Why you’re so hard on yourself

There’s a voice in your head that talks to you in a way you’d never allow anyone to talk to someone you love. It notes every mistake. It discounts every success almost as soon as it arrives. It keeps a running commentary on your failures so constant that you’ve stopped hearing it as a voice. By now it just sounds like the plain truth about you. You hold yourself to a standard you’d call cruel if it were applied to anyone else. And when you fall short of it, which is always, because the standard is built so that you always will, you punish yourself in ways both large and small. I want to talk about that. The way you treat yourself isn’t a fixed fact about you, and it isn’t, whatever the voice insists, making you any better.

The belief that keeps the harshness in place

Almost everyone who is hard on themselves shares the same underlying belief, usually without ever having examined it: the harshness is what keeps them good. Being tough on yourself is the only thing standing between you and becoming lazy, or arrogant, or mediocre. Ease up even a little and the whole thing falls apart. It’s worth seeing clearly, because it’s wrong. The cruelty isn’t what has made you capable. It has made you anxious, and brittle, and afraid to try things, and tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch. Whatever you’ve achieved, you achieved it despite that voice, not because of it. You’d very likely have gone further with a kinder one, because fear is a far worse fuel than it looks from the inside. And the voice was usually not even yours to begin with. It was learned somewhere early, borrowed from someone else’s harshness and then turned on yourself for years, until you mistook an old, cruel echo for your own conscience.

Where to start

If it shows up mostly as nothing ever being good enough, the inability to rest or to enjoy anything you accomplish, start with why nothing you do ever feels good enough.

If it shows up as something specific you did that you can’t put down, that you can’t forgive yourself for no matter how long ago it was, start with why you can’t forgive yourself.

And if you’ve already tried to just be kinder to yourself and found that it didn’t take, start with how you actually become kinder to yourself, which is about why the usual advice fails and what changes things instead.

How I work with this

The way you treat yourself doesn’t stay politely contained inside you. It shapes how you are with the people closest to you, how much you can let yourself be loved, how you handle being hurt and handle hurting others. So this isn’t only individual work, even though it starts inside one person. What I do is help people get free of a voice that has been running them for most of their lives. That’s slow, careful work, and it’s hard to do alone, because the voice is old and it’s convincing. The framework I’ve built for exactly this, for the person who can’t seem to forgive themselves or ease up on themselves, is The Unforgiven Self.