You Can’t Berate Yourself Into a Better Life

Three ways to get out of your own way when you're ready for a change.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had some pretty loud internal voices with outrageously high standards. They have generally had an opinion that I probably should not be resting at any given time.

And if things feel less than stable? Time to get louder, while insisting that’s probably all my fault.

At one point the voices were certain that that every time I made a mistake at work that I was about to take a swan dive into the abyss. The parts of me that simply could not allow me to rest, who didn’t believe I deserved a moment of peace, got so damn loud they pushed me straight into existentialism.

I thought, “I’m going to be dead someday, and then what? What will the point of all this endless anxiety have been?”

It was at that moment that I made a deal with my most insistent part, the one screaming in my ear about my imminent failures. “I cannot do a good job while you’re hijacking my nervous system,” I said. “Please back off and I promise I’ll do good work.”

In my personal life, my wife and I have a deal — if one of us is having a big reaction to something, the other one asks, “what do you need right now?” I might say to my wife, “I need to scream at the wall for a bit then I want a hug,” and she’ll say, “sounds good” and go load the dishwasher until I ask for the hug.

Ideally, we would be able to give ourselves the same deal, especially in times of much-needed change. Space to feel that shit, in your own time. Comfort offered and given in a way that works for you. No demand that you be anything you’re not.

The need for change often comes because we feel like we’ve been hijacked by life-- our energy has been obliterated by a workplace that extracts without bounds. We’ve been so deeply dissatisfied with an unhappy relationship that each day feels like an exercise in chafing against invisible shackles. We’ve gotten so numbed out from overwhelm that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to access simple joy. We have shocked ourselves by our own anger and irritation, we’ve lashed out at someone we love and poured shame into the mix.

Arguably, when those voices get the loudest, when they’re yelling at you to run, that’s the signal to slow down, not speed up. Change, however glorious, requires energy. It requires space. And for many of us, this is the moment when our most vicious voices start piping up.

You can’t berate yourself into being happy. You can’t beat yourself into a better life. You can’t hate yourself into a more fulfilling career or a more connected relationship.

You need grace to muddle about. Paul T Shattuck, MSW, PhD, in his treatise on the power of muddling, says “befriending yourself beats berating yourself every time.”

Real, lasting change has to be grounded in care, compassion. In love.

You need to be able to send your loudest inner critics into the kitchen to load the dishwasher.

If this is you, the noise is at an all time high. So, how the hell do you get yourself to back the hell off so youy can find our signal?

Have an (internal) family meeting.

No person is just one thing. We contain multitudes. A coalition. We are made up of a whole lot of parts. So the voice that’s haranguing you? That’s just one part of you. Despite the harsh words and the tendency to jack up our nervous systems, even our super critical parts have good intentions. They exist to protect us, and they’re usually not operating on a full set of information. Whatever part that’s insisting that you’re failing and it’s all your fault is trying to protect you.

Most of these parts are like scared little kids - the more you ignore them, the louder they get. Time to have a sit down with that part.

Here’s the thing about anxious kids - they want boundaries. They want to know that the person in charge knows what they’re doing. And if you try to ignore them, they only get louder. Treat them like you would your own scared kid - listen to their concerns, let them know you’ll protect them. Tell them they can ride in the passenger seat, but they can’t drive.

Build some Boxes.

When I told my wife that I needed space to rage, she gave it to me. Building boxes for change is one way to give this space to yourself.

Career change is a topic that really stirs up the hornet’s nest of loud parts - when I work with coaching clients we build boxes by making the terms real. For example, clients do the math to figure out exactly what they have to work with in terms of financial runway, compensation needs, and retirement. A laid-off client who knows they can invest, say, 3 months of time into exploratory work when they do not need to generate income, can put the voices to rest within that box. A client who is being driven mad by their current toxic workplace can game out the consequences of creating new boundaries. What’s the worst case scenario? If they fire me for leaving by 5 every day to have dinner with my family (unlikely but possible), what would happen? I could get contract work until I land the next thing if I have to. We’d be okay. That client moves the locus of control — permission isn’t granted by your boss, it’s granted by you. Instant room opens up in your life. (Rachel Tully has excellent advice on actually doing the math, here.)

These clients have bigger, existential topics come up, as well. Life questions about family planning, whether to move, how to manage relationships, etc. - the box is a parking lot and a timeline to return to those questions. Once you’ve committed three months to this work, you can revisit the question of whether you should go to grad school.

Sometimes the uncertainties that hound you are beyond your own realm of control. Politics, climate change, whether Rihanna will actually ever release new music, etc. Michelle Tea talks about creating a Goddess Box in her book Modern Tarot:

Create a box in honor of whatever deity you like to imagine watching over you. (You do imagine a benevolent force watching over you, don’t you? Try it! It feels nice!) Inside this box will go every single thing that you have no control over, the terrible things you’re having a hard time letting go of, everything you’re fighting against accepting. These things can be big-concept, like injustice; that’s super-hard to accept. They can be downright trivial, like your bestie’s annoyingly shitty taste in dates. Write down each one, fold up the paper, and slip it into your Goddess Box. It’s out of your hands now—you’ve handed it over.

Connect to Love.

You may not be in a place yet where you’re ready to embrace yourself unconditionally. But you’ve got the love in your life. You have the love to give. Spend some time connecting with that love.

Some writing prompts to get you started:

What would you say to someone that you loved? What advice would you give to the people to whom you feel the deepest tenderness? What would it take to give that tenderness to yourself?

If you want a place to start grounding, the Values Sort takes about ten minutes.

If this named something you’ve felt, send it to someone who’d recognize it too.