Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 13, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:48

957 Overcoming Self Abuse

The art of empathetic self defense.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good afternoon, everybody. I hope they're doing well at Steph.
	It's day three in Miami.
	Just girding my loins for the conference that's coming up next week.
	It's 5.37, January 13, 2008.
	And it's been very restful so far, this break.
	For me, not for Christina.
	I mean, you can imagine. I mean, I'm really high-maintenance at home, but on vacation...
	Oh, it's madness. It's madness.
	I'm like Pavarotti with a head cold.
	So, I wanted to respond to a listener request regarding the question of negative self-talk.
	Negative self-talk being, you know, you get mad at yourself, or you say, oh, I'm such an idiot, or why didn't I think of that, or I can't get anything organized, or why is it that everything is so chaotic in my life?
	I get so mad at yourself and frustrated at yourself.
	And, you I think this is generally a little bit more true for women than for men, although it probably should be a little bit more true for men than for women, but we're just immune to that kind of stuff due to general pig-headedness.
	So I wanted to put a few tips across the waves, or the airwaves, the internet tubes, to help you ease yourself out of this kind of self-attack.
	It's a form of self-attack or self-abuse, and If you've ever played sports and tried to achieve more than a rudimentary kind of competency, then you probably know what this is all about.
	I certainly have had this in the various sports that I have worked at to master from tennis to tennis.
	So tennis to soccer to squash to whatever.
	You try to make the shot.
	You flub it and you get mad at yourself and so on.
	And this occurs outside the realm of sports.
	But that's the one where I had to work in it the most.
	So... I wanted to pass along a few tips to help you sort of stop this.
	The first tip, or I guess the first way to rephrase or reframe the self-talk when you have this kind of negative or critical self-talk is to say to yourself, it's really bad.
	It's really bad, naughty, and evil to have this kind of self-talk.
	No, wait. Sorry, that's not right. Let me just check my notes here again.
	Ah, yes. Here we go. The way that I... Manage to get rid of the worst aspects of this.
	And it takes time, but this was the approach that really helped for me, and I can share it with you, and hopefully it will help for you as well.
	When I would get mad at myself for blowing a tennis shot or whatever it is, making a mistake that I considered foolish in some manner or another...
	I should talk about the tennis. So I would try and make a particular tennis shot and it would go into the net or go out or whatever and get mad at myself and say, I can't believe I missed that shot.
	Well, one thing that illuminated that whole process for me and allowed me to start to turn it around was to picture the following and say, if I were coaching my child, is this the approach that I would take?
	If I were coaching my child, is this the approach that I would take?
	Or, to look at it slightly less subjectively, if I saw a man or a woman coaching their child in tennis and basically inflicting the running commentary on that child that I was inflicting on myself...
	What would I think of that coach?
	So if the child goes and tries to make a hit, the child misses the hit, and the coach or the dad or whoever yells at the child, like, I believe you didn't get that shot!
	That was an easy shot! What's the matter with you?
	Focus! Concentrate, damn it!
	Well, I would say, what a tool!
	Like I would be shocked and I would be appalled and I would be aghast at seeing a parent or a coach inflict that kind of verbal abuse on the child.
	And if, you know, this is basically the UPB principle, which is if it is wrong to see a coach verbally abuse a child, then is it not also which is if it is wrong to see a coach verbally abuse a child, then is it
	Can I look at, with shock and horror, somebody verbally abusing a child, And yet feel that somehow I deserve the verbal self-abuse that I am susceptible, that I sort of inflict upon myself.
	And so, I can keep this relatively short, but I just wanted to put this idea out there that this can be an enormously helpful way for you to place this kind of stuff in perspective.
	And the reason that I use the child metaphor is that an adult...
	Can escape or can choose voluntarily a coach, right?
	So if an adult is getting abused, verbally abused in this kind of manner, is getting yelled at or whatever, we understand that there's a pathology involved on the part of needing that humiliation or abuse on the part of the adult sports player.
	But... These kinds of hypercritical self-attacks were inflicted upon us as children in various forms, which we then internalized as a way of controlling, right, and this is all in the RTR books, I won't go into too much detail here, but it is a way of controlling the stimuli by inflicting it upon yourself, right, so... If you can inflict pain upon yourself, you feel it's much more manageable than if somebody else is inflicting pain on you.
	So when you get infected with these kind of hypercritical conversations, it's an internalization of an external voice or an external critical approach that was inflicted upon you when you were a child.
	So that's why we are helpless in the face of our internalized critical voices.
	The best that we can do is to fight them.
	What I found hard in fighting these kinds of voices was that I confused them for things like excellence.
	This is why the cult of excellence is so...
	I'm so suspicious of it.
	It usually just means unpaid overtime.
	But also, it's so often used by assholes to attack other people.
	There's a, in the film Magnolia, Tom Cruise plays a sort of terrifying kind of cult figure, Seduce and Destroy, and he yells at one person who's having problems getting something done in his organization, and he just yells at him, you know, what I want you to do is just do your job!
	And he just gets really mad at him.
	Just do your goddamn job.
	And this idea that competence is a standard that you hold up, which you then use to abuse people who don't meet that standard, is a really dangerous one, of course, because what it does then is you say, well, I'm going to give up The criterion of excellence at the same time that I give up self-abuse, right? That's the trap that we fall into.
	If I'm not pushing myself to become better, that I'm just going to sit on my ass, grow fat, eat bonbons, watch soap operas, or whatever, right?
	That if I get rid of self-abuse, I get rid of the criterion of excellence or improvement and so on.
	And that, again, is just...
	That's the for-your-own-good lie that abusers use, right?
	That they wish to discharge their own tension and hostility...
	By attacking their children, and then they say, when the children complain, hey, it's for your own good, right?
	I mean, I just want you to be good at this sport, you know?
	It's okay if I'm a little tough with you, and blah, blah, blah, right?
	So, we can't escape those internalized voices.
	We can only challenge them, right?
	Now, there are certain aspects of ourselves that I think we need to be gentle with, but there are certain aspects of ourselves, particularly those which are in factions of abusers, The infections that have sort of been laid into us or layered into our personality structure through abuse.
	There are certain aspects of ourselves that we need to be really gentle with, and there are certain aspects of ourselves that we really need to be tough with.
	And we need to be gentle with our vulnerability, and we need to be very tough with our capacity for self-abuse with these hostile voices, right?
	And that doesn't mean that you self-abuse yourself for self-abusing, which is the other trap.
	You know, like, I can't believe I'm negatively self-talking again.
	My God, when am I ever going to give this up?
	When am I going to be able to drop this?
	It's happening again. Is it never going to stop?
	Right? That's not the way that you would do it.
	But if you saw somebody who was verbally abusing a child in this manner, you know, I believe you missed that shot.
	That's so stupid. Then...
	In the ideal world, whether you do this or not, I don't know, but in the ideal world, you would like to go up to that person and say, that's not the way to talk to your child.
	That's not reasonable.
	That's not productive. That's not fair.
	That's not helpful. It's not about excellence.
	It's about humiliating him and so on.
	And you wouldn't hit him with a tennis racket and yell or anything like that, but you'd like to be firm about the fact that it is completely unacceptable and To deal with a child or to talk to a child in that manner.
	And that's really what we need to do with this self-talk.
	So when this sort of virus of self-talk lands upon us and it sort of starts shredding us on the inside, this negative self-abuse, negative is implicit, then we just sort of need to sort of shake our heads and say, if I heard somebody talking to a child like this, would I consider that acceptable?
	And the answer, of course, would be no.
	And so I'm perfectly comfortable with, and I think it's worthwhile getting comfortable with this, I'm perfectly comfortable with negotiating with these inner voices.
	I mean, we are an ecosystem of widely divergent perspectives.
	I hope that in the future this may not be the case as much for humanity, but we are an ecosystem of multiple personalities, or at least I am, and everybody that I know is, who's honest about it.
	And so you sit down, you have this debate with yourself, and you say, okay, that is not an acceptable way to talk to me, right?
	And you have this debate. You can write this debate out, you can have it out loud, you can roleplay it with someone, but...
	You know, bring this voice to life.
	Bring all the implicit criticisms out, right?
	You can say to this voice, how do you feel when I miss that shot?
	And of course, shame, embarrassment, impending attack, all of this kind of stuff is the anxiety that's being managed by parents who do this to children and by yourself when you do this to yourself, right?
	But I think it's perfectly acceptable to negotiate from the standpoint or from the position of strength with these inner voices.
	But the first thing that you have to do...
	It's to stand up and to say, this is not acceptable.
	I would not countenance a parent talking to his or her child like this.
	If I came home and saw my spouse talking to our child in the way that I'm talking to myself, I would absolutely stop that.
	I would have my spouse get help to avoid becoming that kind of condemnatory person or negative or hostile or destructive person and In the same way that we would leap to the protection of others when this abusive self-talk was being heaped upon them, we must leap sternly and strongly to our own defense.
	When this kind of infection flares up.
	And so to externalize it, to imagine that you were hearing somebody talk to their child in this way can be a very, very powerful way of clarifying what is going on with this negative and hostile self-talk.
	And it's okay to write it out.
	It's okay to have a debate with this inner voice and so on and learn to put it in its place and release the energies that it has for more productive things.
	So, we pursue accidents because of pleasure, not out of fear of attack.
	If we don't achieve it, that's never going to get us anywhere other than, you know, rolling down the hill towards this kind of self-abuse.
	So, give that a shot and let me know what you think, but externalizing it, looking at it in the third person, and protecting yourself in the way that you would protect a child in that situation is a really powerful and productive tool to start bringing this kind of A kinder approach to yourself about.
	So give it a shot and let me know what you think.

▲