Moralizing Mistakes
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If you have goals at any point in life, you are going to encounter failure - coming up short, running into obstacles, experiences where you are not able to attain what you have sought out. It is absolutely a part of the human condition to experience disappointment, grief, or even anger when this happens. Where I often see people getting stuck is in the moralizing narrative they apply to these situations - “I’m a failure,” “I can’t do anything right,” or even harsher language. This is such a salient theme with the people I work with, and I think perhaps even culturally in our part of the world.
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I am not a therapist who necessarily prioritizes “catching and changing your thoughts” as a strategy for meaningful, deep change in and of itself because trying to force a thought to be different than what it is, is an exercise in futility. If I tell you not to think something, what do you think is going to happen? Give it a shot - set a one-minute timer and tell yourself not to think about puppies for that full minute. I’d be curious to know how many times you noticed yourself reminding yourself to not think about puppies - which, of course, necessitates thinking about them.
All of this is to say, I don’t believe rewriting the narrative of our self-concept is as simple as “catching and changing” thoughts. Where I like to begin with folks is with a question - Where did you learn to moralize your mistakes? At what point in your life did you learn that making a mistake means something about who you are as a person? When, or from whom, did you learn that failure is something to be ashamed of, to be hyper-alert for so that it can be prevented before it even starts to maybe-sort-of-kind-of precipitate? That it is something that should be avoided at all costs, because if you make a mistake something really bad will happen?
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The resource we hope to access with this line of questioning is curiosity - one of the 8 C’s that make up the concept of Self energy as defined by Dr. Richard Schwartz in his theory of Internal Family Systems, or IFS (sometimes colloquially known as “parts work”). When we approach a behavior, such as self-judgment or self-flagellation, with curiosity - which takes courage - we are opening the door for compassion and clarity. Asking ourselves questions like Where did I learn this behavior or belief allows for increased psychological flexibility, which can be a reparative tool for those of us who experience very polarized (all-or-nothing, black-or white) thinking. So try it this week - when your inner critic is berating you because it thinks doing so will create change, ask it where it comes from and how it learned to do the job it’s doing - and what it is worried will happen if it takes a day off.