Defeating Self-Defeating Prophecies

A piece of mine that often sticks out in my mind was a blog about depression written in the days before 9/11. It was one of the first times I voluntarily opened up about my diagnosis of clinical depression at the age of 14, and how it lead to me becoming suicidal on Prozac (SSRI’s really do a number on me). The blog didn’t begin to scratch the surface of the impact mental illness had on my life in general, but it represented something huge for me. In the years since then, my life has unfolded, repressed memories have surfaced, and truths have come to light — as they do. In addition to some strides in medical science and my own periodic need for support through some pretty dark shit, that diagnosis has had a few letters and phrases added in refinement.

The people who have dealt me the deepest mental scars are either dead or so far removed from my life I no longer have to choose between fight/flight/fawn/freeze. This leaves me squarely cast as “primary antagonist” in the story of my own life, but if I’m honest with myself — it’s always been me. If I’m really honest with myself, it’s more like “here I am again — knowing what I have to do to make myself move towards something, but I’m just not going to do them.” Or — and this I’ve said out loud frequently — “No, I won’t do yoga. It would make me feel good and I don’t deserve that.” No pretty, pithy quote set over a nature scene will help me to shake the comforting familiarity of my own self-loathing. Since I seem to love to set diabolical self-defeatist traps of thought as a way to torture myself, I’ve also been able to ascertain that few things fuel self-loathing quite like self-defeating behaviors, or as I like to call them, my self-defeating prophecies. It makes them sound more fun than they actually are.

Much like I can’t pinpoint a particular moment out of years of abuse that instilled in me all of the mental and emotional damage I carry, I can’t say for certain what is triggering this latest round of self-defeatist flare-up. But, I can say that in the last calendar year, I’ve had to euthanize my beloved dog, I lost a job, I’ve been seeing (or not!) enormous degradation in my vision, and my father died (along with the tough revelation that he was my father, after much debate). And … yeah, I guess there’s the fact that nearly everywhere there’s panic, paranoia, and an actual pandemic. All of these are, of course, merely explanations and not excuses. While they illuminate the facts, they don’t offer other information for tactics on how to deal with it.

I am also unlucky enough to carry with me an internalized chorus of self-loathing peopled with voices from my past, replete with guest soloist samples of all my failures, singing an awful medley of my worst traits mashed up with how my dreams are all stupid and unachievable.

I’ve managed to defeat this toxic headspace of self-defeating tendencies before, and I’m hoping I can do so again using the following four tricks.

Set myself up for successes early in the day.

During the hardest project I ever had to work through at work (and trust me, it was a doozy), most of my days contained a lot of frustration and failure. To deal with those, I set myself up to succeed at something every day. To trick myself into doing it, I would do it early in the morning. I’d wake up at 4:30 and get a long yoga workout in before I had to be at work (I started work at 7 AM at the time). When I was training for a marathon, I’d do my run early in the morning so I’d get it in before I had a day to craft a litany of good excuses. More than once my husband and I joked about how we were going for a run before our bodies actually registered what they were doing, but the same sort of trick was working on my mind. Over the next few weeks, I will be finding ways to ensure that I get some good successes on my ‘must-do’ list to keep that feeling of success going throughout the day.

Allow myself to obsess over what success might feel like.\

A lot of the times there’s something I’m working on that is a smaller part of a larger goal. Writing, knitting, spinning — a lot of the activities that I enjoy the most show what happens when you dedicate incremental effort into something. During many difficult training runs for the marathon, I moved myself to tears thinking about what the finish line would feel like — what that burst of pride would possibly be like so that I could work towards being able to achieve that feeling. The same ability to visualize an end-state made me an adept ETL developer. Visualizing myself achieving things is so helpful in moving me towards my goals that my self-defeatist self hates me engaging in these thought experiments at all.

I’ve found that just as yoga, pilates, and lifting are the best things I can do for myself physically that meditation is a best thing that I can do mentally for myself. it really helps me to be better about not only visualizing end-states, but moving my self-defeatist tendencies out of the way when I’m trying to focus on those visualizations. While I have many activities that I engage in that are meditative in their nature and can help me on-ramp into meditation if I’m in a bad way, I’m at my best when I dedicate time to my meditative practice in and of itself.

Spend less time in front of screens.

I have so many reasons that this is true — from my very poor vision all the way to the sickness in spirit that can come with general consumption of social media. I think I’m justified in turning things off these days, especially since offline activities allow me to fully focus and invest in what I’m doing, and give me the emotional strength and focus to break out of self-defeating cycles. It’s harder to chastise yourself for being worthless when you can see some creation of things of true value (or at least that’s true for me). While perspective is necessary, comparison is the thief of joy, so there’s a fine line here. When I limit my time in front of screens to focus on inputting things I’ve written, or correspondence, or whatever task it is that I might need to get complete — I find I’m much more focused on the task.

I remind myself often these days that the point of many things is just endless scrolling — that it’s vital to them. I think often of why someone is engaging me on a particular platform and how that platform earns money, etc. All of these weigh into my decisions as to whether or not something is worthy of screen time, and more and more often I find that I don’t open my laptop much.

Ignore / shut down my inner critic when the attacks turn personal.

This comes down to being able to catch myself doing some real nuanced mental games. There’s a difference between ‘this idea failed,’ or ‘this technique failed,’ or ‘you failed to execute this task,’ and ‘you ARE a failure.’ Some of these are helpful observations — one is a large red flag with “‘”Stinkin’ Thinkin’” written on it. Trust me, this is a difficult thing to do. One of the things that meditation has definitely helped me to see is that thoughts like these are just like clouds in the sky of the mind. It’s just a matter of riding out those personal attacks, or shutting them down and no longer investing my energy into them.

Thank you so much for reading. These four techniques have led me through times of self-defeatism before, and properly employed, I know they’ll work again — and I hope they can help you!