[40Days] #4: With friends like this...
It's funny you should ask this.
I have a number of friends, almost exclusively highly-intelligent women, around whom I cringe (a lot) in response to hearing how they talk to and about themselves. The negative, denigrating, grating barrage of put-downs that comprise a hefty bulk of their self-narrative is uncomfortable to hear, and increasingly so since I began to understand more about how those narratives get programmed into us through our lives by the patterns and perceptions of others, then selected for reinforcement through an unhealthy but embedded version of confirmational bias.
Yes, I have been that person. The equation of "that which I DO = that which I AM" is a wholesale catastrophe on the emotional development level, and a serious bitch to both identify and root out. I had a conversation a couple of years ago with one of these women-friends after a particularly vitriolic barrage she had just leveled at herself that went something like this:
"What do you get out of talking to yourself like that?"
"Motivation to remember to do something different next time."
"You get motivated by being put down?"
"It's what I know."
"Have you ever considered joining the military? At least they'll pay you and provide room and board to take the abuse."
Somewhere along the way, we got the message into our heads that "taking the abuse", regardless of who dishes it out, is how we toughen ourselves up to being in the world that we believe either largely doesn't care about us, or is actively out to hurt us. My parents were certainly not abusive to me, but I grew up in the shadow of my parents' typical parental disappointments in my failures to live up to their high hopes (my father wanted me to be good at math, engineering, and music; my mother wanted me to share her appreciation for crafty creativity and the domestic arts she believed were a part of womanhood). My father expressed his disappointments by calling me "dummy", and to this day, the obstacles I face in doing anything with math and music still prove insurmountable. I learned to shrug it off, somewhere, but probably long after the damage was done.
Not all of my friends have been so successful in turning aside those disrespectful tagalong internalizations, and every time I hear the invective slip out of them with such smooth, longstanding practice, I just want to cry. It's too exhausting to keep reflecting the better aspect I see back at them, and I refuse to engage their internalized messages with them; one of us standing in the deep cesspool is quite enough, thanks. *I* believe my friends to be better than those ancient messages, but if they can't, don't, or won't believe themselves, those aren't battles I'm going to fight for them. Most days, I have my hands full trying to fight my own.
So to come back to the question at the root of todays's meme, I don't talk to myself in those harsh derogatory manners any more, much. I *do* frequently question what I was thinking or doing in the moment, and sometimes the sarcasm (even self-directed) is a little harsh. But I've been actively weeding out the "I am [x]" derogations as I find them, and if I have to substitute anything, I make distinct the difference between "I am an idiot" and "Well, that was a dumbass decision process". I don't allow my friends to talk to me like that, even if I can't stop them talking to themselves that way. I will, if I catch it and feel it is meant with something less than compassion, stop them from making such denigrating comments to *others*. Anyone who doesn't get the point of the exercise at least insofar as accepting that I will not accept such attitude levelled at me, won't get to stay in the circle for long.
And if I won't let others get away with that shit, I'm certainly going to be no less and no more accepting of hearing those messages bombard me from *inside* my own head. There is judgment and insecurity and anxiety, sure; but they, like any other tool, serve only the purpose of the hand that wields them. If there isn't a more effective tool to wield than denigration to motivate or inspire educate, then there is a bigger problem afoot... regardless of whether it's in my head or someone else's. I can only stop what happens in my head, and serve as a living example to those who are still mired in that form of self-expression that it doesn't always have to be this way.