anger explodes. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. “What I want you to say isn’t important. The point is, what’s the truth? Isn’t that what we’re really after in these sessions?”

  “I guess so,” she said reluctantly, “but it seems to me that making mistakes is really stupid and completely avoidable. I just can’t stand it when stupid things like that happen.”

  I looked directly at Alicia. “I think we both know these ideas about mistakes being stupid and inexcusable were trained into you a long time ago.”

  Alicia rolled her eyes upward. “All roads lead home, eh?” she ventured. “All right, yes, I got it from my parents. They never let up on me. They were constantly on my case. I could never measure up to their yardstick, and they would beat me with it when I didn’t.”

  Suddenly, bitter tears formed in her eyes.

  “The way they treated you hurt a lot, didn’t it?” I responded, hoping to keep the tears flowing. She needed the emotional relief.

  “Yes. A lot,” Alicia replied.

  “It seems to me that your parents used a standard with you that no one could have measured up to, but you’ve never realized that. You’ve continued to use that same yardstick ever since then.”

  “I guess I have. I certainly never seem to measure up, and for that matter, no one else seems to be measuring up to my yardstick, either,” she admitted.

  “I’ll tell you what I think. When no one measures up, it’s time to change the yardstick.”

  “Could be,” she answered, not really sounding committed to the idea.

  “Alicia, I believe that if you’re willing to take a truthful look at the yardstick you were handed by your parents—the one you’ve been using ever since you left home—you’ll see that you need to throw it away and replace it with a more realistic and humane one. Your parents taught you that to err was stupid, inexcusable, and unforgivable. Like all other children, you believed your parents. Unfortunately, in this area, they were wrong. You need to recognize that. You’ll never get over your chronic problems with anger and depression until you allow yourself and others to make mistakes—even some big ones.”

  “I will never accept the idea that making mistakes is all right,” she defiantly replied, replaying the mental tape her parents had put inside her.

  “Then you will never get better!” I said, just as defiantly.

  “You’re telling me I have to like my mistakes?”

  “No,” I replied. “Accepting mistakes and liking them are two different things. I’m just telling you that if you keep refusing to accept the fact that making mistakes is part of life—yours and everybody else’s—you won’t ever become emotionally healthy and you won’t get along with others. You certainly don’t have to like your mistakes, but you need to accept them as part of being human.”

  “Sounds like an awfully fine line between accepting and liking.”

  “Maybe. But it’s a fine line worth distinguishing.”

  Alicia shrugged. “I’ll tell you straight out, I don’t really want to do what you say. Still, I know I need to do something. I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.”

  “That’s a start,” I encouraged her. “I’m confident you can pull this off.”

  How Human Is Making Mistakes?

  Is making mistakes human or not? Your decision about this, like Alicia’s, will be crucial. If you decide that making mistakes is stupid/dumb/inexcusable/ avoidable/intolerable/idiotic, you’ll be in for a lifetime of self-abuse and emotional misery. If on the other hand, you can see the truth that making mistakes is inescapable/human/normal/tolerable/frequent/understandable, you will experience a lifetime of growth and peace.

  Now, again, let me emphasize that believing “to err is human” does not mean we have a license to make mistakes all over the place or not to try to correct our mistakes. You can’t expect to succeed in life if you have the attitude, “Well, since I can’t be perfect, I might as well be imperfect all over the place and not worry about it.” Not being concerned about doing well is just as grievous a mistake as trying to be perfect. Both are failures to deal with the truth. We are imperfect, but we are capable of quality and improvement. Yes, we’ll all make mistakes. But making them out of indifference or carelessness isn’t healthy. As Jerry Jenkins humorously put it, “To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of your pencil, you’re overdoing it.”

  Growthwork

  At the end of each chapter, I have given you an assignment (you have been doing them, haven’t you?). The purpose of these assignments has been to help you see the lies you tell yourself and how they are destructive to you and your relationships with others. Now, as we focus more on telling ourselves the truth, I want to add to our A-B-C model to help you go even farther.

  In the A-B-C model, recall that “A” stands for the “event,” “B” stands for your “self-talk,” and “C” stands for your “response.” To extend our model, let’s add the letters “D” and �
�E.” “D” represents “new self-talk,” and it is here that you tell yourself the truth needed to counter the lies you told yourself at “B.” “E” represents “new response,” and this is the part of the model where new (healthier, more appropriate) emotions and behavior will begin to replace the unhealthy, inappropriate reactions you’ve been having at “C.”

  Let’s take real-life “A” and run it through the A-B-C-D-E model:

  “A” (Event): At the express (ten-item or less) checkout line, the person in front of me has more than twenty items.

  “B” (Faulty Self-Talk/Lies): She’s got a lot of nerve! What an inconsiderate person! Why do I always get behind people like this? I ought to give her a piece of my mind! Doesn’t she think about anybody but herself? Why do people do this to me!

  “C” (Response): Muscles tighten up, breathing becomes rapid; feel irritated, angry, resentful; slam my seven items down, one by one, let out a noticeable grunt, and give the person a dirty look when she turns around.

  “D” (New Self-Talk/Truth): I’m choosing to let what this person is doing bother me. That’s my choice. She is being inconsiderate, but it isn’t the end of the world. She isn’t doing it to me personally; she is just doing it. I can choose to say something, or I can choose to let it slide—that’s up to me. This is a small thing. I need to keep it that way.”

  “E” (New Response): Less physical tension; reduced feelings of anger; pick up a magazine and start reading it until it is my turn to be checked out.

  The challenge is adding steps “D” and “E” to start using the truth to defeat the lies you tell yourself at “B.” Don’t worry if your initial efforts result in less-than- immediate improvement in your attitude or emotions. Lies are hard to change, and hard work over time is the key to making significant changes.

  Let’s run a tougher situation through the A-B-C-D-E model just to see what it’s made of:

  “A” (Event): My spouse and I had our worst argument in the last ten years. Both of us said some pretty mean things. The argument reached a boiling point, and my spouse cursed at me, stormed out of the room, and slept in the guest bedroom that night.

  “B” (Faulty Self-Talk/Lies): How dare he talk to me like that! He never thinks he does anything wrong! It will be a cold day in Hades before I apologize to him! I should have never married him in the first place. Now I’m stuck with someone I don’t even like half the time! I hate being married and hope he dies in an accident on the way to work tomorrow!

  “C” (Response): Heart raced, breathing rapid and shallow, muscles tight; felt extremely hurt, angry, and hopeless; went into the kitchen and ate a half-dozen chocolate chip cookies and watched television until one o’clock in the morning.

  “D” (New Self-Talk/Truth): That was our worst fight in years. Both of us were out of line and didn’t really listen to each other. My spouse was wrong to curse at me—that is never acceptable. But I still need to forgive him for that. I need his forgiveness for some of the things I said too. We hardly ever fight like this anymore, a sign that things are getting better in our relationship. Just because we blew it pretty badly this time doesn’t mean we have gone back to square one or that this relationship isn’t a good one. Yes, I don’t always like everything about my spouse, but he doesn’t like everything about me, either. I really don’t want him to die. I just feel very hurt and angry. We need to talk again and try to resolve this—swallow our pride and give it another try.

  “E” (New Response): Calmer; still hurt and angry but not vindictively so; called spouse at work to say that I was sorry for my part in last night’s fight and that I would like to try and figure out what went wrong and solve it.

  Now, here is your assignment. I want you to spend the next week keeping an A-B-C-D-E journal. Make entries in your journal about situations you felt upset about and/or didn’t handle very well. Specifically, I want you to write about any situations that have to do with the battle between the “I must be perfect” lie and the truth “to err is human.” A journal entry might look like this:

  “A” (Event): I locked my keys in my car.

  “B” (Faulty Self-Talk/Lies): What a stupid idiot I am. Only I would do something this idiotic! What kind of moron locks his keys in his car at a time like this? Incredible! Now I’ll miss my appointment, and everybody will end up mad at me. What a complete jerk I am!

  “C” (Response): Muscles tensed up; breathing rapid; heart raced; felt angry, humiliated, ashamed, anxious; pounded on the roof of the car.

  “D” (New Self-Talk/Truth): Okay, this is inconvenient, but lots of people make the same mistake every day. I’m not the first guy to lock his keys in his car. This doesn’t make me an idiot. I’m not happy about it, but then again, it’s not the end of the world. If people get mad at me for being late, I’ll tell them exactly what happened. No doubt they’ve done the same thing.

  “E” (New Response): Less physical tension; heart slower; felt less angry, embarrassed, more at peace; went inside to call security for assistance.

  Consider another example:

  “A” (Event): I spilled a greasy, red-sauced hors d’oeuvre down the front of my shirt at a very important company event with the boss watching.

  “B” (Faulty Self-Talk/Lies): You stupid idiot. Only a socially ungracious slug like you would do something as stupid as this. No one else at this party did something this stupid. You look like a clown with no circus to go to. Every eye in the place is on you. You will be lucky if you ever get invited to another social event the rest of your life.

  “C” (Response): Heart started to race, muscles tensed up, began to sweat; felt anxious, humiliated, embarrassed, uncomfortable; immediately covered up the stain with my hand and hurriedly walked to the rest room where I feverishly worked on getting it out.

  “D” (New Self-Talk/Truth): Hey, you just made a mistake. It isn’t the end of the world. Nobody really noticed, and even if people did, they probably felt some compassion for you. Maybe you can even make a joke out of it to put everyone at ease (tell the host and hostess that not only did you enjoy the hors d’oeuvres but your shirt did too). Be thankful it wasn’t battery acid you spilled on yourself. Now, go clean yourself up and get back to enjoying the party.

  “E” (New Response): Physically calmed down, breathed easier; felt less embarrassed, anxious; able to laugh about it.

  A second assignment I want to give you is to do something imperfectly on purpose this week. I want you to do something “good enough” but not perfectly. For example, let’s say you are an obsessive-compulsive “neat freak” when it come to cleaning up the kitchen after a meal. Instead of spending an hour making everything perfect in the kitchen (i.e., making the floor so clean you could eat off it), spend fifteen minutes making it clean enough. Or instead of putting everything “in its place,” leave some things lying around. Find something this week that you usually try to do flawlessly, and purposely permit some flaws in how you do it.

  The main purpose of all this is to get you to fight the “I must be perfect” lie you tell yourself at “B” with the “to err is human” truth you need to tell yourself at “D” in order to react more maturely and appropriately at “E.” Again, be patient. Old “tapes” are hard to change, and you may find it difficult to come up with new ways of thinking.

  Think of the lies you tell yourself as speaking your native language. Fighting back with the truth, then, is like learning to speak a whole new language. Just as you can learn a foreign language with enough effort and practice, you can learn to speak fluent “truth” if you will do the same.

  A quick story. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, I had to take four semesters of a foreign language in order to get my degree. Because my parents were stationed in Germany at the time, I decided to take German. Big mistake! My first day of class in my first semester of German was, how should I put it, a disaster! The professor began the class speaking German. I dropped the class in a heartbeat because it was just more than I cou
ld handle. It took me four years of college to finish four semesters of German because I kept dropping them when they got tough.

  I say all this just to let you know that learning to tell yourself the truth will be as hard as learning to speak a new language. I’m not saying this to discourage you but to help you be more realistic about what you have gotten yourself into. To become fluent in a new language is a time-consuming, laborious process. Hang in there—don’t drop the class. It will be worth it!

  9

  YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE

  I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give

  you the formula for failure—try to please everybody.

  —Herbert Bayard Swope

  In 1975 singer Rick Nelson recorded a song entitled “Garden Party.” It tells of an actual event from his life. He was invited to be part of an “oldies” concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City where he and other popular artists from the fifties and sixties were to perform their hits. When he got on stage, he chose to sing his newest songs, not the ones for which he was famous, such as “Hello, Mary Lou” and “Traveling Man” and his other classics. The crowd registered their displeasure. They booed him. That wasn’t what they had paid to hear.

  Rick Nelson learned (relearned?) something at that concert. A line from “Garden Party” reveals what it was: “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.” While I am not so sure about the “so you’ve got to please yourself” part (it sounds a little bit too self-centered for my taste—if all we did was please ourselves, we wouldn’t be any better off), I do think the “you can’t please everyone” line is one of the great truths we need to know and practice to lead emotionally and spiritually healthy lives. To some extent Rick Nelson must have come to this realization, for the last line in “Garden Party” is, “If memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”