It's Not You, It's Me

“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”

— Lucille Ball

In last week’s blog, we looked at how disappointments large and small, sustained over time, can tempt us to take on limiting and destructive beliefs about ourselves and the world.  This week I want to focus on a related tendency I’ve observed, equally as problematic and possibly even more pervasive.  This is the tendency that many of us have to feel disappointment or frustration, and then turn it quickly and harshly back against ourselves as anger. 

In her excellent book Tapping into Wealth, Margaret Lynch includes some great work on how to notice what you’ve decided certain experiences mean about you, who you are and what is possible for you.  Uncovering the beliefs about yourself that came about in response to difficult events can be a real eye-opener, because while the beliefs may seem quite familiar when you think about it, you may have no idea where they came from or why they’re there.  They probably just seem true, the way things are.  Working with these beliefs and reshaping them is a revolutionary experience that can change the entire tenor of your life.  However, it’s just as important to look forward and find ways of not forming brand-new limiting beliefs every passing day, and this can be even more tricky.  You have to notice how it happens to stop doing it.

I recently had an experience through which I realized very clearly how vicious my self-talk can become when I’m upset or disappointed about something.  It wasn’t even triggered by anything all that important, just something that was causing me some garden-variety stress and annoyance that I was tapping about, and I suddenly had a vivid memory of being a young child that seemed connected to the problem at hand.  I was probably under ten years old in the memory, and I was so angry and frustrated at myself because there was a skill I was trying to learn that I just could not do correctly yet.  All the feelings of frustration, and a seemingly disproportionate sense of rage, as well as feelings of being trapped, welled up.  (I never cease to be amazed that such a volume of emotion can be stored and flare with a vengeance when an old memory is triggered, even one you haven’t thought of in years, and that now seems unimportant from an intellectual standpoint!)  In this memory, I was just so angry at myself, and I felt that anger in the present as a physical burning sensation all throughout my torso.  I remember telling myself that I couldn’t do anything right, and that I’d never learn the new skill because I was just hopeless. 

I’m not sure where I got all this, because my parents really tried to encourage us to be positive, persistent, and to put in the work when we were trying to learn something.  Who knows?  We all get angry and frustrated, and maybe I was just tired and burned out that day.  Whatever the reason for the pattern, I recognized this as something I do from time to time internally to this day, and I barely even notice it happening.  I generally don’t stop to think about it, and I’ve never seen it so clearly as I did in this memory.  I kept tapping on the anger, frustration, and the feeling of being trapped until it all subsided.  I was left with a resolve to watch for this habit of thought in the future and work to arrest negative self-talk when I get frustrated by something.  I also felt much less concerned with the thing that was contributing to my original stress and annoyance in the present day.

It’s obvious to me in retrospect that when we’re learning new skills, we always have to endure a period of rank incompetence, which really isn’t any fun, but is completely normal.  No one is born with skills at, really, anything.  Learning is always a process; just because we can’t do something on the first try, that doesn’t mean we’re not able to learn it at all, or that we’re stupid, or useless, or anything else dire.  But in the moment, when emotion overtakes us, we’re not thinking logically.  We’re far more likely to overreact and decide that our current difficulties “mean” something about us that they don’t actually mean at all.  Boy, did I ever do that in that childhood memory!  If we can gain clarity about some of the formative experiences that set a negative pattern for us, that creates a path toward undoing them by targeting those experiences with tapping, or NLP, or hypnosis, or some other technique that involves both the memories and a physical element.  Techniques that involve the body have proven to be the most successful in creating positive emotional change that sticks.

 Next time you find that you’re ranting at yourself when you’re angry or frustrated, ask yourself what this feeling of self-recrimination reminds you of, and think back to the earliest time you can remember feeling something like this.  You might be surprised at the answer you get from the old memory banks, and the outdated anger at yourself you might still be holding onto.  If you haven’t learned how to tap, hop to it!  It’s easy, and I know I’m grateful for it every day that I use it to ease my stresses, whether old or new.  When you diminish the power of old emotions, it can be astonishing how your current emotions will calm as well.  And keeping your current emotions from spiraling too far out of control diminishes the likelihood that you will reinforce habits of reflexive anger at yourself that have no earthly use in the creation of a happy life.