Interesting facts about Self-Criticism

So I’ve just started reading Kirsten Neff’s Self-Compassion. In the first few chapters she talks about a lot of reasons why we engage in the practice of  self-criticism. They’ve been rolling around in my head since I read the chapters on Monday.

A person who is fat in North America experiences the world as a place that tells them that being fat makes them ugly and unloveable. Our reality is that people will make unsolicited comments, provide unsolicited advice, be hurtful or hateful, or be outright discriminatory. Neff explains that one of the reasons that people engage in self-criticism is to prevent or reduce the blow of criticism they expect to hear. There are obvious manifestations of this, of course. Many fat folks engage in self-deprecating humour about their weight as a means to teflon coat themselves from others. The idea is: I’m going to short circuit your attempt to make me feel less by showing you that I already know I am less… and sometimes, by showing you that I’m better at making fun of myself than you ever will be. How many heavy stand-up comedians does this bring to mind?

Now this is something I was aware of… but this is all just the external stuff. What I found fascinating is that Neff says there is also an internal mechanism that plays out a similar way. People play self-critical tapes over and over again in their minds in a self-protection effort to reduce the harm that will inevitably come from someone else’s criticism. When someone criticizes us, and that criticism is already part of the critical – often hateful – tapes in our own heads, the psychological impact of the criticism is muted. We’ve quite literally beat them to the (emotional) punch.

Neff goes on to explain that self-criticism is also an effort to control. In our heads, when we self-criticise, we are both the subject and object of criticism. We can (and do) identify distinctly with both the criticizer and the criticized at the same time. We will always identify with the criticized, because of the way we are treated in the world we live in. This makes us feel powerless. Taking on the additional identiy of the criticizer makes us feel powerful. When we become our own bully, we retake control… at the expense of ourselves.

Lastly, came this fascinating bit; I am lucky enough to have escaped this one, but know a lot of people in the WLS community who it applies to. Self-critics are often attracted to judgemental and bullying people who confirm their feelings of worthlessness.  In general, people seek out people who reinforce their firmly held beliefs because it makes their world more stable and secure. We see this play out in a million ways as people who share the same cultural background (ethnic, religious, political, socioeconomic, etc) seek out each other ro re-inforce their worlds – birds of a feather and all that. This is called “self-verification theory”. Even when our deeply held beliefs are harmful to us (like feeling we are less), we tend to follow this same pattern. It is psychologically easier for someone to choose a partner who bullies, belittles or abuses us if we think that is how we deserve to be treated, than to choose a person who will treat us differently than we think we deserve. Of course, that ease is the ease of the moment, and the outcome of that choice only compounds psychological harm over time. This is one of the (many) major reasons why so many relationships fail after one part of the couple has WLS. As we learn to believe that we deserve more, we are attracted to people that treat us as we deserve.

Food for thought.

Working on Me

I’ve just finished a phenomenal book called Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. It’s badly named, having little specifically to do with women and holding a very different conception of God than one might expect when picking it up. It’s a self-help book, which is something I have historically wanted nothing to do with. But… it’s really very enlightening. There were at least a half dozen times while reading it that I found myself in tears, a half dozen more where I found myself re-reading passages out loud so that I could hear it, feel it, better. I’ve already started taking some of the advice to heart and using the techniques outlined in the book. I’m kind of shocked to find them working.

Basically, the book is the cumulation of Roth’s work on emotional eating and compulsive dieting / compulsive eating. How you eat, what you have on your plate and how you consume it, Roth maintains, tells you everything you need to know about your relationship with yourself and your spiritual fulfillment.

I liked it so much I’ve picked up a few of her other books: Breaking Free From Emotional Eating and Why Weight?: A Workbook for Ending Compulsive Eating. For a very long time I resisted the idea that I was a compulsive eater. The term invokes binge eating patterns to me, and while I am definitely a mindless overeater, I have thankfully never been a full-on binge-eater of the eat-the-world-until-I-burst variety. I have a lot of compassion for those folks, but my eating isn’t the same.

This is me: My portions are too big. I eat without recognizing I’m getting full. I always clear my plate. I fixate on the food that hasn’t been put on my plate yet, even when I have had enough to eat. I have a mental drive to obliviate as I consume food. I’m attracted to food that helps me do that even if it doesn’t make me or my body happy. I am convinced I will enjoy unhealthy foods more than healthy foods even when I know that is not always true. I distractedly read, talk, think, watch TV do anything but pay attention to the process of eating. I eat for emotional relief: I graze in times of stress or boredom. I soothe myself with food. I reward myself with food. I bargain with myself for food.

So I’m going to be working through these books, and a few others I picked up on mindfulness and acceptance, on cognitive and behavioral techniques. I may use this forum for some of the exercises, or reflection on some of the exercises.

I’m aiming to understand me better, and help myself through a transition to a healthier way to be.