Healing Your Emotional Self (15 page)

• The way your saboteur manifests itself is usually related in some way to the type of happiness you are experiencing. For example, it was not a coincidence that my saboteur caused me to overeat whenever I connected to my body in a positive way. If your positive experience is feeling loved or accepted, your saboteur is likely to cause you to behave in a manner that will elicit anger or disapproval from the ones you are close to. For instance, let’s say that you are feeling loved by your new boyfriend. Your saboteur doesn’t want you to feel loved, so it might cause you to start an argument with your boyfriend, or to flirt with
  

  another guy and make your boyfriend angry. Someone who is finally feel- ing accepted by a group of people might find herself suddenly behaving in a way that causes the group to disapprove of her or turn on her.
  

  Here are some suggestions to help you recognize your inner saboteur:
  

  1. Notice what happens when you experience joy, pleasure, love, recognition, or success.
     

  2. Particularly notice whether you tend to overeat, drink too much, or otherwise indulge whenever you experience any of these positive things—especially when your positive feelings are related to connecting with your body, your sensuality or sexuality, or your emotions.
     

  3. Notice whether you start an argument or push others away whenever you are feeling loved or accepted.
     

  My client Cheryl had a narcissistic mother who never really loved her. Her mother did not want a baby at the time, particularly since she was planning on leaving Cheryl’s father. When Cheryl was born, her mother hated the way she looked. She made fun of her to others. By the time Cheryl was two years old, her mother finally decided to leave her father. She left Cheryl with a neighbor couple “just until I get on my feet.” That took five years, during which time neither parent came to visit her. When Cheryl was seven years old, her mother arrived at the door one day and announced that she wanted her daughter back. Cheryl was heartbroken about leaving the only mother and father she remembered having. It turned out that the reason her mother sud- denly wanted her was that she had remarried and had two small boys, and she needed a babysitter so she could go back to work.
  

  Today, whenever Cheryl feels close to anyone, even for a short time, she immediately pushes the person away by criticizing him or her or by saying something hurtful or insulting. This is her inner sabo- teur at work.
  

  Doing Battle with Your Inner Saboteur
  

  As Elan Golumb said, “We want to please this uninvited judge that sounds so much like our narcissistic parents. We succumb to its mes-
  

  sages, the thoughts that we hate and almost believe. We want to reject such miserable input but lack the foggiest notion of how to do so.”
  

  When we fight with our negative introject, we often end up feel- ing stomped on and exhausted by our efforts. It feels as if we will never win. We take one step forward and then don’t just take two steps back but a dozen. We try to ignore the incessant criticism but finally succumb, feeling all the more hopeless in the process.
  

  The power we give to our introject makes it difficult to eradicate, but with deliberate thought and effort, we can put a gag over his mouth:
  

  1. The first step is to identify the introject as something that is foreign to your self. As long as you think of it as something that is a part of you, you are at a disadvantage. If you see it as a non- self, an identification that drives you to unacceptable feelings, behaviors, and roles, you can begin to get the upper hand.
     

  2. Labeling the inner saboteur as a nonself is difficult, because we unconsciously see the introject as an aspect of our narcis- sistic or overly controlling parent. Loyalty to our parent can undermine our efforts. This is especially true for people who were raised never to put themselves first. In order to rid our- selves of the negative introject and reach our true potential, we must stand alone and face the fact that our parent (partic- ularly a narcissistic parent) cannot now adequately meet our childhood needs any more than he or she could when we were growing up. We must let go of our childish behaviors, fan- tasies, illusions, and addiction to our unrealizable desire of getting our parents to meet our needs.
     

  3. We need to recognize that our introject uses our parents’ val- ues, and if our parents are narcissistic or otherwise emotionally abusive, most of these values cannot lead us to happiness.
     

  4. Because the introject is so harsh, it can never be fully inte- grated into the personality in the form of a normal conscience, as you would do with an inner critic. This internalized anger with its harsh inner rules needs to be softened and balanced by the experience of parental love in order to develop into a reasonable conscience. Because love is in short supply for
     

  children of narcissists, the negative introject remains destruc- tive. In fact, it takes up the parent’s cause from inside the child (and eventually the adult), hating her and telling her not to do and not to be.
  

  I had always felt that my negative introject was a foreigner in my body. In fact, a couple of times in my life I actually heard my negative introject speak to me in a harsh, deep, masculine voice. This made it very clear to me that this voice was not my own. I’ll never forget the first time I heard it. I was walking down the street, thinking about how I felt ready to lose weight (I battled with my weight since I was nine years old). As I was silently saying to myself, “I’m really ready, I’m going to do it,” I reached the curb. As I stepped off the curb into the street, I heard a voice inside my head say, “F——K you! I’m not going to let you lose weight.” This was a powerfully disturbing experience. It felt as if I was possessed. It took many years for me to discover that this voice actually represented my narcissistic mother’s voice.
  

  As I mentioned earlier, recently, my inner saboteur returned to try to sabotage my success in getting fit. My dream about the preacher grabbing at me in the shower was a good example. I decided to use this dream and the image of the man grabbing at me to help me fight the negative introject’s power. In order to do this, I drew a picture of the preacher and kept the picture with me as a reminder of how pres- ent it was in my life.
  

  It was immensely valuable for me to periodically remind myself that my inner saboteur was not me but a foreign entity who had taken up residence inside me. By thinking of it this way, I was able to con- front this entity without feeling as if I was attacking a part of myself.
  

  I began by declaring out loud to my saboteur that I was no longer going to allow him to control me. My dialogue went like this: “I want you to know that I’m going to win this battle. I’m no longer going to allow you to control me or sabotage my happiness.” I felt incredibly powerful as I spoke these words.
  

  If you choose to engage your saboteur in this manner, be prepared for the consequences. The week following my declaration, my sabo- teur went into full gear. I became very irritated with a client who arrived late after changing her appointment. Then I noticed that all week I had been driving badly. I’d find myself beginning to swerve off
  

  the road for no apparent reason, and once I almost hit the car in front of me because I wasn’t paying enough attention. Then I realized that I was banging myself on things. I whacked my head after bending down to get something off the floor, I ran into a table with my hip, and I stubbed my toe. It didn’t dawn on me until the end of the week that all these actions were the work of my saboteur. Because my resolve was so great, the realization that it was my inner saboteur at work made me feel all the more determined to win my battle. I continued to talk out loud to him and I continued to swim. Ever so slowly, I noticed that he had begun to weaken. He still rears his ugly head from time to time, but now I am ready. I know what to do.
  

  A word of warning: If you choose to do battle with your inner saboteur, be sure you have plenty of support—either a therapist, a support group, or a 12-step group. If you find yourself feeling over- whelmed or frightened, stop immediately and seek outside help.
  

  Replacing Your Critical Voice with a More Positive, Nurturing Voice
  

  Unfortunately, you cannot permanently quiet your inner critic’s or sabo- teur’s voice by challenging him or telling him to shut up. This helps at the time, but eventually his voice will return. What you need to do is replace his voice with another voice—a nurturing inner voice that will substitute the critic’s negative messages with positive ones. I will go into detail about how to begin creating this nurturing inner voice in chapter 9.
  

  For now, focus on trying to replace your critic’s voice with a posi- tive awareness of your essential worth. This will not be an easy task, since you probably believe that your worth depends on your behavior. Instead of seeing yourself as an empty vessel who is filled up, drop by drop, with your achievements, you need to begin to recognize your intrinsic worth as a human being. This means that you begin to entertain the idea that you are already enough just the way you are. You do not need to achieve anything in order to be of value. Your inner critic would have you believe that you have no intrinsic value, that we are born empty with only the potential for becoming someone
  

  worthwhile. But you were born with a tremendous amount of good- ness, wisdom, and strength.
  

  In order to affirm your sense of worth, you need to reconnect with this essential goodness, wisdom, and strength, as we will discuss fur- ther in chapter 8.
  

  Compassion and Self-Acceptance
  

  As Byron Brown, the author of
  Soul without Shame
  , so eloquently stated, “Compassion is the greatest antidote to the poison of your pathological inner critic.” When you are being compassionate toward yourself, you essentially gag your pathological inner critic, who cannot tolerate compassion because it renders him powerless.
  

  Compassion is the essence of self-esteem. When you have com- passion for yourself, you understand and accept yourself the way you are. You tend to see yourself as basically good. If you make a mistake, you forgive yourself. You have reasonable expectations of yourself. You set attainable goals.
  

  Compassion is a skill. That means you can improve it if you already have it, or you can acquire it if you don’t. The next time you hear your inner critic chastising you about something you did or did not do, counter this negativity by telling yourself something like “I’m doing the best I can,” or “Given my circumstances, this is all I am capable of at this time.” Learning to be compassionate toward yourself will also help you make contact with your sense of self-worth.
  

  Unfortunately, to some extent people with a strong inner critic will always be shackled to a negative inner voice. Your job is to diminish the intensity of self-attacks while practicing ways of healthy self-talk. Although you may never be entirely free of an inner voice that says, “What’s wrong with you?” or “You’re an idiot” whenever you make a mistake, you can create and reinforce the growth of a parallel and even stronger voice that says, “I did the best I could,” or “I’m just fine the way I am.” You will discover that as your healthy inner voice grows stronger, it will respond more quickly, more forcefully, and more believably to the attacks of your critic. In part three of this book, you will learn more ways to strengthen this healthy inner voice.
  

  Psychological Truths of the Week
  

Parental emotional abuse creates a negative inner judge or pathological critic.

Our inner critic is a mirror that reflects back to us who we think we are. It overrides our inherent intelligence and our direct response to life by superimposing its beliefs about what is real. It is a warped lens that distorts reality. Because of this distorted perception, we come to distrust our intuitive contact with life. Though our inner critic acts as if it were helping us get what we want in life, it actually resists our movement toward growth and development.

Mirror Therapy Assignment #7: Creating a Nurturing Voice

This exercise is an adaptation of an “Imagine” from the Solutions Program (see the appendix at the back of this book for more information).

1. Take a deep breath and begin to go inside.
   

2. You may become aware of a wall of anger, sadness, fear, or guilt, or you may feel a void inside. Tell yourself that what- ever you find inside, it is okay. Continue to focus inside anyway.
   

3. If you notice a wall of thoughts, step over the wall and begin to sink into yourself more deeply.
   

4. Focus inside and see if you can find even a fledgling sense of connection with yourself.
   

5. Bring up a nurturing inner voice. This is not a harsh, criti- cal, or depriving voice, and it is not an overly sweet, indulging voice. It is a warm, kind voice that cherishes you and accepts you for who you are. In time, this voice will become your own, but for now it can be any voice that meets your needs.
   

   P a r t T h r e e
   

   Creating a New Mirror
   

   8
   

   Looking Deeper into the Mirror
   

   Discovering the Real You
   

   What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
   

   —R
   ALPH
   W
   ALDO
   E
   MERSON
   

   When the mind soars in pursuit of the things conceived in space, it pursues emptiness. But when the man dives deep within himself, he experiences the fullness of existence.
   

   —M
   EHER
   B
   ABA
   

   I
   N ORDER TO CONTINUE
   to raise your self-esteem and feel better about yourself you need to find out who you are—not who you were told you are, not the persona you took on in order to please your parents, but the real you. Many survivors of emotional abuse and neglect in child- hood do not know themselves. They know who their parents have said they are and they know who they pretend to be, but they don’t know their true selves.
   

   No one can tell you who you are. You are the only one who is capa- ble of determining who your true self is. Your parents’ misplaced labels, distorted perceptions, and negative projections have created a
   

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   false image—an image you now need to discard. In its place you will need to discover and create your true self. I say discover, because many of you do not know who you are aside from your parents’ mir- ror. Once this mirror has been smashed, you find that another image does not readily emerge. This means you will need to look deeper inside to begin to find your true reflection.
   

   People who were neglected or abandoned tend to have a fleeting sense of their own identities. It is as if they walk by a mirror and see a reflection of themselves that disappears immediately. Many are in a constant search for clues about who they are, and they often struggle with such a sense of insubstantiality that they feel at times they could actually vanish.
   

   But no matter how fleeting the image or how insubstantial you feel you are, there
   is
   someone there. You may have to continue to dig to find it under the rubble of your parents’ judgments and expectations, or you may have to look deeper into the mirror to find yourself, but sooner or later, with enough focus and patience, you will find the real you. In this chapter we will concentrate on helping you to create a detailed self-portrait. We will start by having you observe your behav- ior and list your personality traits. I will encourage you to pay attention to your emotions—in particular, what makes you angry, afraid, embar- rassed, and sad. Finally, we will focus on helping you discover your
   essence
   or
   true self
   —something that is separate from your physical and even your emotional being.
   

   Self discovery requires self-awareness—or an ongoing attention to one’s self. In order to truly pay attention to oneself for the purposes of self-discovery, it is important to take on a neutral stance. When you observe yourself in this way, you take in whatever you notice about yourself with impartiality, interest, and curiosity, but you do not
   judge
   what you observe.
   

   Some do not know their true selves because they are full of con- flicts, as was my client Stephanie: “I can’t tell who I really am. It keeps changing. One time I think I’m one way only to discover I act in an entirely different way another time.” Although all of us change some- what depending on who we are with and the circumstances we are in, there needs to be an element of consistency and congruence with who we are at any given time. But for people like Stephanie, who tried so
   

   hard to be good that she morphed into a different version of herself with each person she was around, finding that core of consistency may be difficult to do. The following suggestions will help you take a close look at yourself and begin to identify who you really are.
   

   Exercise: Who Are You?
   

   1. Closely observe yourself for at least a week. (Notice your behavior, your feelings, and the thoughts that run through your head.) Make notes about what you notice or any insights you may have about yourself. You may also want to use the following questions as a starting-off point:
      

      • Are you uncomfortable being alone, or are you aware that you need time alone? What do you enjoy doing when you are alone?
        

      • When do you feel most secure? When do you feel least secure?
        

      • When do you feel most competent? When do you feel least competent?
        

      • How do you get your needs met (for example, security, attention, or affection)?
        

      • Do you do best in a structured environment or with lots of freedom?
        

   2. Start a list of your personality traits. Here’s the list of one of my client’s: honest, sometimes to a fault (“tell it like it is”), loyal, distrusting, a tendency to worry, overly concerned about what others think of me, a perfectionist, sensitive— get my feelings hurt easily, a tendency to be self-absorbed, sincere, impulsive, obsessive, respectful of others’ needs, talented, competent, intelligent, caring. As you continue to observe yourself, you can add to your list.
      

   3. Notice any tendencies you may have to hide your true self from others or yourself, any tendency to pretend you are feeling one thing when you are really feeling another. Also notice such things as how you act with others versus how you are when you are alone.
      

   4. Write a description of yourself based on your observations and what you already know about yourself to be true. Be sure to include all aspects of yourself in your description, including your physical, social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual sides. Add to your list whenever you notice some- thing new about yourself. You will find that you are think- ing about and looking at yourself more carefully than you ever have before. You may discover qualities about yourself that you never noticed, or you may revise a previously held notion about yourself.
      

Reconnect with Your Body and Your Emotions

As Marion Woodman so wisely put it: “What you know in your head will not sustain you in moments of crisis . . . confidence comes from body awareness, knowing what you feel in the moment.”

The most effective way to reclaim all your emotions—pain, anger, fear, guilt, shame, joy, and love—is to begin to pay attention to your body. Even when you unconsciously repress your feelings, your body remembers them. These memories are called
body memories
. Your body remembers what it felt like when you were neglected, criticized, rejected, or smothered as a child. For each emotion, your body expe- riences a different set of physical sensations. It remembers with stiff- ness, constrictions, and tension the pain and anger you felt when you were a child.

Allow yourself to reconnect with your body, to let it express and release all the pain of childhood. Your body hurts, bleeds, tingles, or tightens for a reason. It is trying to tell you something. It is reminding you of the kinds of childhood trauma you experienced. Listen to your body and heed its messages.

One of the most effective ways of discovering who you are is to pay attention to your emotions. In fact, some define self-awareness as being conscious of our moods and our thoughts about our moods. Once again I urge you to take on a neutral stance, a nonreactive, nonjudgmental

stance when observing your emotions. It helps to take a slight step back from your experience so that you can be aware of what you are feeling rather than be immersed in it.

According to Daniel Goleman in his groundbreaking book
Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
, “Self- awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence . . . the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and understanding. . . . People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions.”

Unfortunately, for many who have been neglected and abused in childhood, emotions are a frightening thing. It was when their parents’ emotions got out of hand that they got yelled at, pushed around, or hit. It was when they themselves got angry or started to cry that they were ridiculed, punished, or abandoned. For this reason, most survivors of abuse and neglect tend to deny and repress their true emotions. Even the ones who may appear to be extremely emotional, eruptive, or volatile are usually denying their more vulnerable feelings underneath. In addition, if you were neglected or abused in childhood, you will tend to be overwhelmed and controlled by your emotions. Many peo- ple are so overwhelmed that their emotions become their enemies. Dysfunctional behaviors, including abusive or victimlike patterns, sub- stance abuse, and suicidal tendencies, are often attempts to cope with intolerably painful emotions. Many try to regulate their emotions by trying to make themselves not feel whatever it is that they feel. This style is a direct result of the emotionally invalidating environment they were raised in, which mandated that people should smile when they are unhappy, be nice and not rock the boat when they are angry, and confess or beg for forgiveness even when they don’t feel they did

anything wrong.

Because of these behaviors, you may have ended up feeling sideswiped by your own emotions, or overwhelmed when your emo- tions build up. This, in turn, may cause you to project your feelings onto others.

What is referred to as “psychic numbing” (stuck or frozen feelings) is another frequent result of abuse and neglect in childhood. Children

shut off their feelings or dissociate in response to a traumatic situation. It is as if their minds go somewhere else and they are disconnected from their bodies. Learning to re-experience frozen feelings takes time. But once these deadened feelings are liberated, they can help you by providing useful information so you can make rational deci- sions and take appropriate actions in your life. Reconnecting with feelings can provide you with strength, courage, and joy.

It is important that you stop labeling emotions as “good” or “bad” and instead see them as important messages that can educate you about yourself, your circumstances, and your environment. You will begin to see that your emotions can empower you to take better care of yourself and, in so doing, help you raise your self-esteem.

Exercise: Your Feelings Lists

1. List some of the things that tend to make you angry.
   

2. What are some of the things that make you feel sad?
   

3. What makes you afraid?
   

4. What makes you feel guilty?
   

5. What makes you happy or joyous?
   

6. What makes you feel fulfilled or satisfied?
   

Identify Your Emotions

People who were neglected and abused as children tend to have diffi- culty identifying what emotion they are experiencing at any given time. This is because they may have needed to shut off their feelings in order to survive childhood trauma or neglect, or they may have had to pretend to feel something they didn’t really feel. But it is also because many believed it was not safe for anyone to know what they were feeling, and as a result, they became adults with a jumble of feel- ings they now have difficulty identifying.

In the course of just one day we all experience myriad emotions, and learning to identify each and every one of them can be a daunting task. Therefore, it is best to focus on only a few primary emotions, at

least in the beginning. According to most experts, there are eight or so primary or basic emotions: anger, sorrow, joy, surprise, fear, disgust, guilt/shame, and interest (some also consider love a primary emo- tion). These are considered primary emotions because we are born with the potential or biological readiness for them. All other emotions are considered secondary or social emotions because they are learned, and are usually some combination of the basic emotions. For our pur- poses we are going to focus on five of the primary emotions: fear, sor- row (or sadness), anger, guilt/shame, and joy.

We often become disconnected from our primary emotions by diluting them and giving them other names. For example, instead of saying they are afraid, many people will say they feel anxious or worried. Instead of saying they feel sad (or even knowing they are sad), many people will say they feel tired. And instead of saying they are angry, many people will say they are uninterested or bored.

To make it more confusing, many other words are commonly used to describe our primary emotions. The following is a list of words often used to describe the emotion of sadness. Some words describe a mild form and others more intense forms of sadness. For the most part, the list is, in order of intensity: unhappiness, hurt, dismay, melancholy, gloom, grief, sorrow, suffering, misery, despair, depression, agony, anguish, hopelessness. Sometimes using one of these words instead of the word
sad
is beneficial, because it clarifies exactly what level of sad- ness you are feeling. For example, agony and hopelessness certainly describe a more intense state of sadness than does
sad
. The important thing is that you not allow the description of your state to take you away from the fact that you are basically feeling the emotion of sadness.