I grew up with a lot of criticism, and I wasn’t supposed to show anger at it. I also was harassed by other students at school, and told to just ignore it. In other words, they were under no obligation to control their actions, while it was my job to control my involuntary reactions.
FWIW, I’ve fixed similar patterns to this in myself by realizing that I actually did have the right to not want the (ciriticism, teasing, harassment), the right to act in order to stop it, the right to feel bad that it continued and no-one else stopped it, and the right to feel like a worthwhile person even if I fought back.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to put into words how to create those realizations (and that was really just a summary, rather than the full list), but I can at least say that if it causes you to break down sobbing with relief, you’re probably going in the right direction.
The central process, though, is identifying which of your SASS needs were used to condition the learned helplessness, and then give yourself the right to meet that need in the circumstances where you were taught not to. For example, if you weren’t supposed to show anger because your parents withdrew their acceptance of you, then you would need to give yourself the right to accept yourself when you show anger. And so on.
Individual rules can be complex, though, and based on what you describe in your comment, I would guess you’ve got maybe 15-20 such rules you’d have to tweak just to get started. But it’s definitely fixable.
One book that may be of use to you is “Healing The Shame That Binds You”—it has an excellent set of examples of how shame-binds form, even though its techniques for fixing anything absolutely sucks.
(Psychologists rarely aim anywhere near high enough in their standards for devising ways to fix things, IMO; my personal standard is that you should be able to change something in 15 minutes or so, if you know what you’re doing and precisely what you need to fix. As Eliezer says in one of his stories, it only takes a few minutes to have an insight, if you have all the data)
I believe in maximizing the amount of resources I can from people, and therefore feeling I deserve what I plausibly can get—but I don’t see how that’s a “right”. I think what you realized is that you didn’t have to deal with ciriticism, teasing, harassment, not that you had the right to not deal with those things.
I’m using “right” in the sense that a programmer speaks of “access rights”. An access right is the ability to do something, not moral approval. Rights in the sense I’m speaking of here simply refers to making a set of actions reachable in the brain’s planning trees, if that makes sense.
I’ve found, though, that asserting that one has the right to do something is helpful in imperatively making this connection in the brain, so that’s the word I use. (It seems in many people to elicit an accompanying “territorial” emotional response, that may or may not be related to the mechanism used to mark actions accessible or inaccessible in the first place.)
FWIW, I’ve fixed similar patterns to this in myself by realizing that I actually did have the right to not want the (ciriticism, teasing, harassment), the right to act in order to stop it, the right to feel bad that it continued and no-one else stopped it, and the right to feel like a worthwhile person even if I fought back.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to put into words how to create those realizations (and that was really just a summary, rather than the full list), but I can at least say that if it causes you to break down sobbing with relief, you’re probably going in the right direction.
The central process, though, is identifying which of your SASS needs were used to condition the learned helplessness, and then give yourself the right to meet that need in the circumstances where you were taught not to. For example, if you weren’t supposed to show anger because your parents withdrew their acceptance of you, then you would need to give yourself the right to accept yourself when you show anger. And so on.
Individual rules can be complex, though, and based on what you describe in your comment, I would guess you’ve got maybe 15-20 such rules you’d have to tweak just to get started. But it’s definitely fixable.
One book that may be of use to you is “Healing The Shame That Binds You”—it has an excellent set of examples of how shame-binds form, even though its techniques for fixing anything absolutely sucks.
(Psychologists rarely aim anywhere near high enough in their standards for devising ways to fix things, IMO; my personal standard is that you should be able to change something in 15 minutes or so, if you know what you’re doing and precisely what you need to fix. As Eliezer says in one of his stories, it only takes a few minutes to have an insight, if you have all the data)
I believe in maximizing the amount of resources I can from people, and therefore feeling I deserve what I plausibly can get—but I don’t see how that’s a “right”. I think what you realized is that you didn’t have to deal with ciriticism, teasing, harassment, not that you had the right to not deal with those things.
I’m using “right” in the sense that a programmer speaks of “access rights”. An access right is the ability to do something, not moral approval. Rights in the sense I’m speaking of here simply refers to making a set of actions reachable in the brain’s planning trees, if that makes sense.
I’ve found, though, that asserting that one has the right to do something is helpful in imperatively making this connection in the brain, so that’s the word I use. (It seems in many people to elicit an accompanying “territorial” emotional response, that may or may not be related to the mechanism used to mark actions accessible or inaccessible in the first place.)