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Why You Can’t Stop Beating Yourself Up
The Seductive Power of Self-Blame
Maybe this doesn’t happen to you. Maybe, on the day when you discover you’ve screwed up your boss’s flight reservations, which is the same day you’re late to work because you’ve misplaced your keys, so in your hurry you’ve spilled coffee all over your white shirt, you shrug it off. You realize you’re human. You fix the flights, apologize if needed, dab away the stains, put the keys on the right hook, and get on with life.
If that’s you, then you are a highly effective and evolved individual, or else you are blissfully insensitive. Either way, I wish I were more like you.
But if that’s not you, if a string of goof-ups, or even one, can send you into a funk of self-blame, I feel you. And here’s the thing: I’m sure that like me, you know better.
You are fully conscious of the fact that chipping away at your own self-confidence is not going to improve the situation, and it’s not going to make you a better person. Quite the reverse, in fact. The kind of recrimination you heap on your own head leads nowhere but to dispiriting psychic paralysis — and that’s if you manage to stop the toxic mantras before you end up officially depressed. You know this because you’ve been there.
