Help me learn to be kind to myself

July 17, 2024 8:31 AM

At the age of 43 it's starting to become apparent to me that I have some pretty incorrect internal beliefs about myself. Trouble is that I don't know how to spot them. I'm in therapy at the moment, which is great, but it's dealing with other things — this feels like I need to reprogram myself and I don't really know how.

These are things that I objectively know are wrong, and yet I can't seem to stop believing them.

I know that one recommendation is going to be (C|D)BT here but I'm already in talk therapy and don't want to change styles from what my current therapist offers.

Here are some examples of things that I know to be untrue, but which I somehow believe apply to me:

- If somebody does something that upsets me, and I don't tell them so right away, it's wrong to then bring that upset up with them later (since they could never have known in the first place).
- The amount of time that it takes me to process my feelings about something should be limited; once I've decided I'm fine I should be fine. Moreover, if I'm not fine, that's not a problem I should try to dump on someone else.
- Relatedly: if I say that I'm fine with something, I'm not then allowed to change my mind later on.
- Letting someone down is the worst thing that I could possibly do
- Asking for help figuring these things out is stupid — I should be able to do this by myself (writing this question has been something that I had to keep coming back to, because that little voice in my head was saying "oh come on, you're a grown up, stop asking for help from other people"). Relatedly, it's easier to ask advice from strangers than it is from friends, because friends shouldn't have to know that I'm struggling.
- If I've spent a lot of time supporting someone (say a friend or SO), it is then wrong for me to ask them for support later.
- When I'm struggling with low mood, and in a disagreement with my SO, mentioning that low mood can only be a manipulative act designed to get them to feel sorry for me and stop fighting with me, so I should keep it to myself and handle it alone, whilst doing my best to resolve the disagreement.
- Reaching out to charities designed to support people in a crisis (e.g. hotlines like The Samaritans) is pointless: they won't actually be able to help me because my issues are ones that I've created for myself and can't find my way out of.

The list goes on. Again, I know, rationally, that this is poor logic and an unhealthy way of thinking. And there are times where it doesn't affect me. But it's usually there, waiting to pounce.

I can be endlessly kind and patient with others. I can show them a tremendous amount of grace and patience. But I can't seem to do that for myself. Indeed, I struggle to believe that I am worthy of kindness and, on the bad days, even love.

Except for addressing this in therapy (which I will do, I've just got other shit to deal with first), how can I go about learning how to be kind to myself in the way that society tells me I deserve.

posted by gmb to Health & Fitness (18 answers total)

I used to do a lot of what you write about. It still flairs up sometimes, though not like it used to. I think you are on the right track by pursuing therapy and I think that with time, and good therapy, you will find it to be a huge help.

Here is the major theme I notice: You "should" yourself a lot. The thing is, there is no "should". And emotions and thoughts just aren't logical. You feel what you feel and think what you think. We are human and that means we are messy. And it is all ok. My two cents is it might be helpful to examine where all these tapes you have running come from. In my case, I had trauma in my childhood. Once I could see that, I could then learn techniques to quiet the "should".

One trick I learned when "should" came up, was to say, "oh, Hi should. Good to see. Now you can go" It sounds weird but it kinda worked.

To end: learning to be kind to yourself is a skill. But you don't need to do it in a way that society tells you. It doesn't matter what any of "society" or the 8 billion people on the planet say. It only matters what you say.
posted by jtexman1 at 9:18 AM on July 17, 2024 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Oh today is one of those days over here too if that helps.

My oldest and one of my very favorite friends came over this morning and we both sat there and cried about the same garbage you're going through. It sucks.

Things that help me:
* Spend time with people who help me to be kinder to myself in whatever ways
*Avoid people/situations that I know will send me to the corner to glove up and fight with myself
*Acknowledge that this is a very common human issue and make flailing attempts to stop pathologizing
*Make myself keep my head up and just handle it when the other things are not working
*Allow myself to be really uncomfortable with forming new habits of self soothing to replace the old familiar comfortable TERRIBLE habit of inviting myself to a fight and beating myself into oblivion
*Reach out when I need help (like you are doing by asking this question and thank you for asking because I need help too and your question makes me feel less alone)

You already know this as you made clear in your question but I still feel compelled to say that you aren't alone and your instincts are correct and this shit is just really really hard for a lot of people.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 9:23 AM on July 17, 2024 [9 favorites]

A theme I saw was you need to allow yourself more room to be human. Humans make mistakes, humans don't make ideal choices every minute of every day (or even most of the time). We are all together in that. Every one of your points seems rooted in not allowing yourself to be real, honest, to get things wrong sometimes. With some work, you may figure that out and from that you could start addressing the causes.

If you want something a little more actionable, see if you can get people in your life to talk about their struggles (and of course, opening up about your own will go a long way in that area). Listen to them, learn from them how they deal with similar thoughts. Not everything you learn will be useful but 1) some of it will be applicable to your life and 2) you'll at least have some concrete assurance in front of you that you're not alone.
posted by Meldanthral at 9:26 AM on July 17, 2024 [3 favorites]

Best answer: You can learn the technique of CBT on your own and stick with your regular talk therapist.

Mine uses 'Mind Over Mood' and it's literally a workbook you can use to fill in the blanks and follow the method and is meant to be usable by people who aren't in therapy.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:26 AM on July 17, 2024 [3 favorites]

I've been there for some of this. I had an epiphany around being kind to myself, which I'll try to describe.

Essentially, it was the realization that I should treat myself with, at a minimum, the same level of kindness and love that I try to treat to treat others with.

So, for example, I was beating myself up for making mistakes. When I asked myself how I would react to a friend if the friend told me that was happening to them, my answer was that I would be understanding, that no one is perfect, and that it wouldn't be a big deal. But, that wasn't how I was treating myself. So, I was stuck with the dilemma, because why should I treat myself differently? Why would I be meaner to myself than I would be to a friend? That isn't very nice.

And, that was kind of it. It really made sense that it was right to treat myself as I would a friend. So, I try to keep that in mind with my inner dialogue and keep myself in check a bit.
posted by bruinfan at 9:28 AM on July 17, 2024

Oh yeah, I recognize all of those. And unfortunately, the way that I have dealt with them over a 20 year period has heavily involved therapy.

Outside of that, something that really helped was discovering an MRI study showing that different parts of the brain light up when thinking about others vs oneself. The kicker is that when thinking about oneself in the future the section for others activates.

I haven’t deeply investigated the study, but what I do know is that I am capable of showing kindness and compassion if I’m doing it for my future self. Letting that person down is unacceptable, and I will do what it takes to make sure I do right by them.

Perhaps less applicable to you was a study in which a person was asked to walk through a room with many people in it and then write down how they felt they were viewed by the people. The people, who were placed in the room with no idea of what the experiment was about, were later asked to write down their impressions of the person who walked through.

Needless to say the person who walked through felt that they had received different body language and emotional content from everyone else, and basically no one in the room had noticed them at all. We are all the center of our own stories and vastly over estimate how much other people care at all.

But mostly what has helped is practice. I’ve done the things that I told myself I should never do and the world didn’t end. And then I did them again and again and again and again. Eventually my brain caught on.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:36 AM on July 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

Oh, and a note on timescales. You probably picked up most of these habits when you were very young, and you’ve spent the last four decades reinforcing them. Unlearning them is a matter of years at a minimum.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:42 AM on July 17, 2024 [4 favorites]

Is there an imagined consequence behind any of those ‘shoulds’ that you could test, as a therapeutic exercise? Something like predicting that if you ask for help in x situation, Bad Thing y will result, then see whether it does and talk about it with your therapist?
posted by space snail at 9:51 AM on July 17, 2024

i am currently ready an excellent book about this called self compassion. i don't usually like self help books (i hate stuff that's touchy feely woo woo) but this one is kind of amazing so far. there are also exercises in the book for you to do that help refocus some of your thinking.
posted by koroshiya at 9:53 AM on July 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

The Neurodivergent Woman podcast episode on Compassionate Practice might be helpful (whatever your gender or neurotype!)

There is quite a lot of practical advice there.

I found the section on the different "drives" we use to regulate ourselves particularly useful, as it gets to the heart of the different ways we treat ourselves, harshly, or compassionately.

Very briefly, the Threat System is when we use anxiety to motivate ourselves, and results in heightened adrenaline and cortisol.

Drive System is when we chase dopamine -  exercise, playing games, getting into arguments (anger releases dopamine too).

Soothe System is activated by being compassionate,  doing soothing activities that release serotonin or oxytocin.  Cuddling with a pet, reading a good story, having a warm bath, listening to nature sounds etc.

Each of these can be very useful - being a bit anxious about a deadline can help you meet it, for example.  And going for a run or cycle, or playing a game to you enjoy is also good and useful.

But it's easy to fall into unbalanced habits and rely on Threat and Drive only, and neglect Soothe.

Learning to soothe yourself, and reassure yourself, without trying to use empty positivity that you don't really believe in, is the core skill of self compassion.
posted by Zumbador at 10:34 AM on July 17, 2024 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I believe that the starting place for this is the story you tell yourself. All those things you listed as recognizably dysfunctional constructs? You have to tell yourself something different. Your brain, your mind, your nervous system are listening.

Some people have a hard time at first speaking to themself like a friend, so if you have to you can start with talking to yourself at least as politely and diplomatically as a coworker. You would presumably never tell a coworker not to ask for help, in fact you'd likely urge them to ask sooner rather than later once they've already put a ton of effort into doing something incorrectly. You might point out that many of the tasks of their job/existence aren't even meant to be done alone or without help/collaboration.

To extend the metaphor, this is going to mean you will at first spend a lot of time correcting your "coworker's" incorrect assumptions. (You also need to decide this is a non-toxic workplace.) You're going to spend a long time catching thoughts and going "okay, no, actually, X is an adult and can manage his own feelings, it's not up to me to manipulate him and the situation to get a 'safe' response."

Kristin Neff's books, as koroshiya suggested, are very popular for this work. I also like her The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, if you like workbooks.

It's worth doing some introspection to figure out where you got these concepts from. It's probably a mixed bag - we get told a lot of terrible shit about ourselves just from advertising, a lot of people are traumatized into toxic independence by family and/or early education, some of these talk tracks are part of the lies of depression, abusive people in our lives tend to teach us that other people are cruel and can't be trusted to behave, or at least have no reason to specifically be kind or even reasonable to you personally because you don't deserve it.

If the tally of this analysis is leaning heavily toward trauma, you're going to need to use other resources besides classic talk therapy to do the appropriate physical therapy for your nervous system. If these maladaptive behaviors have been wired into survival tactics, you have to retrain your body to do something else.

There's a lot of material out there related to Internal Family Systems and how to do "parts work" yourself, which you may also find valuable. If a major factor in these thought processes are a part that is, like, a scared/traumatized/disappointed/hurt 12 year old or a part that exists only to hold pain and has no other interaction with the world, you can't really just tell them to adult themselves out of it. It is often easier, as well, to call up appropriate empathy for parts that came into existence to protect you from something.

Some people also find IFS a useful entry point to Inner Child or Reparenting work, both of which also play into that concept of reframing the story you tell yourself, with an additional vector of reframing the story a younger version of you was told.

I think that can be a major aspect of correcting faulty narratives that even therapists sometimes miss - yeah, Adult You that knows more about how the world works and how relationships work recognizes that people-pleasing creates more problems than it solves, but you didn't just discover people-pleasing a few months ago, did you? You discovered it when you had limited understanding and resources and you need to go back and address the need for it on THAT level first before you can bring it up to the modern day to work on solutions.

But first and foremost, you gotta be kind to yourself. And you can do that even before you believe you deserve it, and you know you can because you have almost certainly been very kind and compassionate to undeserving people before. You can make it a habit before you ever internalize it, but making it a habit will certainly drive you to internalize it.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:35 AM on July 17, 2024 [7 favorites]

A struggle I've had throughout my life is that feeling of "wait, I had it pretty good, I don't have any excuses, why am I struggling with this?"

Being able to accept that a lot of these behaviors I have that I don't like are trauma responses, and that despite the intent of my parents there was quite a bit of trauma in my childhood, and that it's okay to say "yeah, that was really fucked up, and really fucked me up" has helped me to see why I'm engaging in behaviors that I wish I wasn't.

And has been tremendously freeing. Like "oh yeah, I was doing that because I was masking and trying to not get beat up, and 99% of my life is now in social circumstances where I don't have to". Or "oh, I use clutter to manage other people intruding into my space, and I can just ask nicely now".
posted by straw at 11:01 AM on July 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

Yup, a lot of this is very familiar, and some of it is something I've gotten better at over the years. Reading up on CBT myself was definitely helpful; a lot of it was not for me but I found a few specific exercises/practices that helped my specific flavor of Brain Stuff, and incorporated those into my life. I also, when I can wrangle my brain into doing it, try to think about my problems the way I would advise a friend with those problems, not the way my brain is trying to tell me I "deserve" or "should feel" or whatever. If I would tell a loved one that it's okay to call that hotline, then I tell myself the same thing. Even if I don't really believe it, even if I know I'm just lying to myself, I tell myself the thing. Sometimes, eventually, repeating the thing seems to wear a groove into my brain that starts to believe the thing, at least a little.

A loved one has a specific name for the part of his brain that tells him deeply unhelpful things, and is sometimes just like, oof, Damian will not shut up today, and sort of externalizes it as a part of himself that he is allowed to talk back to or roll his eyes at or tell to shut the hell up. That doesn't really work for me - if anything, I think of my brainweasels as more like a basket of unruly puppies and sometimes they spill out and get into some nonsense and I have to gently corral them back into their pen and tell them I know they're just doing what they do, but I need them to stay in there and take a nap or something. But one or the other approach might feel helpful to you.
posted by Stacey at 11:03 AM on July 17, 2024 [2 favorites]

Best answer: It's kind of a cliché but I do really like the advice of imagining that a friend, someone you dearly love and care for, came to you for advice about one of these things, thinking of the advice you'd give them, and then giving that advice to yourself.

For what it's worth: the thing nobody told me about CBT-type exercises is that they work the same way physical therapy and exercise does. You have to keep doing them, really intentionally, over and over, to "build the muscle" mentally. The first, I dunno, 500 times you try to give yourself the advice you'd give a friend, it might not feel like it's helping at all. You might think, "well, this is stupid, my friend would never come to me for advice" or "this would never happen to my friends in the first place, because they're all much better people". That's the part where I usually stopped. I eventually learned that I had to keep going.

The next 500ish times, it'll still feel really forced and artificial, but maybe it'll help a little, or at least it won't feel completely worthless.

Then something different starts to happen. You stop having to force it. You think something cruel toward yourself and... automatically, without you having to sit down and analyze it, the thought springs into existence: "Wait a second. That was unkind." Maybe the kind thought you choose to think instead still feels forced, artificial, silly, or cliché. But it's... there, without you having to intentionally put it there.

It probably takes more like 10,000 or 50,000 "automatic" kind thoughts to get there, but at some point you will start to internalize that the kinder thoughts aren't coming from therapy, they're coming from you; you're not pretending you are giving advice to your best friend because you are your best friend. It still won't work 100% of the time. I'm still self-critical of my genuine flaws, and not always constructively so. But I can say from the perspective of many years of working on this that I like myself a lot more than I used to.
posted by capricorn at 11:09 AM on July 17, 2024 [8 favorites]

Best answer: As a reflexively independent person I recognize a lot of these thoughts. It helps me to reframe in terms of reciprocity and connection.

You don’t want to put people out by asking them for emotional support, or understanding, or help, or kindness, and it’s probably because you aeked for these things when you were small and you were given the message, you didn’t deserve them and/or that you were weak or flawed for needing them, and/or that you shouldn’t ask for them.

However, most people are not like the person who rebuffed you, they are like you, yourself. These folks appreciate your kindness to them and are probably looking for ways to repay your kindness.

In western culture (esp. American culture) we often focus on a single transaction (they asked for help and I gave it) and lose track of the community we create through reciprocity. If I help my friend and listen to her vent, tell her that I understand her, tell her that I care about her and hope for good things for her, and make some helpful suggestions when she asks, then I feel valued and we both feel positive feelings about our relationship because it feels good that we share this closeness. If there’s a time when I need to feel understood and cared for and get some help, she can provide that, and she gets to feel valued and feel closer to me.

Sometimes it is a great gift to a person to ask them for a favor that they can grant you.

The hard, work-on-this-in-therapy part is allowing yourself to feel vulnerable with other people. If you ask for help, you have to admit that you need help, and that got you hurt in the past. Part of the work you need to do is changing how you feel about yourself, and the ways that you think you deserved to be hurt, and part of it is changing how you feel about other people, and whether they will lash out at you when you make yourself vulnerable to them.

Good luck. The self-awareness we gain as we start working in therapy can feel like a curse when we don’t yet have the tools to address the difficulties that we recognize, but you will build the tools you need with the help of your therapist… and the people who will support you, if you let them.
posted by BrashTech at 11:34 AM on July 17, 2024 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Based on the answers you're favoring I'll share that for me, it's useful to back one more step up from questions of whether it's okay to feel/be vulnerable with others and tell myself that yeah, my feelings are valid. It's okay to have such feelings, and to be like this in this moment. If you also are feeling like your feelings themselves are a problem/unwarranted before you get to "I shouldn't bother other people with them," maybe this is a first step for you to tell yourself, too.
posted by deludingmyself at 4:58 PM on July 17, 2024

Best answer: I really relate to your question - lately I have been trying to dismantle some underlying views about myself (such as “everything is always my fault somehow” and “my body is disgusting”) - or at least just notice where they’re turning up!

Echoing everything above, especially CBT techniques!

And for me, one of the biggest things is meditation - specifically loving kindness meditation. In the traditional format, you move through five stages, cultivating loving kindness for yourself, a good friend, a stranger, a difficult person, and then all of you (and out to the rest of the world). Some people use a repeated mantra, others use images - there are many ways to engage. I would suggest a led practice (so audio rather than written directions) to learn. You can use an app like Insight Timer and search for “loving kindness” to get started. Here’s a good article with audio.

Feeling well-wishing toward yourself can be as simple as noticing sensations in your body, thoughts arising, really paying careful attention to yourself. And the most important thing I’ve glimpsed from this is equalizing between all of us - feeling that same loving kindness for each individual, myself included, with a better birds eye view. The practice really, really helps.
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 4:18 AM on July 18, 2024

"Should" is always ALWAYS coming from a place of shame. Shame says that who you are is wrong. Being curious about the tone of that and what that inner critic might be trying to protect you from is helpful.

I see a lot of folks recommending CBT, which is great. As a note, those who are neurodivergent may find that CBT does not resonate with them or is not effective.

The thing that helped me most with these types of things is Internal Family Systems therapy, which encourages us to interact with the parts of us inside ourselves that are loudly stating such beliefs and investigate what they might actually need in the situation and what they are trying to protect us from.
posted by softlord at 10:05 AM on July 18, 2024 [3 favorites]