Your post got me thinking about some stuff I’ve been dealing with, and I think helped me make some progress on it almost instantly. I don’t think the mechanisms are quite the same, but thinking about your experience induced me to have useful realizations about myself. I’ll share in case it’s useful to someone else:
It sounds like your self-concept issue was rooted in “having a negative model of yourself deeply ingrained”, which induced neuroses in your thoughts/behaviors that attempted to compensate for it / search around for ways to convince yourself it wasn’t true. And that the ‘fix’, sorta, was revisiting where that model came from and studying it and realizing that it wasn’t fair or accurate and that the memories in which it was rooted could be reinterpreted or argued against.
I thought about this for a while, and couldn’t quite fit my own issues into the model. So instead I zoomed out a bit and tried this approach: it seems like the sensation of shame, especially when no one else is around, must be rooted in something else, and when I feel shame I ought to look closer and figure out why, as it’s a huge >>LOOK RIGHT HERE<< to a destructive loop of thoughts (destructive because, well, if I’m feeling shame about the same thing for years on end, and yet it’s not changing, clearly it’s not helping me in any way to feel that way—so I ought, for my health, to either fix it or stop feeling it).
[Aside: in my experience, the hallmark thought pattern of depression is loops: spirals of thoughts that are negative and cause anxiety / self-loathing, but don’t provide a fix and have no mechanism for ‘going away’, so they just continue to spiral, negatively affecting mood and self-esteem etc, and probably causing destructive behaviors that give you more to feel anxious / hateful about. And I’ve observed that it’s very hard to go through rational calculations with regard to yourself in private, for me at least, and so talking to people (therapists, friends, strangers, whatever) and being forced to vocalize and answer questions about your thought spirals can cause you to see logical ways to ‘step out of them’ that never seem clear when you’re just thinking by yourself. Or whatever—I could probably write about how this works for hours.]
So I looked closer at where my shame from, and found that it wasn’t that I had a negative self-concept on its own (something like “I am X”, where X is negative), but rather that it was that I was constantly seeing in my world reminders of someone I felt like I should have been, in a sense. I felt like I had been an extremely smart, high-potential kid growing up, but at some point, video game addiction + sleep deprivation + irresponsibility + depression had diverted me off that path, and ever since I have been constantly reminded of that fact and feel shame for not being that person. So I guess I had (have) a self-concept of ‘being a failed version of who I could have been’, or ‘having never reached my potential’.
For some concrete examples:
When I saw my reflection in things, I would criticize myself for seeming not-normal, goofy, or not.. like.. masculine enough? for a mid-20s male. not that I wanted to be, like, buff, but I want to be a person who wouldn’t strike others as goofy looking, but I always see my bad posture from computer use and my haircut that I’m never happy with, and get stuck in loops looking at myself in the mirror and trying to figure out what I need to work on to fix it (work out this or that muscle, do yoga, figure out how to maintain a beard, whatever).
A lot of times when I read really brilliant essays, on LW or other blogs or etc, about subjects I’m into, especially by autodidact/polymath types, I’d feel really bad because I felt like I could have been one of those people, but had failed to materialize. So I’d be reminded that I need to study more math, and write more, and read more books, and all these others things, in order to get there.
These are thoughts I have been having dozens of times a day.
The second big realization: that motivation borne out of shame is almost completely useless. Seeing your flaws and wanting to change them causes negative emotions in the moment, but it doesn’t really lead to action, ever. A person who feels bad about being lanky doesn’t often go to the gym, because that’s not coming from a positive place and the whole action is closely coupled to negativity and self-loathing. And a person feeling bad for not being a clever polymath doesn’t.. become one.. from negativity; that takes years of obsession and other behaviors that you can’t curate through self-loathing.
(Well, it’s possible that shame can induce motivation for immediate fixes, but I’m sure it doesn’t cause long-term changes. I suspect that requires a desire to change that comes from a positive, empowered mindset.)
I’m not entirely sure what the ‘permanent’ fix for this is—it doesn’t seem to be as simple as redefining my self-concept to not want to be these people. But realizing this was going on in this way seemed like a huge eye-opening realization and almost immediately changed how I was looking at my neurotic behaviors / shames, and I think it’s going to lead to progress. The next step, for now, I think, is focusing on mindfulness in an effort to become more able to control and ignore these neurotic shame feelings, now that I’ve convinced myself that I understand where they’re coming from, and that they’re unfair and irrational.
TLDR
feelings of shame / neurotic spirals = places to look closely at in your psyche. They’re probably directly related to self-concept issues.
it’s possible for negativity to come, rather than directly from your self-concept, from your concept of who you ‘should have’ or ‘could have been’.
shame-induced motivation is essentially useless. For me, at least. I’ve been trying to channel it into lifestyle changes for years to essentially 0 results.
Your post got me thinking about some stuff I’ve been dealing with, and I think helped me make some progress on it almost instantly. I don’t think the mechanisms are quite the same, but thinking about your experience induced me to have useful realizations about myself. I’ll share in case it’s useful to someone else:
It sounds like your self-concept issue was rooted in “having a negative model of yourself deeply ingrained”, which induced neuroses in your thoughts/behaviors that attempted to compensate for it / search around for ways to convince yourself it wasn’t true. And that the ‘fix’, sorta, was revisiting where that model came from and studying it and realizing that it wasn’t fair or accurate and that the memories in which it was rooted could be reinterpreted or argued against.
I thought about this for a while, and couldn’t quite fit my own issues into the model. So instead I zoomed out a bit and tried this approach: it seems like the sensation of shame, especially when no one else is around, must be rooted in something else, and when I feel shame I ought to look closer and figure out why, as it’s a huge >>LOOK RIGHT HERE<< to a destructive loop of thoughts (destructive because, well, if I’m feeling shame about the same thing for years on end, and yet it’s not changing, clearly it’s not helping me in any way to feel that way—so I ought, for my health, to either fix it or stop feeling it).
[Aside: in my experience, the hallmark thought pattern of depression is loops: spirals of thoughts that are negative and cause anxiety / self-loathing, but don’t provide a fix and have no mechanism for ‘going away’, so they just continue to spiral, negatively affecting mood and self-esteem etc, and probably causing destructive behaviors that give you more to feel anxious / hateful about. And I’ve observed that it’s very hard to go through rational calculations with regard to yourself in private, for me at least, and so talking to people (therapists, friends, strangers, whatever) and being forced to vocalize and answer questions about your thought spirals can cause you to see logical ways to ‘step out of them’ that never seem clear when you’re just thinking by yourself. Or whatever—I could probably write about how this works for hours.]
So I looked closer at where my shame from, and found that it wasn’t that I had a negative self-concept on its own (something like “I am X”, where X is negative), but rather that it was that I was constantly seeing in my world reminders of someone I felt like I should have been, in a sense. I felt like I had been an extremely smart, high-potential kid growing up, but at some point, video game addiction + sleep deprivation + irresponsibility + depression had diverted me off that path, and ever since I have been constantly reminded of that fact and feel shame for not being that person. So I guess I had (have) a self-concept of ‘being a failed version of who I could have been’, or ‘having never reached my potential’.
For some concrete examples:
When I saw my reflection in things, I would criticize myself for seeming not-normal, goofy, or not.. like.. masculine enough? for a mid-20s male. not that I wanted to be, like, buff, but I want to be a person who wouldn’t strike others as goofy looking, but I always see my bad posture from computer use and my haircut that I’m never happy with, and get stuck in loops looking at myself in the mirror and trying to figure out what I need to work on to fix it (work out this or that muscle, do yoga, figure out how to maintain a beard, whatever).
A lot of times when I read really brilliant essays, on LW or other blogs or etc, about subjects I’m into, especially by autodidact/polymath types, I’d feel really bad because I felt like I could have been one of those people, but had failed to materialize. So I’d be reminded that I need to study more math, and write more, and read more books, and all these others things, in order to get there.
These are thoughts I have been having dozens of times a day.
The second big realization: that motivation borne out of shame is almost completely useless. Seeing your flaws and wanting to change them causes negative emotions in the moment, but it doesn’t really lead to action, ever. A person who feels bad about being lanky doesn’t often go to the gym, because that’s not coming from a positive place and the whole action is closely coupled to negativity and self-loathing. And a person feeling bad for not being a clever polymath doesn’t.. become one.. from negativity; that takes years of obsession and other behaviors that you can’t curate through self-loathing.
(Well, it’s possible that shame can induce motivation for immediate fixes, but I’m sure it doesn’t cause long-term changes. I suspect that requires a desire to change that comes from a positive, empowered mindset.)
I’m not entirely sure what the ‘permanent’ fix for this is—it doesn’t seem to be as simple as redefining my self-concept to not want to be these people. But realizing this was going on in this way seemed like a huge eye-opening realization and almost immediately changed how I was looking at my neurotic behaviors / shames, and I think it’s going to lead to progress. The next step, for now, I think, is focusing on mindfulness in an effort to become more able to control and ignore these neurotic shame feelings, now that I’ve convinced myself that I understand where they’re coming from, and that they’re unfair and irrational.
TLDR
feelings of shame / neurotic spirals = places to look closely at in your psyche. They’re probably directly related to self-concept issues.
it’s possible for negativity to come, rather than directly from your self-concept, from your concept of who you ‘should have’ or ‘could have been’.
shame-induced motivation is essentially useless. For me, at least. I’ve been trying to channel it into lifestyle changes for years to essentially 0 results.