If you feel inferior, re-evaluating your attitude towards yourself is more effective than trying to pull down someone else's self-esteem.
Thinking You're Special
Trying to replace a sense of worthlessness with a feeling of ‘specialness' is another common self-defeating technique you can adopt for beating low self-esteem. Look out for times when you tell yourself ‘If I'm not different, I'm nothing' or ‘Being average or normal is like not existing'.
The problem here is that, as far as the universe is concerned, you're not special. No one is. You may be unique, but so is everyone else. In fact, you may well try so hard to avoid the ‘horror' of mediocrity that you end up living an unhappy and unfulfilled life. This tendency largely stems from an extreme form of all or nothing thinking (which we cover in Chapter 2) and the mistaken idea that you need to reduce low self-esteem by wildly overcompensating.
Rather than trying to assert that you're special, focus your attention in a more constructive direction. Challenge the idea that you need to be ‘special' in order to feel okay about yourself. Accept yourself as a normal, ordinary, worthwhile individual, just like everyone else.
Trying to Get Everyone to Like You
Substituting your dislike of yourself by trying to win the approval of other people is a recipe for anxiety. You can end up feeling anxious about not achieving your goal of being liked by someone or a group. If you do achieve your goal and win approval, you're likely to become anxious about losing your prize.
The real pity is that your imagined ‘need' for approval may not help you give off the attractive, self-assured air you'd so dearly like. Believing that you need to be liked in order to like yourself can leave you in a desperate position. Allowing people to walk all over you in an attempt to win their approval has a pretty negative impact on your self-esteem, for fairly obvious reasons.
Rather than attempting to win approval, strive for respect. If you respect yourself, you give off an air of being comfortable in your own skin. People with true self-respect are those often most respected by others. You don't have to be a slave to this principle, but seeking respect can help you assert yourself more readily.
Placing Yourself above Criticism
Placing yourself above criticism is a classic tactic if you believe that being criticised reveals you to be inadequate, useless or a failure. Perfectionism, covering up your weaknesses and defensiveness are the inevitable result. You try to be flawless so that other people can't criticise you. However, you end up being unduly harsh with yourself for your shortcomings and errors. You may even believe that you can knock yourself into shape by criticising yourself, unwittingly lowering your self-image further.
Instead, try to accept your human fallibility without condemning yourself. Mistakes and flaws are an unavoidable aspect of being human, no matter how hard you try to change things. Don't be ashamed of your shortcomings - everyone else has flaws too. Do you think people really lose respect for you if they find out you're only human? They probably don't. Chances are, they'll be relieved and feel more able to relax in your company. Their respect for you may even grow, because they can accept you, warts and all.
Reveal an imperfection and check out the response you get. Try accepting yourself non-defensively in the face of criticism. If someone criticises you, try asking them for more information. Most people find owning up to their human fallibility a far more productive strategy than striving to be perfect.
Choosing perfection as your goal is setting yourself up to fail because no one is capable of being perfect. The more you fail to reach your unrealistic goal, the more you put yourself down. Don't be tempted to try harder to be perfect. Instead, try harder to accept your imperfection.
Avoiding Failure, Disapproval, Rejection and Other Animals
You may find that you avoid situations, places or people that trigger your tendency to put yourself down. This approach is very much a way of papering over the cracks. Your underlying attitude towards yourself remains the problem. By avoiding potential failure, you don't change your attitude: you simply postpone setting off your insecurity for a while.
A long-lasting, elegant solution to overcoming poor self-esteem is for you to uncover, examine and change any unhelpful attitudes you may have developed towards yourself. Then, you can deliberately seek out the things you've been avoiding, while practising your new self-accepting attitude (head to Chapter 14 for more).
Avoiding Your Emotions
You may try to block out certain emotions because you regard them as a sign of weakness. Although you may try to persuade yourself that you're strong because you can control your emotions, your relationships and psychological health are likely to suffer.
Having a wide range of emotions is part of what makes you human. Try as you might, avoiding these emotions is difficult - and unhealthy. You may end up feeling isolated, cold and aloof in your relationships, which can rob you of much richer and more satisfying experiences. Begin to accept your feelings and recognise that this acceptance shows courage, not weakness.
Sometimes, experiencing strong negative emotions is a natural response to adversity, a part of the healing process and a sign of strength in facing up to difficulties.
Attempting to Feel More Significant by Controlling Others
If you try to control others, the underlying assumption is that you need to prove your significance by having an effect on other people. The problem is that without this proof, you are (in your eyes) insignificant.
Perhaps you immediately offer unsolicited advice or try to convert others to a favourite cause to prove that you are a person of influence? Unfortunately, your lack of respect for others' thoughts, feelings and behaviours may actually be a turn-off to those other people.
Compulsively trying to influence or affect people actually shows you have a lack of control. You also reinforce a negative self-image by acting as if you have to prove something to be worthwhile or significant.
Imagine how you'd interact with people if you didn't have the need to prove your power or influence. You can use this imagining exercise as a guide to new healthier behaviour.
Over-Defending Your Self-Worth
We don't advocate you being a doormat, but the healthy alternative to being passive is to stay calm in the face of minor slights. Constantly defending your self-worth can lead to verbal or physical aggression (have a glance at Chapter 15). Besides, if you're confident in your self-worth, do you really need to guard it so carefully? Insisting that others must show you respect at all times leads to unhealthy anger. Your compulsive outrage at being disrespected can simply drive you to take people to task for minor assaults on your fragile self-esteem.
Respect yourself regardless of whether other people treat you respectfully. Self-respect affords you the ability to assert yourself appropriately when it's worth doing so.
Feeling Superior
You may have superior, equal and inferior traits compared with other people, but the idea that you're either an inferior or superior person is an overgeneralisation. No one is superior or inferior to everyone else in every way. We all have different strengths and weaknesses.
Some people can only feel good about themselves when they convince themselves that they're ‘the best'. Many people with this tendency try to demonstrate their superiority by showing off their physical or psychological strength. For example, you may feel driven to impress people with your wit, intellect or other talent. Unfortunately, these solutions are only temporary ones to your underlying feelings of inferiority, which can be your real target for change. At worst, your attempts at superiority serve only to alienate other people and mask your true strengths.
Although the notion of the ‘real you' is a bit simplistic, try dropping the superiority. Be as authentic as you can and see how people respond to you.
Blaming Nature or Nurture for Your Problems
Blaming your problems on your past, genetics, hormones, brain chemistry or other people does have the distinct advantage of
temporarily alleviating any sense that you're stupid, pathetic or less worthwhile. This blame system stems from the mistaken idea that if you take an appropriate degree of responsibility for your emotional problems, then it means that you're to blame for those problems. Protecting your self-esteem by blaming something or someone else can typically backfire, which makes real change more difficult because you attribute your problems to factors outside of your control.
Half of the people in the Western world experience some kind of significant emotional problem during the course of their lives. So, having an emotional problem simply means you're human.
Use your understanding of your past and your ‘make-up' to develop a compassionate, sympathetic perspective towards your current difficulties. Take some personal responsibility for keeping your problems going. Recognising how you may be making your problems worse gives you the power to make changes for the better.
Unhelpful ideas about how to feel good about yourself can stem from childhood messages. Teachers or parents may have told you to ‘Be the best', ‘Never admit that you're wrong', ‘Our family is better than other families', ‘Failure is not an option' or ‘Big boys don't cry'. Such messages may have been offered to you as words of wisdom, but as an adult you can re-evaluate their truth and helpfulness. You can decide to dump them in favour of updated, self and other acceptance beliefs.
Chapter 24: Ten Ways to Lighten Up
In This Chapter
Discovering the benefits of not taking things too seriously
Finding yourself funny
Getting more enjoyment out of life
Throwing caution to the wind
Sometimes you can make life more arduous than necessary by taking yourself too seriously. If you take yourself overly seriously you may well find that you feel hurt, angry and depressed far more frequently than you'd like. Being unduly earnest can prevent you from seeing the funny side of things, lead you to misinterpret innocent comments as criticism and urge you to turn minor misfortune into major disaster. This chapter lists ten ways to lighten up a little, live with life's ups and downs and increase your overall enjoyment of things. Go through the list and pick out the headings that apply most to you.
Accept That You Can - and Will - Make Mistakes
Consider the following attitudes to making mistakes:
I'm only human/Of flesh and blood I'm made/I'm only human/Born to make mistakes.
- The Human League, British band
Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal
- Mike Ditka, American football coach
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Sir Winston Churchill, British prime minister and statesman
Eighty per cent of success is showing up.
- Woody Allen, US comedian and film director
If you take yourself overly seriously, you're likely to consider your mistakes unacceptable. You may also believe that other people may reject you on the basis of your blunders. Moreover, you probably judge yourself harshly when you make a social gaffe or a poor decision.
Everyone gets things wrong and mucks up from time to time. If you try to hide or ignore your mistakes, you can deny yourself the opportunity to develop from them. By acknowledging mistakes, and accepting yourself for making them, you give yourself the chance to do things differently next time. You'll also become more comfortable with making errors in the first place and are likely to spend less time worrying about whether you get things ‘right'. Giving yourself permission to get things wrong can encourage you to take the risk of trying things in the first place - even at the risk of error or failure. Try to remember that your own mistakes are generally far more important to you than they are to others. Most people respect someone who can own up to and take responsibility for his mistakes, poor decisions, misdemeanours and foot-in-mouth moments. Remember that most of the time mistakes are a small price to pay for rich experiences.
Try Something New
Perhaps you're reluctant to play a different sport, change your usual holiday destination or acquire a new language or skill. Maybe you're even reluctant to try a fresh route to work in case you get lost and look foolish. The fear of looking silly can stop many people dead in their tracks. If you can cope with looking a trifle daft now and again, you'll find it a lot easier to discover novel interests, immerse yourself in new experiences and acquire new skills. Even doing small things like eating different cuisines or going on a one-day meditation course (or a course on anything that interests you!) can broaden your horizons.
Doing something foolish doesn't mean you're a fool. It's pretty much impossible for you to learn a new language or how to play the piano without making lots of grammatical gaffes or hitting the wrong notes. By giving yourself the opportunity to try new things, you may have a lot of fun in the process, even if you don't become a polyglot or a pianist in the Royal Philharmonic. Lots of things in life are worth doing simply for the sake of it!
Stamp on Shame
Taking yourself too seriously can lead you to experience unnecessary emotional upset. For example, if you need to look as though you're in complete control and composed all the time, you're a prime candidate for experiencing frequent bouts of shame.
Feelings of shame and humiliation are often linked to perceiving that your weaknesses, errors or faults have been exposed and that others will reject you as a result. For example, if you fall over while boarding a train, you may experience intense, unpleasant feelings of shame rather than getting appropriately embarrassed. The shame you experience about somebody seeing you trip up is likely to last longer than simple embarrassment, and cause you far more distress than any physical injuries you may have sustained.
As one of your goals, you can have a go at overcoming your propensity to feel ashamed. Try deliberately exposing yourself to scrutiny using the following four-step technique:
1. Make yourself conspicuous. Wear a ridiculous outfit, make animal noises, sing to yourself, wear your underwear on the outside of your normal clothing, ask a really stupid question, or do anything else silly you can think of. Whatever you choose, do it on purpose and in a very public place. Travelling on public transport provides an excellent opportunity to carry out shame-attacking exercises.
2. Stay in the situation long enough for your feelings of shame and general discomfort to subside on their own. Don't hide yourself away in the corner, run away from the public place or remove your clown hat, for example. Stay in the situation until you notice that your uncomfortable feelings are beginning to subside (sometimes this may take ten minutes and other times it may take an hour). The important point is to stick with the exercise for whatever length of time it takes for you to feel less embarrassed, ashamed or anxious.
Don't expect to feel totally calm and happy when you're deliberately doing something ridiculous in public. The idea is for you to see that nothing terrible happens to you when other people look at you as though you're weird.
3. Hold an attitude of self-acceptance throughout the experience. This means that you act as if you truly believe that being judged as odd or weird isn't the end of the world. (This just isn't the case, or the world would have ended long ago.) Tell yourself that you can tolerate uncomfortable feelings, which you associate with possible negative evaluation from others. (You can: feelings of shame and embarrassment don't kill people.)
4. Repeat variations of the exercise often and without long gaps in between. Doing the exercise once isn't enough. Repetition is the key to making yourself desensitised to scrutiny so that you don't feel shame as a result. Try doing this exercise daily for a week; it's a great way to lessen your distress.
Laugh at Yourself
Many people claim that laughter's the best medicine. This adage may well carry a sizeable grain of truth. Finding the funny angle in an otherwise awkward situation can help remove the sting. Sometimes you can take the horror out of your mistakes and shortcomings by finding them amusing.
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bsp; If you're able to value yourself as a worthy person and recognise your human imperfection, you won't fall into the trap of taking yourself so seriously that you're unable to laugh. Think of people you know who can't take a joke: they're very likely people who take themselves and everything they do far too seriously. Being overly earnest is a bit tragic: anything that happens to you or anything you do that is, in your mind, less than acceptable has a profound impact on your global opinion of yourself. You can glean much more enjoyment out of life and your personal relationships if you can have a giggle at your own expense.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies Page 39