I am
reading The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women by Gail McMeeken. It is a fast read. Her tone and rhythm are well balanced and are
particularly easy to follow. I am
learning about confronting the inner critical voice and carving out time to
follow my heart or listen to it. That
rest is required, sitting and daydreaming are necessary for creative ideas to
occur.
But the
demon I must confront is my own critical self-assessment of myself. It is a cognitive error, a slippery trap that
you don’t even know your falling until you find yourself in the pit, trapped
again. How is it that I get this side of
myself, this critical, unhealthy voice out?
How did I catch it? Is it a natural product of our current culture?
Catching a “negative self-perception” virus?
Is it inflicted upon us by media and Hollywood?
Making us feel we must measure up? But haven’t we felt that way for a long time? Even before the days of TMZ and Us Weekly
magazine, women were comparing themselves, unfavorably, to the perception of
what was beautiful. It doesn’t mean it
should continue. We must find a way to
counteract that critical inner voice, the one that tells you that we’re not
good enough, won’t succeed, or we’re not the right size, color or age.
This is
just another shade of being mean to yourself.
Before I discussed how mindreading and assuming the worst is really only
a negative farce intended to get you to be mean to you. Now I am asserting that another way is by
comparing ourselves to others, unfavorably.
It robs you of your joy.
Joy is
found when you are happy with who you are, where you are, and how you are. These situations would naturally occur when
given half a chance but we usually snub them out early. Mindreading and assuming the worst, coupled
with comparing yourself will rip the joy right out the moment.
One night
I was getting dressed in my sweatpants and matching sweatshirt, in preparation
for bedtime. I felt snuggly and life
just felt nice at that moment. I glanced
in the mirror and immediately switched to thinking that my gut looked more
inflated than I imagined it to be and was I just having a perception problem?
Or, what if all along people see me and think I’m fat? I immediately didn’t give myself or the
perception the benefit of the doubt. And
what I mean by that is that I didn’t test the thoughts against reality. I was self-centered and self-abusive at the
same time. And it happened in a flash. Life…it happens in flashes. One quick flash to another. Sometimes the flashes seem to last forever
and other times it seems like they didn’t stay long enough. But they are
flashes all the same. Sparklers in the
universe. ‘
So again,
I’m confronted with however are we to become able to short circuit this
self-inflicted painful cycle? If it
really happens that fast, do we have any control over it? The first thing to do is realize that the
reason it is kneejerk or feels like a reflex is because it is a habit. Somehow, someway you and I picked up critical
thoughts about ourself and then we proceeded to repeat them over and over to
ourselves. So the first thing is to make
it into a positive habit. Yes, this
takes mental effort, practice and exercise.
You’ll have to consciously re-route yourself when you catch yourself
having a negative thought about yourself.
You won’t be able to catch all of the negative thoughts so don’t even
try. But know this: You don’t have to
for this to work. All that has to happen
is that you consciously re-route the negative thought to its positive opposite
and do so on a regular enough basis for it to take hold and start carving one
of those beautiful neural pathways.
The second
thing is, really, the first and that is mindfulness. When we practice mindfulness and stay in the
moment but distance ourselves or detach from our death-grip hold on our
thoughts we can view them from a broader stance. You can view your possible kneejerk reaction
to something, that is, the negative thought and staying mindful, simply don’t
take hold of it. If you have to do
anything, just say to yourself, “Hmmm….I wonder if my perceptions are off
today. Maybe I’m blowing things out of
proportion.” Know that the negative
thought is a lie. It almost always is a
complete lie. David Burns, in his
best-selling book, Feeling Good, says, “Our research has documented that the
negative thoughts which cause your emotional turmoil nearly always contain
gross distortions.” (3) A cognitive error.
So you can catch that negative thought in a loose mental net and say,
“This is quite likely to be false and I am practicing some sort of error. I know this because it is proven to be true.”
Be nicer to yourself. I’ll be nicer to
me too. It sounds mushy and new age-y
but what if it works? And, what else do you got to lose?
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