Figure 13-2: Theresa's responsibility pie chart.
You can also use the responsibility pie chart with negative events that have actually happened and that you're blaming yourself for, for example losing a job, a failed relationship, someone treating you badly, or a loved one becoming ill.
The purpose of the responsibility pie is to help you see that you're not 100 per cent responsible for an event happening. Many obsessional people give themselves more responsibility than is legitimate - or at least more than non-obsessional people do.
Taking less responsibility is something that you steadily need to train your mind to do. Actually, you're retraining your mind to break your habit of taking excessive responsibility.
Retraining your attention
If you think you're preoccupied with your appearance, health or being responsible for harm coming to yourself or others because you focus on it too much, try to create a counterbalance by training your attention elsewhere. Chapter 5 gives you some more guidance.
Seeking professional help
Use the following checklist to determine whether an obsession or compulsion is normal or a problem for which you should seek professional assistance.
Your obsessional problems are impacting on your physical health. For example, you're not taking prescribed medication, attending medical appointments, or feeding and grooming yourself sufficiently.
Your obsessional problems are preventing you from leaving your home. Sometimes people with severe OCD or BDD become housebound.
Your obsessional problems are having a serious impact on your social and occupational life. For example, you're unable to continue working, you've lost a job, you're avoiding contact with friends or your partner has left you.
Your obsessional problems are preventing you from caring adequately for your children. This is a particularly painful point for many people with OCD. People with OCD typically take too much responsibility for the welfare of their loved ones. However, if you contemplate the needs of your children and decide impartially that your problems are stopping you from meeting those needs, get in touch with a professional.
You've given self-help an earnest try but are unable to overcome your problem.
Your family doctor might be familiar with obsessional disorders, but you may be better off seeking out a specialist. Make an appointment with a psychiatrist for assessment. If your problem is so severe that you're housebound, you may be able to get a home assessment via a community mental health outreach team. However, you may need to prepare yourself for going out of your safety zone and into a hospital or clinic.
Getting the best help for your obsessional problems isn't always straightforward, but we do encourage you to not give up. If you meet the criteria on the checklist above, please do seek help. Appendix A lists relevant organisations you can consider contacting for more information.
Chapter 14: Overcoming Low Self-esteem and Accepting Yourself
In This Chapter
Understanding low self-esteem
Appreciating the principles of self-acceptance
Strengthening your self-acceptance
Dispelling myths about practising self-acceptance
Disturbing feelings, such as depression, anxiety, shame, guilt, anger, envy and jealousy, are often rooted in low self-opinion. If you're prone to experiencing these feelings, then you may well have a problem with your self-esteem. You may assume that you're only as worthwhile as your achievements, love life, social status, attractiveness or financial prowess. If you link your worth to these temporary conditions and for some reason they diminish, your self-esteem can plummet too. Alternatively, you may take a long-standing dim view of yourself: However favourable the conditions mentioned above, your self-esteem may be chronically low. Whatever the case, you can follow the philosophy of self-acceptance that we outline in this chapter, which can significantly improve the attitude you hold towards yourself.
Identifying Issues of Self-Esteem
Implicit in the concept of self-esteem is the notion of estimating, or rating and measuring, your worth. If you have high self-esteem, then your measure of your value or worth is high. Conversely, if you have low self-esteem, your estimate of your value is low.
Condemning yourself globally is a form of overgeneralising, known as labelling or self-downing (we talk about overgeneralisation in more detail in Chapter 2). This thinking error creates low self-esteem. Labelling yourself makes you feel worse and can lead to counterproductive actions, such as avoidance, isolation, rituals, procrastination and perfectionism (which we talk about in Chapters 7, 12 and 13), to name but a few.
Examples of labelling or self-downing include statements such as the following:
When you measure your worth on the basis of one or more external factors, you're likely to go up and down like a yo-yo in both mood and self-concept because life is changeable.
Developing Self-Acceptance
One approach to tackling your low self-esteem is to boost the estimate you have of your worth. The underlying problem, however, still remains; and like an investment, your self-esteem can go down, as well as up.
Self-acceptance is an alternative to boosting self-esteem and tackles the problem by removing self-rating. If you don't have a sturdy belief that your value is intrinsic, or built-in, you may have difficulty concluding that you have any worth at all when things go wrong for you.
Unconditional self-acceptance means untangling your self-worth from external ‘measures' or ‘ratings' of your value as a person. Eventually, you can become less likely to consider yourself defective or inadequate on the basis of failures or disapproval, because you view yourself as a fallible human being, whose worth remains more or less constant.
Self-acceptance involves making the following assertions:
As a human being, you're a unique, multifaceted individual.
You're ever-changing and developing.
You may be able, to some degree, to measure specific aspects of yourself (such as how tall you are), but you'll never manage to rate the whole of yourself because you're too complex and continuously changing.
Humans, by their very nature, are fallible and imperfect.
By extension, because you're a complex, unique, ever-changing individual, you cannot legitimately be rated or measured as a whole person.
The following are the principles of self-acceptance. Read them, re-read them, think them over and put them into practice in your daily life to significantly enhance your self-acceptance. The principles are good sense, but we're leaving it up to you to decide how ‘common' this kind of sense is. The principles are derived from the rational (self-helping) thinking methods developed by Albert Ellis and Windy Dryden.
Understanding that you have worth because you're human
Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy - one of the very earliest approaches to CBT - states that all human beings have extrinsic value to others and intrinsic value to themselves. But we humans gamely confuse the two and classify ourselves as ‘worthy' or ‘good' on the basis of assumed value to others. We humans too easily allow our self-worth to be contingent upon the opinions and value judgements of others. Many cognitive behaviour therapists (and indeed other kinds of psychotherapists) hold the implicit value of a human being at the very heart of their perspective.
Imagine how much easier your life will be, and how much more stable your self-esteem will be, if you realise that you have worth as a person independently of how much other people value you. You can appreciate being liked, admired or respected without feeling a dire necessity to prompt these responses, or living in fear of losing them.
Appreciating that you're too complex to globally measure or rate
You may mistakenly define your whole worth - or even your entire self - on the basis of your individual parts. Doing so is pointless, because humans are ever-changing, dynamic, fallible and complex creatures.
Humans have the capacity to work on correcting less desirable behaviours a
nd maximising more desirable behaviours. You have the distinctive ability to strive for self-improvement, to maximise your potential and to learn from your and others' histories, mistakes and accomplishments. In short, you have the capacity to develop the ability to accept yourself as you are, while still endeavouring to improve yourself if you so choose.
Consider a bowl of fresh, hand-picked fruit, beautiful in almost every respect. Now imagine that one of the apples in the fruit bowl is bruised. Do you consider the whole bowl of fruit to be worthless? Of course not! It's a beautiful bowl of fruit, with a single bruised apple. Avoid overgeneralising by seeing that your imperfections are simply facets of yourself and do not define the whole of you.
Letting go of labelling
Self-acceptance means deciding to resist labelling yourself at all and rather to entertain the idea that ratings are inappropriate to the human condition. For example:
You lied to a friend once. Does that make you a liar forever and for all time?
You used to smoke cigarettes but then you decided to give them up. Are you still a smoker because you once smoked?
You failed at one or more tasks that were important to you. Can you legitimately conclude that you are an utter failure?
By the same token, if you succeeded at one important task, are you now a thoroughgoing success?
As you can see by reviewing these examples, basing your self-esteem on one incident, one action or one experience is a gross overgeneralisation.
Believing you're more than the sum of your parts
Take a look at Figure 14-1. The big I is comprised of dozens of little is. So, what's the point of the figure? When you evaluate yourself totally on the basis of one characteristic, thought, action or intention, you're making the thinking error that a single part (the little i) equals to the whole (the big I).
Figure 14-1: Which do you see first: the big I or all the little is?
Along similar lines, consider a finely woven tapestry comprised of countless variations of texture, colour and pattern. Within this tapestry, you may find one or more flaws, where the colours fail to meet or the patterns are slightly out of sync. The flaws in the tiny details don't cancel out the beauty or value of the overall piece. And what about the Venus de Milo? Over the years, she's lost a limb or two, but the officials at the Louvre don't say, ‘Um, sorry, she's flawed; put her in the bin!' The fact that the statue is damaged doesn't diminish or define its overall worth. The statue is valued as it is, and the absence of arms doesn't negate the impact it has on our understanding of the evolution of art.
If your child, sibling or nephew failed a spelling test, would you judge them a total loser? Would you encourage them to think of themselves as a global failure, based entirely on one action? If not, why are you doing this to yourself?
Start acting in accordance with the belief that your parts do not define your wholeness. If you truly believe this idea, what do you do when you fail at doing something, behave badly or wickedly, or notice that you have a physical imperfection or character flaw? How do you expect to feel when endorsing this belief?
Take a pack of self-adhesive notes and a large, flat surface. A wall or a door works well - or try a mate if he has a few spare minutes. Write down on one of the notes a characteristic that you, as a whole person, possess; then stick the note on the wall, door or volunteer. Keep doing this, writing down all the aspects of yourself that you can think of until you run out of characteristics, or sticky notes. Now step back and admire your illustration of your complexity as a human being. Appreciate the fact that you cannot legitimately be rated globally.
Acknowledging your ever-changing nature
As a human being, your nature is to be an ever-changing person. Even if you measure all your personal characteristics today and come up with a global rating for yourself, it'll be wrong tomorrow. Why? Because each day you change a little, age very slightly and gather a few new experiences.
Consider yourself as work-in-progress and try holding a flexible attitude towards yourself. Every skill you acquire or interest you develop effectively produces a change within you. Every hardship you weather, every joyous event that visits you and every mundane occurrence you endure causes you to develop, adapt and grow.
Ellis theorises that your essential value or worth cannot be measured accurately because your being includes your becoming. Ellis suggests that each human is a process with an ever-changing present and future. Hence, you cannot conclusively evaluate yourself while you're still living and developing.
Forgiving flaws in yourself and others
Interestingly, you may overlook some imperfections in yourself while condemning the same shortcomings in others, or vice versa. To some degree, this relates to what you consider important, your flexibility and your level of self-acceptance. Consider the following scenarios:
Julian works in a computer shop. Whenever he's about to close a sale, he gets excited and trips over some of his words. He feels a bit foolish about this, although none of his customers has ever mentioned it.
Margarita has a poor sense of direction. Sometimes she forgets which way is left and which is right. When she's driving, Margarita has difficulty following directions and frequently finds herself lost.
Carlos is a good student, but has difficulty in exam situations. He studies earnestly but, come the day of the test, he forgets what he's read and performs poorly.
You can't always change things about yourself. Sometimes you can improve a bit, but sometimes you can't change at all. If you're a fully developed adult and five-foot tall, you're unlikely to be able to make yourself grow to six foot through sheer determination. The trick is to begin to recognise where you can make changes and where you can't. Living happily is about accepting your limitations without putting yourself down for them and capitalising on your strengths. So, taking the three examples above:
Julian may be able to make himself less anxious about a potential sale; therefore, he may speak more coherently. By accepting that he mangles his words sometimes, but not condemning himself for it, he may come some way towards overcoming this aspect of his behaviour.
Margarita may simply be someone who's not particularly good at navigation. She may improve with practice, but she may also do well to accept that she's the person who turns up late for parties two streets away from her home.
Carlos can look at his studying habits and see whether he can study more effectively. However, he may simply be someone who does better on practical assignments rather than tests.
Overall, Julian, Carlos and Margarita can choose to accept themselves as fallible human beings and work to improve in the areas described, while also accepting their personal limitations. They can choose to embrace their inherent fallibility as part of the experience of being a human, and understand that their ‘less good' traits are part of their individual composition as much as their ‘good' traits.
Alternatively, they can choose to evaluate themselves on the basis of their ‘less good' traits and judge themselves as worthless, or less than worthy. But where, oh where, do you go from there?
Accepting your fallible nature
Sorry if we're the ones to break it to you, but human beings are flawed and imperfect. You may be the pretty impressive product of evolution, but essentially you're just the smartest animal on the planet. Even if you believe you're the creation of a divine entity, do you really think the design brief was perfection? Maybe being complex, different and with an in-built tendency to make mistakes are all part of the plan. When people say ‘You're only human,' they have a point: never, ever, can you be flawless or stop making mistakes. And neither can anyone else. It's just how we're built.
During the process of accepting yourself, you may experience sadness, disappointment, or remorse for your blunders. These healthy negative emotions may be uncomfortable, but usually they can lead to self-helping, corrective and ‘adaptive' behaviours. Self-condemnation or self-depreciation, on the other hand, are likely to lead to far more intens
e, unhealthy negative emotions, such as depression, hurt, guilt and shame. So, you're more likely to adopt self-defeating, ‘maladaptive' behaviours, such as avoidance or giving up.
Valuing your uniqueness
Who else do you know who's exactly - and yes, we do mean exactly - like you? The correct answer is no one, because the human cloning thing hasn't really taken off yet. So you are, in fact, quite unique - just like everyone else!
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Page 24