Self-sabotage: Parts 12 through conclusion

Continued from yesterday:

“12. Glorify or vilify the past. Glorifying the past is telling yourself how good, happy, fortunate, and worthwhile life was when you were a child, a young person, or a newly married person—and regretting how it’s all been downhill ever since. When you were young, for example, you were glamorous and danced the samba with handsome men on the beach at twilight; and now you’re in a so-so marriage to an insurance adjuster in Topeka. You should’ve married tall, dark Antonio. You should’ve invested in Microsoft when you had the chance. In short, focus on what you could’ve and should’ve done, instead of what you did. This will surely make you miserable.

“Vilifying the past is easy, too. You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you never got what you needed, you felt you were discriminated against, you never got to go to summer camp. How can you possibly be happy when you had such a lousy background? It’s important to think that bad memories, serious mistakes, and traumatic events were much more influential in forming you and your future than good memories, successes, and happy events. Focus on bad times. Obsess about them. Treasure them. This will ensure that, no matter what’s happening in the present, you won’t be happy.”

Exercise: Make a list of your most important bad memories and keep it where you can review it frequently. Once a week, tell someone about your horrible childhood or how much better your life was 20 years ago.

We all know they guy who was the star of the high school football hero or girl who was the Prom Queen,people whose lives peaked during high school and have gone nowhere since. Rather than address their lack of forward progress in life, they dwell on their glory days and make excuses and blame others for not having achieved anything they consider noteworthy since then. In extreme cases, thirty years down the road she still dresses and wears her hair and make up like she did when she was 16; he is still laddishly enslaved by sports on TV, beer in hand, and behaving like he was still 17 and about to throw that winning touchdown. It isn’t so much that they’ve never grown up as it is that they’ve never moved past those moments of glory and have never moved on.

Their opposite number is the person who had a childhood devoid of “crowning achievements” or whose achievements went unacknowledged. Such a person may have suffered abuse in her childhood…and then again may not have suffered abuse but simply didn’t get what she wanted: when we grow up feeling entitled and don’t get what we want, we may feel ill-used (this explains GCs who think their lives were as bad or worse than the SGs in the family). When we grow up abused, we also feel ill used. When we are miserable in our present life and a good part of that misery is focussed around our history, whether is it to glorify that history or to vilify it, we sacrifice the present. We fail to live in today as we re-live yesterday. And that is not healthy, whether we were abused or not.

For ACoNs, this can be tricky to negotiate because in order to heal, we must address and resolve our unhappy pasts. But we must also be careful not to let the study and redress of yesterday’s wrongs keep us from moving ahead today. We must not obsess or allow our past to overwhelm and control our present or yesterday’s misery overwhelms today. Resolve the past, yes, but don’t continue to live in it. 

“13. Find a romantic partner to reform. Make sure that you fall in love with someone with a major defect (cat hoarder, gambler, alcoholic, womanizer, sociopath), and set out to reform him or her, regardless of whether he or she wants to be reformed. Believe firmly that you can reform this person, and ignore all evidence to the contrary.”

Exercise: Go to online dating sites and see how many bad choices you can find in one afternoon. Make efforts to meet these people. It’s good if the dating site charges a lot of money, since this means you’ll be emotionally starved and poor. 

I have to wince at this one because I can’t tell you how many times I have done this…and how hard it was to stop picking partners I perceived as “needing” to be reformed. “He just needs love,” I would tell myself. Or “His ex just didn’t understand him.” Or “He wouldn’t do it if he just understood how 1) much it hurts me or 2) much I love him or 3) it affects the people around him…” 

First, this is self-delusional: this requires that you delude yourself into believing you have the power to change another person when, in fact, you only have the power to change yourself. It requires you go into denial when faced with the truth of another person’s inability or unwillingness to change. It requires you to buy into whatever pop-psychology or New Age or old-fashioned rubbish that promises to give you what you want rather than face the truth that this other person does not want to be who or what you want him to be.

Second, it is distracting: this was my hook…if I could focus enough on rescuing some other person from him/herself, I wouldn’t have the time or energy to focus on fixing my own problems. The more screwed up the man, the greater a challenge he offered me, the more distraction…and the more volatile, offering me ample opportunity to have justifications for my explosions of rage. It did nothing to help either of us, ever.

And third, it is very disrespectful! I really didn’t realize this until, after therapy, I hooked up with a guy who was constantly “doing things” for me…like answering questions that were addressed to me...and generally usurping my autonomy. After dumping him, I hooked up with a guy who, it turned out later, tended to say things like “People would like you more if you would…” or “You’d be more popular if you…” My reaction to this was to be affronted. Who the hell was he to pick me apart and then try to remake me into the image of what he wanted me to be??

It was then that I learned to look for men who didn’t need fixing. Oh, maybe in somebody else’s eye they might need fixing, but what they took as faults (like my extremely shy-with-strangers geek husband) I found endearing. And guess what? In the 20+ years since I ended therapy and learned this lesson, I have had two good, solid marriages to two really great men (the first one died after 9 years). I am no longer emotionally attracted to the walking wounded because I did take the time to focus on myself and I learned, through experiencing it myself, just how intrusive and disrespectful it is to presume I had the right to tell someone else he needed to change into my version of what he should be.

People are not lumps of clay to be moulded into our vision of what our mate “should” be: they are human beings with the same right of self-determination that we have. So, rather than delude and distract yourself with a partner remodelling project, the smart money is on spending that time finding someone who doesn’t need the remodel…someone who is perfect for you just as s/he is. And the smartest money is on fixing yourself before you even bother hunting up that perfect partner... 

“14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything.

“It helps if the things you criticize are well liked by most people so that your dislike of them sets you apart. Disliking traffic and mosquitos isn’t creative enough: everyone knows what it’s like to find these things annoying, and they won’t pay much attention if you find them annoying, too. But disliking the new movie that all your friends are praising? You’ll find plenty of opportunities to counter your friends’ glowing reviews with your contrarian opinion.”

Exercise: Make a list of 20 things you dislike and see how many times you can insert them into a conversation over the course of the day. For best results, dislike things you’ve never given yourself a chance to like. 

This, too, is a two-edged sword for ACoNs. On the one hand, we have to be critical because we have to set boundaries…we have to redefine right and wrong, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy because the definitions we grew up with were skewed towards the benefit of the Ns in our lives and away from their objective definitions. Some of us grew up in households so repressed we even have to learn that it is ok to disagree with an authority figure, and then how to do it. So, for many of us, learning to be critical is an essential part of our recovery.

But, like glorifying/vilifying the past or rumination, we can get stuck in criticism and let it become a way of life rather than a useful tool. Hardest for me to learn was balance…when it was appropriate to criticize, even in my own head, and when it was not. And learning to not hear negative criticism when it was not intended. And how to deal with kindly meant but poorly delivered criticism.

There is a difference between criticising when necessary and appropriate and being critical. Nobody likes a critical person…but people tend not to trust “yes men,” either. There is a balance that has to be struck. What kind of friend are you if you don’t speak up when your BFF hooks up with her fourth alcoholic boyfriend in a row? What kind of parent are you when you find out your child is behaving like a bully and you look the other way? What kind of spouse are you when your other half is behaving irresponsibly with money and you say/do nothing? Criticism and recognizing wrong are necessary parts of life, as is sometimes having confrontations…but being critical is not a necessary part of life any more than turning blind eye to wrong is.

My grandmother once told me that every person has something about them that you can compliment if you just look hard enough. I found she was correct and in making myself look for that something in everyone…my co-workers, my colleagues, my neighbours, my friends…I found I was generating more positive responses from people. Something as simple as “cool tie!” or “you have such a great laugh…” just perks people up. Even if you have to say something critical to them later, they are in a better frame of mind to receive your message if they don’t perceive you as a critical personality.

It also benefits you: when you are critical, you feel critical…and negative. Nobody like a wet blanket, a balloon buster, a moaner and complainer. Perhaps you need to read more, get out more, come up with some new topics…and perhaps you just need to adopt a new habit, like not allowing yourself to be critical without first acknowledging something positive and uplifting.

Remember, criticism has a valid place in your life…but it doesn’t have to be your personality type! 

Madanes closes with: “I’ve just listed 14 ways to make yourself miserable. You don’t have to nail every one of them, but even if you succeed with just four or five, make sure to berate yourself regularly for not enacting the entire list. If you find yourself in a therapist’s office—because someone who’s still clinging to their love for you has tricked you into going—make sure your misery seems organic. If the therapist enlightens you in any way or teaches you mind-body techniques to quiet your anxious mind, make sure to co-opt the conversation and talk about your misery-filled dreams from the night before. If the therapist is skilled in dream analysis, quickly start complaining about the cost of therapy itself. If the therapist uses your complaints as a launching pad to discuss transference issues, accuse him or her of having countertransference issues. Ultimately, the therapist is your enemy when trying to cultivate misery in your life. So get out as soon as possible…” 

This is the game of “Ain’t It Awful” in which the person “…overtly expresses distress, but it is covertly gratified at the prospect of the satisfaction they can wring from their misfortune.” By avoiding or repudiating the therapist’s suggestions, the person gets to cling to those misfortunes and their misery and even feel righteous about it. It perpetuates the misery in a way that the “victim” feels that she doesn’t have to take responsibility for it.

I can’t address what you are doing or have done in your life but I can address what has transpired in mine and I can tell you, this article is dead on. I didn’t want to take responsibility for the unhappiness in my life because I didn’t feel that I had created it. Why should I have to all that hard, painful work when all would be well if my bitch of a mother would ’fess up to the abuse, apologize, and start behaving like a real mother? What I was refusing to acknowledge was that even if my mother did do that, it wouldn’t fix a thing. It not only wouldn’t take away the years of hurt and humiliation, pain and anger, it probably would have made me angrier still…for making me suffer for so long before the acknowledgement came. And even after that, it wouldn’t be gone…the work still would have to be done and it would have to be done by me because nobody can change me but me.

So if you are miserable…even if you just have miserable parts to your life…the first place to look for relief is inward. What are you doing, what kinds of choices are you making, that aren’t bringing you the joy and happiness you deserve? Only you can change your life.

Self-sabotage: Parts 9 through 11

Continued from yesterday...

“9. Blame your parents. Blaming your parents for your defects, shortcomings, and failures is among the most important steps you can take. After all, your parents made you who you are today; you had nothing to do with it. If you happen to have any good qualities or successes, don’t give your parents credit. Those are flukes.”

“Extend the blame to other people from your past: the second-grade teacher who yelled at you in the cafeteria, the boy who bullied you when you were 9, the college professor who gave you a D on your paper, your first boyfriend, even the hick town you grew up in—the possibilities are limitless. Blame is essential in the art of being miserable.”

Exercise: Call one of your parents and tell her or him that you just remembered something horrible they did when you were a child, and make sure he or she understands how terrible it made you feel and that you’re still suffering from it.

I think this is a bit of a touchy one for ACoNs. While we have lived through some terrible treatment at the hands of one or both of our parents and we have undeniably been affected by those experiences, blaming doesn’t fix anything.

One of the things that always irked me about my NM…and I have read much the same from other ACoNs…is how nothing was ever her fault. No matter what it was, from ruining a piece of my clothing that she borrowed while I was asleep (it wasn’t her fault because she was drunk) to breaking up a marriage (he wouldn’t have cheated if his marriage was a good one) to leaving bruises all over me (“Look what you made me do!”) to getting stuck in a marriage she didn’t want (“It was your grandma’s fault for getting him an early discharge from the Navy so I couldn’t go do what I wanted!”), nothing was ever, ever her fault. Probably everybody reading this has had a similar experience.

I once had a roommate, a morbidly obese woman who was sexually abused as a child and whose mother didn’t put a stop to it. This woman sat on the sofa in my family room and ate a whole six-pack of giant-sized Snickers bars in one sitting and when she had finished, she turned to me and said, with complete sincerity, “That was my mother’s fault.” I was boggled…her mother lived more than 600 miles away and they did not communicate, but she truly believed that her binge on those Snickers bars was not her fault…or choice.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that as long as you blame others, you give away your power to change things. She was not responsible for what happened to her in childhood and she was right to blame both her stepfather and her mother for their roles in abusing her; she was, however, responsible for choices she made as an adult, including that choice to eat those six Snickers bars.

What I found very difficult to learn to do was to differentiate between what things truly remain the fault of my long-dead NM and what things were my choices. I had to learn to acknowledge that I made some of my choices subconsciously because I was unwilling to spend the time, energy and angst examining them. I had to learn to differentiate between things forced upon me in childhood and adolescence and choices I was making to continue those things as an adult. But the most difficult of all was simply giving up blaming other people for my decisions or choices. It was a big, big flea that I had learned from my NM, one that was deeply entrenched, and which went way back into my childhood.

This is a particularly difficult one to get a handle on because our society is so fixated on blaming something outside ourselves rather than taking responsibility. Mass shootings are the fault of guns rather than the people who wield them or a society that glorifies power; obesity is the fault of fast food rather than the choices we make as to what to put in our mouths, your kid got bad grades because the teacher gave him poor marks, not because he earned them. When I was about 7, my father came into the kitchen to investigate the sound of breaking glass and found me standing next to the sink with a shattered tumbler at my feet. “What happened?” he asked and I replied “It fell.” Right there, I got a lesson in taking personal responsibility: “It can’t move by itself,” my father told me. “How did it fall?” I remember I tried to figure out how to answer him without taking the blame but I couldn’t. “My elbow bumped it,” I finally said. “You mean you bumped it with your elbow?” he asked.

My father’s words “It can’t move by itself,” stuck with me. Oh, I buried them for a long time, but they were never far below the surface…close enough to provoke guilt when I made someone or something else responsible for my behaviour or choices. Close enough to come to the surface when I started getting my life straightened out. I might have been influenced by what I learned as my mother’s victim, but am an intelligent person with the ability take responsibility for my choices and acknowledge my own part in the poor choices that led me to so much misery. My NM’s treatment of me explains many of the poor choices I made, but that does not excuse me or absolve me of responsibility.

There comes a time when we must separate from the parent, no matter how good or how bad they were, and take responsibility for our own choices because only when we do that, do we have the power to make changes and improve our choices…and our lives.

“10. Don’t enjoy life’s pleasures. Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Tell yourself that. If you inadvertently find yourself enjoying some flavor, song, or work of art, remind yourself immediately that these are transitory pleasures, which can’t compensate for the miserable state of the world. The same applies to nature. If you accidentally find yourself enjoying a beautiful view, a walk on the beach, or a stroll through a forest, stop! Remind yourself that the world is full of poverty, illness, and devastation. The beauty of nature is a deception.”

Exercise: Once a week, engage in an activity that’s supposed to be enjoyable, but do so while thinking about how pointless it is. In other words, concentrate on removing all sense of pleasure from the pleasurable activity.

Sometimes we “normalize” our negative feelings and perceptions and then make ourselves feel better by perceiving things outside our norm disapprovingly. Think of it like reverse snobbism. We train ourselves to feel guilty for enjoying certain things and condemn those who do enjoy them as being shallow or small-minded or one-dimensional or insensitive or even bad. We make a virtue of our deprivation and may even begin to think of ourselves as superior to those who do not also deprive themselves. We may come to define ourselves through our self-deprivation, seeing ourselves as virtuous because we have learned to do without and viewing others as wastrels, self-indulgent, or even destroyers of the planet, depending on how far we take this.

Narcissists may do exactly the same thing, but their motives are very different and even the process leading up to the position of self-congratulating martyr is different. Narcissists may seek ways to set themselves apart and through that, feel superior to “the herd.” But even in setting themselves apart, they find like-minded people, so by taking matters to extremes, like being the thinnest, or being able to boast the most marathons (or miles), or adhering to the most extreme diet or whatever floats a particular narcissist’s boat, is the means to the end, the end being “better” than other like-minded people. ACoNs, on the other hand, do not necessarily seek to feel superior and, in fact, may feel guilty when they catch themselves feeling superior (and then go into denial by rationalizing the behaviour that led up to it). When we deny ourselves life’s pleasures, we do it with a completely different motivation from the Ns: we often feel we don’t deserve enjoyment, happiness, or pleasure and some of us later make a virtue out of the deprivation. Ns, on the other hand, use it as a tool designed to make them feel superior.

An example of this from real life was when I made friends with a woman I will call Helen. I was in my mid-20s at the time and struggling through secretarial school on a miniscule budget. Helen was in the same boat. But I noticed that Helen didn’t buy her (or her son’s) clothes at Kmart and cheap shops like I did: Helen bought only occasionally and almost always on sale, but she bought at Macy’s…even for her 5 year old son. It was not until she handed down her boy’s outgrown clothes to my boy that I could appreciate the difference in quality.

But even after we had graduated and gone to work and actually had money to spend, I kept buying at Kmart. I would walk into a Macy’s and feel like I didn’t belong there, like I didn’t deserve to buy decent clothes that would last more than one season. It was not until I was able to rationalize buying work clothes at Macy’s by observing how the executive secretaries dressed that I began to alter my habits. But it took years for me to start having regular appointments at the hair dresser, buy good quality shoes and clothes, and good quality skin care and cosmetics because I believed it was a waste of money to spend it on ME…and I had made a virtue out of my misplaced frugality.

“11. Ruminate. Spend a great deal of time focused on yourself. Worry constantly about the causes of your behavior, analyze your defects, and chew on your problems. This will help you foster a pessimistic view of your life. Don’t allow yourself to become distracted by any positive experience or influence. The point is to ensure that even minor upsets and difficulties appear huge and portentous.

“You can ruminate on the problems of others or the world, but make them about you. Your child is sick? Ruminate on what a burden it is for you to take time off from work to care for her. Your spouse is hurt by your behavior? Focus on how terrible it makes you feel when he points out how you make him feel. By ruminating not only on your own problems but also those of others, you’ll come across as a deep, sensitive thinker who holds the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair and seek out negative feelings, like anger, depression, anxiety, boredom, whatever. Concentrate on these feelings for 15 minutes. During the rest of the day, keep them in the back of your mind, no matter what you’re doing.

This one is like walking a tightrope for ACoNs. On the one hand it is important for us to delve into our pasts, experience the emotions we have repressed, and find out the real truth of our early years, the temptation to wallow in the misery and not only feel sorry for ourselves but elicit sympathy from others can be very, very alluring. Not only do we find a way to take ourselves out of the role of being dumped on every waking minute, we discover that there is a whole lot of people out there who will feed our “poor little me” inclinations. And while it may feel good, at least in the beginning, a protracted amount of uncritical sympathy can be unhealthy for us if we get stuck into it and don’t move beyond into the “fix it” phase. Worse, we can adopt that unthinking, uncritical sympathy and start feeling really sorry for ourselves, a guaranteed way to get…and stay…stuck.

Those of us who grew up thinking we shouldn’t dwell on ourselves because it indicates we are selfish (undoubtedly taught to us by a narcissistic adult who wanted us to dwell on him or her instead), may not turn the wallowing inwards but outwards. We become disheartened and negative about the state of the world, politics, ecology, the next generation…whatever rings your particular chime…to the point of allowing our negative focus colour our entire outlook. Add in the “helplessly hopeless” factor… you haven’t the power to change global warming by yourself and because nobody will listen to you, the situation is hopeless…and you guarantee yourself a catastrophe to ruminate on and feel grim about, thereby colouring your entire perception of life. “How can you expect me to be happy when somewhere a dolphin is dying in a fisherman’s net?” “My life is consumed by the demands of taking care of other people…what do I have to be happy about?” “My parents beat me and screamed at me and abandoned me…and you expect me to be happy?” As long as your inner life consists primarily of negatives, so long as you refuse to embrace perspective (which means acknowledging more than the negatives in your perception of your life), you create and perpetuate that misery you so love to complain about.

Tomorrow: Part 12 through Conclusion