Why am I so hard on myself?
The way we we have been going about achieving the life we want sometimes can get in the way of having the life we want.
Many people ask this question when they find themselves trapped in cycles of self-criticism, anxiety, guilt, and self-doubt. Even when life appears to be going well from the outside, they often feel as though they are failing internally. They hold themselves to high standards, care deeply about the people around them, and genuinely want to do the right thing, yet internally, they often feel like they’re failing. Their personal high standards have served them well up to this point but they’re finding that things are starting to fray around the edges. Their intentions in their relationships are sometimes not communicated well, or they come across in ways that are unintended, which can lead to arguments. Then they beat themselves up over it, looping inside their heads about what went wrong, how they could do better, or why they are such a terrible person. It is fairly routine that when, as a counselor, I begin to talk with these people one of the main questions they say they struggle with is why.
Most people are pretty intelligent, and figure it has something to do with their upbringing. Many people who struggle with being overly hard on themselves often can say that one or both of their parents were emotionally neglectful or they drank a lot or they just had high standards and high expectations of them and were harsh. Things like that are associated with what we might call the ‘small-t’ traumas; ‘big-T’ traumas we might associate more with physical or sexual abuse or extreme or catastrophic events, traumas that are associated more with the diagnostic disorder we know as Post Acute Stress Disorder, or PTSD. There is also instances of what we would call ‘Complex Trauma’. But traumas are traumas; as a rule, for treatment we try not to compare traumas because the actual effects of trauma are not independent of the specific person.
Other people will talk about the relationships that they’ve been in in the past and how that’s shaped what’s occurring now, for example, for their current relationship, they’ll say that they had a series of problematic relationships that were characterized if not by direct physical abuse, then manipulative or emotional abuse. These clients are aware enough to understand that these past traumas and situations have molded them into the person they are today, and yet the question, “Why am I this way?” still doesn’t seem to be answered in a way that allows them to change and stop doing the things that are problematic. They feel like they’re failing somehow, they’re defective or they’re never going to get better. Most of them care a lot about their partners and the people in their lives, but sometimes they start pondering whether their relationship is really meant to be. This is very sad and distressing as well.
When There Is No Obvious Trauma
But then there’s other people that think about their history and they just figure there must be something that happened to them in so much as they are behaving this way now, but they can’t really put their finger on any trauma or anything bad that’s happened in their life. This kind of client looks at their history and sees that they often say is a normal family upbringing, and generally regular life events. Maybe their parents were strict but that they were good parents, that they weren’t abusive, that they’ve had relationships which maybe didn’t go the best but they didn’t seem like they were hugely problematic or dysfunctional. For this group of clients that are experiencing high anxiety and perhaps relationship issues it’s even more baffling because they can’t really put their finger on what it is that is making them this way. Nonetheless again it has lead to self-doubt, self-incrimination, low self-esteem, self-hatred, and even depression.
Holding It Together on the Outside
Yet, both of these groups share the generally common experience of that they are really holding their lives together, albeit often precariously. They are working, they’re supporting their family , and overall they figure they are doing what they’re supposed to do. Often yes, there is kind of the political and social environments and global environments that of our day that are adding a layer of even further worry and nervousness, and they’ll admit that it bothers them and brings them a certain amount of distress at times, but overall they’re holding it together and they’re doing what they need to do. At the same time, they ‘re having a deeper inner crisis, so to speak, where they loop and they spin out in their thoughts —during, after, and before moments of relationship difficulty, discord, or emotional distress. It is consuming them. When things are going well there is a little bit of shadow as if the other shoe is going to drop at any time, and then all of a sudden something happens and here they are in this tangle of argument that they didn’t intend to happen. The arguments can explode unexpectedly into talking about things of the past that they thought were well resolved. This leads them into a state of confusion.
It is really quite a conundrum for these people. It seems every sort of reasonable way to think about their situation and apply solutions ends up bringing about the same result—that’s why they’re coming to therapy.
Why Understanding the Cause Isn’t Enough
The question of “why am I so hard and myself” has a simple answer but often enough the answer doesn’t seem to function as a solution. Mental Health Philosophy encounters a deep layer of this paradox, but it is not very relevant to most people navigating their everyday lives. The simple answer is our experiences and particularly how we were brought up. The more complex context, though, it is that people have been doing the best they can while nevertheless are ultimately shaped by aspects of their personal experience which are necessarily disconnected in some way from the rest of the world, but specifically from the people that we love. The disconnect is not the root of the problem, rather, it is the misunderstanding that there should be no disconnection.
Going Deeper into Mental Health Philosophy
The Limits of Understanding Ourselves
We like to think that even in our deepest connections with the people we love and care about, particularly those of our immediate family, that they love us and so there wouldn’t be a disconnection. But the basic fact of being a human being is, in a manner of speaking, that there is always a piece of my personal development that remains distinct from others, what some contemporary philosophers would call withdrawn. This withdrawn aspect is the individual person having a personal experience of themselves, the aspect of experience that what I might call myself, and what the 20th century existentialists such as Viktor Frankl and Rollo May refer to when they talk about having responsibility for oneself. It is the uniquely personal part of me which develops. Development is the edge of growth of becoming the person that I am that no other person can really reach. Modern medicine will surely tell us that physical dynamics are the culprit, and perhaps more socially oriented clinicians might say that society is, but nonetheless, at some point, I must come to terms with the life that I have and the being that I am in it.
Understanding Anxiety: What You Need to Know
The Developmental Paradox
Speaking of why a person is so hard on themselves, (and why a person would ask them selves “why am I so hard on myself”) particularly from a developmental standpoint, the simple answer is that it has to do with the experiences and traumas of a person’s upbringing. This itself can be a difficult thing to wrap one’s head around because if they are being harsh on themselves and then they’re going to think about the problems that went into their upbringing, they’re going to be faced with a contradiction between a number of elements that they don’t normally come upon and likely resist encountering. These elements can be generalized into categories, but when it comes right down to it are actually very particular to the person. In general and in a way of speaking, the embodiment of the problem which comes out in thoughts about myself and the world is the experience of being the ‘product’ of people who loved me, and this ‘product’ that I am being so hard on, itself therefore does not make sense. As a person in this situation further tries to reconcile this, many times they just become further wrapped into the problem that is the inevitable result, which is the experience of the person experiencing problems, sometimes to the point where they hate themselves.
Discernment and Emotional Strategy
The main conundrum lies in what I call discernment. We develop strategies to make our lives work, and for many of people these strategies have worked very well. When we consider that what they are really working well for is the management of challenging emotional experience, as life becomes more stressful, more challenging emotional content becomes present, and we can start to see that what is really happening is the strategy works so well it has become the go to strategy for all emotional content. The person is not being discerning about their experience but is automatically applying the same strategy to a broad swathe of experiences. This can get in the way of our more intimate relationships which depend on emotional vulnerability. If I am hurting the people I love, then I get hard on myself and try harder. As I try harder, I resort to the same ways I have always managed difficult emotions. If this way of managing is to be hard on myself then I might not be noticing how well I am actually doing, which then makes things more difficult to accomplish, which then makes me try harder, which is emotionally challenging or stressful, and so on.
A little break: High Anxiety.
Working Through the Knot
Working through this experiential knot can involve some very deep personal work.
If you resonate with this post, perhaps getting into therapy would be beneficial for you.
If you live in Colorado, you can reach out to me at Agency Matters Mental Health.
Getting Deeper: Reconciliation in contradiction.
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why am I so hard on myself?
Many people develop self-critical thinking patterns as a way of coping with anxiety, uncertainty, perfectionism, or difficult emotional experiences.—and this can include the question “why am I so hard on myself”.
Can trauma cause self-criticism?
Yes. Trauma, emotional neglect, and difficult relationships can shape how people think about themselves and respond to mistakes.
Can therapy help with self-criticism?
Therapy can help people recognize unhelpful patterns, develop self-compassion, and learn more effective ways of responding to emotional distress.
You Are Mattering.
One response to “Why Am I So Hard on Myself?”
[…] that there are types of mental health that our current way of understanding is obscuring. As I have talked about in another post, the idea that there is a common experience of anxiety, for example, is, on one hand, a misnomer […]