I wrote a whole long spiel but in the end I’ll just reduce it to this:
Fellow people who didn’t grow up with *close* friends or *supportive* family, how have you created meaning in your life? I’ve always thought life’s meaning was what you made out of it– and I still do– but now I’m realizing you can’t make anything out of life if you don’t believe it could become a reality. And you can’t believe in a dream like that if you don’t believe in yourself. My problem is I don’t know how to believe in myself. I think psychological research has bolstered the theory that normally, people learn to believe in themselves after others *model* that belief for them early in their development (both by believing in themselves and in the child as well). So people who didn’t get the lesson in valuing yourself as a child, how did you teach it to yourself later so that you still really believed it? Or did someone else (like a therapist) teach you later? What techniques did they use? CBT? Or alternatively, do you know of another way to create goals in your life that you can truly believe in yourself achieving, through all the ups and downs?
(side question unrelated to this post: is there a way to keep track of comments you’ve made on other people’s posts using the site? I come back a few days later and the only way I can think of is to use browser history… ?)
8 comments
For me you have to make your own purpose in life. and for me that is to better myself as a person along the way. Experience as much of life as I can. Learn to be thankful for what I have and appreciative of people in my life who have helped me and to be a good person to all people and to try to make a positive impact on the world. A positive impact on the people you come into contact with.
This is exactly what I’ve tried to do, though the “thankfulness” part is more recent for me. I think it’s the most beneficial outlook to have. Having trouble on the being “thankful” part but I do recognize how important it is and I’ve tried. I am genuinely grateful for sunlight, the simplest foods, the education and travel I was able to experience in the past, interesting people I’ve met… but my current situation is not easy, and I don’t have people to talk to about it. (I’m even too embarrassed to go back to my therapist.) Unfortunately I don’t get to see many people and the two people I’m in contact with most are often toxic and/or abusive.
This is a question I’ve asked myself many times, and I’m glad you articulated it here. I have some speculations, which I’ll share below, but I hope others will chime in too. I’m still struggling with this myself.
Regarding your post: I think, to add to the obstacle of NOT having learned to trust in one’s own abilities and believe in themselves early in life, is the related (but separate) obstacle of having actually learned self-doubt, believing one is doomed to fail, is inadequate, etc, and having those beliefs reinforced over and over through experience. So we’re left not only with the task of learning to believe in ourselves, but having to actively UNlearn the other beliefs that have become firmly established over time. We have to learn to somehow reject our own personal experience and accept that our self-perception is (very likely) flawed and fallacious. I have to yet to succeed at this 😐
CBT can be very helpful, and you might benefit from it, Sabi. The focus of CBT (as you probably already know) is learning to recognize the flawed and fallacious thoughts about ourselves, our lives, others, etc, and upon seeing the faulty reasoning, learning to correct it. I think the problem the one might run into with CBT is that while it’s always beneficial (in my opinion) to recognize and challenge our flawed thinking, it’s also difficult – in some cases, maybe impossible, even — to *reason* ourselves into good mental health. If we didn’t come to our current conclusions through a rational thought process, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to change those conclusions through rational evaluation. This is particularly true if our brains are misfiring. Many of us have to get a grip on our emotions first before we can attack the problem logically.
To that end, it seems like Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is the gold standard. And in some cases, antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs might be necessary as an adjunct, if the person in question is prone to delusions or other forms or distorted thinking.
Maybe someone will chime in who was able to teach themselves these things. I’d love to hear how that process could work, and maybe implement some of their methods. But i think some people are truly incapable of correcting this on their own; some of us will need a guide to steer us in the right direction. That just comes with the territory when we have brains that go awry and play tricks on us.
That’s a great question. Here’s the answer that’s worked for me:
Pretty much everyone who tells you that you’ll never succede is full of shit and you should pay no attention to them. It doesn’t matter if they’re your parents, teachers, authority figures, etc. Not everyone with a voice is worth listening to.
Figure out what you want. Set realistic goals, then formulate a doable plan that will enable you to reach your goal. It won’t be easy, and you’ll be tempted to give up, but you gotta stick to the plan.
Don’t put too much faith in others. If you rely on others to succede there’s a possibility they’ll let you down. Sink or swim on your own. Limit your dependency on others as much as possible.
Believe in yourself. The opinions of others are just that: Their opinions. Their words are only worth the value you assign them. If someone has nothing productive or helpful to say to you, then they are of no use to you. Drop toxic people from your life. They’ll do more harm than good. This is your life, live it for you.
(I feel like a self-help motivational speaker now). :). Good luck.
@lost: Good point, it’s not just embracing the positive. Those negative lessons we were taught about ourselves are silent killers! I have tried CBT before and ran into the very problems you describe. There was important progress at first where I became able to identify the negative self-talk that I had never been aware of before. But that was it. And that meant that while I had certainly gained a lot of insight about myself, I now had to sit with this disturbingly constant inner critic. Actually I’ve read a very good quote about what we’re touching on– the process of balancing rational insight with emotional awareness. You might be interested in a very well-put quote about it here: http://down-with-depression.tumblr.com/post/78451060289/a-common-trap-for-us-on-the-healing-journey-is-to
I thought DBT was only for people with certain personality disorders. Maybe I should look into it further… I have also been interested for a while in EMDR but it seems that’s only available to people with PTSD most of the time. EMDR takes memories (even foggy hazy ones!) and re-wires your mental associations with them so that they can become either neutral or positive (as appropriate). It seems to work based on discoveries showing that our emotional associations become malleable for a brief period of time while we’re accessing a memory. Some psychs suggest it not just for PTSD sufferers but also for emotional abuse survivors, for example. (My city has places that provide EMDR treatments but I’m not sure I can afford the necessary repeat visits…)
@Maurice: Those are the conclusions I’ve come to as well. I can’t really depend on others– those who *can* find a sympathetic ear or people who will give them encouraging words have a certain social wealth they are taking for granted when they assume it’s the same for all others. Which brings me back to my original problem. How do I make myself believe in myself?
Everyone has distorted thinking, even supposedly “sane,” folks. Sometimes it’s the sane amongst us that have the most damaging forms of distorted thinking. But I’m going to be the dissenter here – I think plans and expectations are the enemy. I like to focus on the little details of the present moment – find little things I can enjoy, no matter where I am. I got the idea from Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. The little things are always the more important. It’s like that ages old struggle with employment and occupation; you hate your job, and you’ve hated every job you’ve held for different reasons; once you realize that it’s the /concept/ of work that you hate, you can find reasons to enjoy the reality of your work by finding little details that make it worthwhile. There is no such thing as perfect, so we have to make do with the things we have in front of us. And I just used the editorial ‘we,’ so I shall now go scrub myself with bleach to cleanse myself of impure syntactical constructs.
Thanks for the insight, xanadu. I may have a look at Frankl’s book too. It sounds interesting.
He said, “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”