Self worth equations. A poorly thought out essay with no real conclusion.
I’ve made a lot of progress this past year and come to some realisations about myself and what I believe lies at the core of my problems. This is not to address the causes of my problems but to try and just recognise them for what they are. This is a very positive post but it might feel quite negative in places. Just trust that it’s not.
In the past I’ve described myself as a person that has issues about rejection. When I feel rejected or abandoned, no matter the form it takes I feel like I take a serious hit to my self worth. I see myself and my value in terms of how I imagine other people see me, and as such have allowed my ideas about what I believe people want drive how I act and respond. And I’ve acted like rejection, and avoiding it, is the key to defending what value I feel like I have.
At the core of the issue is how I feel about myself. That’s it. And having come to that realisation, or possibly not having come to it but accepting that, it’s become very clear to me that it is a pattern across my life that is quite simple but so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to work against.
I don’t feel that I have any intrinsic value, this is a judgement about myself that I have made on such a regular basis from such an early age that it’s become ingrained in how I think. Not in the abstract sense. In how my neural pathways are laid out through years of devaluing myself as a form of defence. I won’t go into the causes for that, the people that I feel should know do know. And to be quite frank, it doesn’t really matter anymore. The point is that this is something that can actually be unlearned. Which is what I am doing, via mentalisation based therapy (MBT). This link gives a short overview of it https://tavistockandportman.nhs.uk/care-and-treatment/treatments/mentalisation-based-therapy/ but the basic idea is that it develops your skills in thinking about thinking. Which is great for me because I love thinking about thinking.
So describing myself as someone who has issues with rejection is at best simplistic, at worst just kinda wrong. Relationships are important to me, I could very well say that I have issues with relationships and that the bit that causes me functional problems is when I perceive myself as having been rejected. But if I look more closely at relationships what I see is that I use them as a tool to validate my existence. So when relationships go well, I feel good about myself. When I perceive a relationship to be going poorly, I feel badly about myself. It isn’t rejection that is the problem, it’s how I perceive my value.
But it isn’t just relationships that I do this with. Relationships are a key area, humans are social creatures and it’s an important part of our existence, I’d like to be able to pretend I’m not human but I can’t. However, it isn’t the only place that I derive my value from.
For the longest time my career was very important to me, it was a part of my life where I could create value through my own efforts. What does that mean exactly? It means, accepting that I consider myself to have no value, that I thought my work could give me that value. I’m still proud of my work, and it’s something of a relief that I’m quite good at it, if I wasn’t then I would feel really badly about myself. And when things went wrong at work, I would feel profoundly hurt by it. It led to me taking criticism poorly too. And I struggled to work with others. That last part I turned to my advantage, being self sufficient in project work is considered desirable. But I rarely asked for help, even when I really needed it it would take me a very long time to accept that and allow myself to be helped. Why not? Because if someone helped me do something I felt that I lost the sense of value I had gained from my achievements.
These are just a few examples, but this is a constant across a lot of things I did and do. It drives me to be materialistic, that owning the right things (not necessarily the expensive things) can give me value. It drives me to the accumulation of knowledge and skills, not necessarily a bad thing but done for less than healthy reasons. If you want to get really fucking meta about it, it drives me to write personal essays like this, that maybe in showing to people that I understand my internal processes I won’t be seen as irredeemably worthless. And Facebook, just… fuck Facebook.
Before I transitioned these things didn’t cause me much issues. I didn’t have value, I had come to terms with that. I existed in a continuous low level depression that I could never truly be very hurt by anything. But then something happened, as I emerged from that depression I became vulnerable, my sources that I drew my value from became vulnerable.
Relationships became harder and my value became more intrinsically linked to them. My work suffered because any perceived mistake became crippling.
This is where MBT comes in. I have started to learn how to see where my thought processes are misleading me. If a situation occurs that causes me problems I make a conscious effort to think through it and to try to see it from different perspectives. I believe that it has, in turn, lead me to greater empathy. This is very much a work in progress, and I have to say, it’s not exactly fun. It involves a lot of just sitting there, being present in the misery of a situation, and picking apart where my conclusions have sprung from. It gets easier with practice, and since I believe my problems share a same root cause, it’s easy to jump to the answer and work from backwards from there (easy does not mean fun).
Short answer, my brain wants me to use the well trodden path of devaluing myself in order to deal with a situation. I yell NOT TODAY BRAIN and go at it until one of us wins.
Spending less time being in the distress of my own thoughts has led me to have more time to be introspective about it. Being anxious less often gives me more energy to cope with the times that I cannot work through. Sometimes I fail at it, and when I do it feels like I fail hard. But recovering from those crashes is a necessary part of this process. As much as anxiety wears me down, the mentalisation process becomes stronger through the experience. The pathways of my brain that allow for acknowledging that I can care about myself become more used to usage and it becomes more natural. My tolerance for what causes me distress has increased, and my downtime from that distress has decreased.
In the practical I use meditation to give my brain the space I need to step back and do the work, I try and maintain a sleep schedule and even eat occasionally so as to have the energy to go through it. But mostly I just try. I go to therapy and I take my pills and I try. And I’m making progress.
And when I see that I can care about myself, I see value. See, told you it was positive.
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
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