52 Ways to Improve Your Life

You are free to choose how you feel

Seeing the truth, Sense of self 4 Responses »

Mar 192013

I’ve quoted Eleanor Roosevelt on this blog before and I’m sure I’ll do it again after today; she was a woman after my own heart and I have benefitted from her wisdom on many occasions. A quotation I keep coming back to is this:

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

It took me several years to understand this and accept its truth. Other people’s opinions had shaped my self-image all my life, at such a deep level that I didn’t even realise it was happening, and the idea that I played any part in the process seemed alien and unfathomable. But gradually it became clear to me I’m not the person that, in a doomed effort to fit the mould I felt I was expected to fit, I was trying so hard to be. This was bewildering at first but began to feel more and more liberating, as I came to understand why it was that I felt so stuck and as if my life had run into the sand. The reason I was finding it such an immense effort was that I was was trying to live a life for which I’m not suited: it was the story of the square peg and the round hole. Once I shifted my energy into creating the life I do want and for which I am suited, suddenly things began to fall into place.

Hand in hand with this insight came the revelation that I can choose how I feel. Before, this had always seemed to me the sort of insensitive, trite suggestion people with no inkling of how I felt used to make, in a misguided attempt to help me ‘cheer up’. Snap out of it, get over it, choose to be happy. Even now, the crassness of this advice induces a surge of fury and frustration in me – so let me reassure you, this is not where I am coming from at all!

Choosing how I feel is not about denying or discounting my suffering, it’s not about putting on a brave face for the sake of everyone else. It’s about realising the extent of my power. Not only do I not have to squeeze myself into a shape I don’t want to be, I don’t have to berate myself for not fitting the hole carved out for me by others. No longer struggling to be round, I can embrace and enjoy my squareness. From here, it’s but a small step to acknowledging that other people cannot ‘make’ me feel anything. Their behaviour and attitudes towards me may have more or less impact on me, depending on the relationships and situation, but in the end I am the one who decides how I feel. If being sad, angry, scared or happy fits the circumstances, then there we are. What I’m talking about is feeling negative emotions, such as guilt and shame, when there really is no reason to. Just because somebody is criticising me, it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with me or that I have failed in any way. Of course, if I have made a mistake, I need to own up and apologise, but making a mistake does not mean I’m inferior. I am not inferior, I am just as good as everybody else. Anyone who pretends otherwise has their own agenda and I am not going to buy into it.

Learning to forgive

Guilt and shame, Letting go of the past, Sense of self 4 Responses »

Mar 122013

Inner peace begins with forgiveness: forgiveness for ourselves and forgiveness for those who have wronged us. Without this, peace will always elude us.

Let’s take forgiving ourselves first. As I’ve said before, I find it very helpful to remember that in the past I did the best I knew how at the time. ‘Should(n’t) have’ is one of the most corrosive concepts there are and I strongly encourage you to keep it under firm control. Something a friend taught me that has changed my life dramatically is how utterly pointless it is to dwell on what I should have done, either twenty years ago or this morning. He didn’t mean I shouldn’t learn from my mistakes, because obviously that would be silly. What he meant was, forgive yourself and move on. Wishing the past different is a waste of energy that you could be using to shape your future.

Forgiving other people can be a delicate balance but it’s a vital part of the process of breaking free. As long as you go on harbouring resentment, anger or even hate, the object of those emotions continues to have influence over you.

We are all products of our upbringing and experience. Some of us learn, explore, change, and others don’t – usually because they’re afraid to. The people who have hurt me over the years are damaged individuals who, in their own misguided (in some cases, warped) way, were doing the best they knew how, just like me. They were trying to survive, trying to make sense of the world, trying to deal with their own pain and fears. A bad character is made, not born, and once I was able to see those who have hurt me in that light, I was already halfway to forgiving them. Once I’d forgiven them, I was free; their power to hurt me vanished.

Let’s be clear about this: forgiveness is for your sake, not theirs. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t tell them you’ve forgiven them, lest they think it means what they did is OK. I’m recommending you forgive, not forget. Almost all the people I’m talking about I have swept out of my life and I have no contact with them any more. With the few I have to go on seeing, I have withdrawn emotionally, so I can go through the motions of maintaining a relationship while keeping the inner me, the vulnerable part, safe.

If you feel the need to get back at someone, forgiving them is the best way to do it. As Isaac Friedmann said, “Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge”. It removes their hold over you and leaves you free to get on with your life in a positive way.

For me, forgiving the people who caused me to suffer went hand in hand with throwing off the mantle of victimhood – and I can’t tell you how empowering it feels to have done it.

Taking control without anybody noticing

Sense of self Comments Off

Mar 052013

The other day I was reading through some notes I made a few years ago, a synthesis of some stuff I’d learnt during my psychotherapy training that I wrote down to encourage myself to look at life differently, and I was stunned to realise how far I’ve come in approximately 35 months. Although I wasn’t able to articulate it clearly at the time, I see now I was suffering from a form of martyr syndrome. The WikiHow I’ve just linked to there goes into some detail about what this is and offers advice about how to overcome it and, if you have any sense of being a martyr or a victim, I recommend you read the article. But I hope I also have something useful to add.

The points in the WikiHow that most resonated with me are identify the ‘payoff’ and stop waiting for the mindreader. This was the major stumbling block for me. I felt it necessary to make it clear to anyone who would listen that I was utterly miserable. Looking back, I can see why my friends and relations found it difficult to be around me sometimes but I felt strongly that if I could just get them to engage with my suffering, to understand how bleak things were for me and to offer some sympathy, it would help me a great deal.

There is an element of truth in that. It was frightening to have no-one solid I could turn to in the dark days of my depression, and not being able to get anyone to understand even roughly what I was going through, since they all saw me as a strong, capable, robust character who couldn’t really be struggling that much, was intensely frustrating.

After many years, I finally realised I was on a hiding to nothing and gave up trying to explain. But it was hard for me to let go of my suffering, which had almost come to define me. I felt that if I recovered without anyone’s help, it would be tantamount to accepting it doesn’t matter if nobody cares about me. I felt everyone who had let me down would be getting away with it.

Well, be that as it may, if other people weren’t going to change, I had to. Gradually, gradually, it dawned on me that there was another way to look at this: nobody being all that interested in my life gave me tremendous freedom. If people aren’t going to notice either way, I might as well do what I want to do. As a strategy for getting my needs met, suffering was a dismal failure. Living the way I want to is a far better one.

Eleanor Roosevelt put it nicely when she said, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do”. To me, the subtext of this is not ‘you’re not important’ but ‘be free‘.

Give yourself priority

Seeing the truth, Sense of self 2 Responses »

Feb 262013

Following on from last week’s post about the dangers of giving too much, I thought it might be useful to cover broadly the same ground again but with a more positive twist. For me, finding the right balance between giving and taking is important in itself but it’s also part of a bigger quest to find out who I really am. I used to be a rock, an earth-mother, the big, strong, capable one who could always be relied on. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as it became more and more apparent to me that nobody could be relied on to return the favour in my hour of need, I began to feel not only resentful but scared and lonely.

What has helped me enormously is to realise: you can’t please everybody, so just be yourself. This is easy to say and may sound rather trite but, when you really think about it, you can’t deny that whatever you choose to do or not do, there’s a chance someone won’t like it. If you let other people’s opinions guide your every decision, you’ll spend your life walking a tightrope and almost certainly feeling restricted and unfulfilled. I don’t know about you but I’ve made some essential, life-changing decisions based on what I believed people thought, without even checking with them to see if I was right. It was an unconscious process but it resulted in my becoming so confused and frustrated that I slumped into a depression that lasted many years.

It doesn’t matter what other people think! Now, I wouldn’t say that to everybody but, since you’re reading this, my guess is you care a great deal about what other people think and you’ll never turn into a selfish bulldozer. Of course it’s important to be polite, considerate and reliable, but this does NOT mean you have to subordinate your needs, wants and dreams to everyone else’s on a constant basis. Live your own life, plough your own furrow. Those who criticise will probably do so whatever you do, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And you stand to gain the life you want.

I’m still working on this but it’s been so liberating to understand that I can put myself first sometimes and the sky is not going to fall. I don’t need other people’s approval. Making my own decisions, doing and saying and being what I want to do and say and be without being crippled by shame afterwards is an absolute joy! And the strange thing is, nobody is treating me any differently from how they did before. Could it be they haven’t noticed how profoundly my life has changed? I suspect they see only that I’m much happier and lighter than I used to be.

You are important

Seeing the truth, Sense of self Comments Off

Feb 192013

Those of us who struggle with perfectionism and are prone to excessive feelings of guilt and shame often labour under the misapprehension that everyone else is more important than we are. It’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve begun to find a better balance between my needs and others’, a balance that allows me to be who I am and not always subordinate my own needs, while also maintaining relationships and being the good friend and relation I would like to be. After much soul-searching and analysis, here are some of the lessons I’ve learnt.

Giving too much damages relationships. Whether or not they are consciously aware of it, people know when a relationship is out of balance. Of course things won’t be perfectly equal all the time; there is going to be an ebb and flow as we are all carried by life’s tides, but a healthy relationship is balanced overall. If you are consistently giving more than the other person is, this will get more and more uncomfortable for both of you. I’ve made this mistake so many times, hoping that if I just gave a bit more I could bounce the other person into appreciating me. It doesn’t work like that. I felt more and more resentful – and so did the other person. Put yourself in that person’s position for a minute. In front of you stands someone who is clearly needy, doing more and more for you in the hope of getting something back, something you are increasingly reluctant to give as you feel more and more cajoled and manipulated. Hmmm… it suddenly doesn’t seem such a good idea, does it?

Another consideration here is that your doing too much for someone is denying him or her the opportunity to grow. We all need to explore, test ourselves, try things out – and even fail sometimes. If you’re standing in the way of someone’s doing this, you are not doing that person any favours at all. Back off!

People may not even notice your sacrifices. The way you think, the decisions you make, what you give, what you need, all these things are inside you and, despite what you may, at some level, believe, they are invisible to everyone else. You may think it’s clear for all to see how overwhelmingly you long for X, but it really isn’t. All they see, if they think about it at all, is that, for whatever reason, you’re not pursuing it. What good does this do anybody? You are the centre of your own world, as everyone else is of theirs, and you alone are responsible for shaping your own life. Sacrificing your dreams for somebody else, particularly without even consulting him or her, is putting a huge and completely uncalled-for and unfair burden on that person. It’s actually an irresponsible thing to do. It also runs a very high risk of chucking your dreams away for nothing.

If you think people love you only for what you do for them, stop doing it. Should anyone confirm your suspicions and withdraw love because you’re no longer ‘earning’ it, doesn’t this suggest you would be better off sweeping them out of your life? But I would bet heavily that the majority of people will surprise you by going on loving you just as much. In fact, they will probably have positive feelings around it, including respect for you finally rebalancing things and giving yourself equal priority.

In the end, if you’re drained and resentful and you have a (not always well) hidden agenda to your giving, you may in truth not be giving as much as you think you are. If you continue with this, everyone loses.

Instead, remember that you are important. Deep down, you know this, which is why you get resentful when others don’t acknowledge it. Once you can come to terms with the fact (yes, the objective fact) that you are just as important as everyone else – no more, no less, but equally – you can start to be honest with yourself and everyone else about getting your needs met. If you behave as if you are less important than those around you, you’re giving a false impression and asking for trouble. Either people will take it at face value and exploit you or they will understand that it is, at some level, a strategy and they’ll feel manipulated.

The Biblical commandment to love thy neighbour as thyself sums this up in a nutshell. We are all equal. Of course we need to love others and to be good neighbours, but we also need to love and cherish ourselves.

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