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Mark Tyrrell
"I feel like I'm no good. Like I'm just damaged goods. I
can't even put my finger on it. It's just like I feel...
unworthy. I feel see-through, as if people are going to look
right into me... and hate what they find..
When I asked Susan how she would describe herself I could
see the pain playing around her eyes. She bit her lip and
her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. The grown
woman before me sounded like a frightened little girl.
"I'm cowardly, ugly, fat, useless, stupid, and selfish."
Susan's description of herself couldn't have been further
from the way I saw her. I wondered what mix of experience
had gone into creating such a poor self-image. After all,
much of what she'd told me about her life showed me she'd
been brave, not cowardly. She wasn't fat or ugly, not
through my objective eyes. And, far from being useless, she
was articulate, intelligent, and had achieved a lot in her
life.
Like many people with a poor self-image, Susan was fair
and reasonable when it came to other people, but reserved a
special corner of mental hell for herself.
So where had Susan's self-image issues come from?
How you learn to see yourself
I learned that Susan had been harshly criticized by her
mum and dad as a child. They had wanted the best for her,
but instead of encouragement they had heaped criticism upon
her.
"Clever girls don't do that!"
"If you dress like that no man will ever want you."
"Why can't you be more like your sister!"
Often our criticisms of ourselves come from other
people's criticisms of us. It feels like we are criticizing
ourselves but actually we have just adopted other people's
condemnations of us - usually at such a deep level that we
can't tell the difference.
When I asked Susan whose 'voice' it was when she was
criticizing herself, it took some careful thought before she
told me it was a mixture of both her parents. She'd taken up
the criticism baton from them and had been running hard with
it ever since.
To some extent we all learn to compare ourselves to
others: to build, almost without realizing it, a self-image.
But what is self-image, exactly?
The fall from innocence
"She has a prettier nose than me!"
"I'm not as clever, cool, rich, funny, tall, successful,
confident, young!"
"I am an inferior specimen!"
But how did you come to be a 'specimen'? An object to be
compared, assessed, praised, or criticized and found
wanting?
We're born into the world beautifully unselfconscious. We
have an 'I' of pure awareness, in which the self as an
object hasn't yet formed in our minds. But, bit by bit, we
learn to view ourselves as we imagine others see us. We
learn to compare ourselves not just to others, but to our
imagined idea of how we should be.
How do we compare?
"I'm 35; I should have my own place to live."
"By now I should be in a settled relationship."
"Am I aging quicker than the people around me?"
Even when we compare ourselves favorably to other people,
the fact that we are comparing ourselves at all leaves us
vulnerable because one day we might find we don't compare as
well as we used to.
And if we tend towards perfectionism - an unachievable
goal - then we can never be good enough. And we fall into a
trap of our own making.
The cost of Comparanoia
'Comparanoia' - living your life through the lens of the
people around you - causes pain. It embitters us, and it
tears us to tatters if we let it.
Worrying how we're doing, how we look, and how we seem to
others shrinks and spoils the life-expanding spontaneity
that we once knew, way back when we hadn't yet learned to
objectify ourselves in this way.
I know people who even compare themselves to those lucky
few who don't seem to compare themselves to others: "I wish
I could be free and not care so much what people think."
More often than not, people who chronically compare
themselves are aware on some level that they're doing it.
They might say, "Yes, I know I've got to learn to think
differently." But in a way, just trying to think differently
to improve self-image is putting the cart before the horse.
Why you can't think yourself into a positive self-image
It wasn't that Susan believed logically that she compared
unfavorably with others or that she really was fat, or ugly,
or useless. Logically she knew that it shouldn't matter if
she wasn't as slim as a supermodel or as rich as a CEO.
But this kind of painful self-image has little to do with
thoughts and everything to do with feelings. To help Susan
be as fair and kind to herself as she was to others, I had
to put her thoughts aside and focus on appealing to her
feelings.
Feelings are more powerful than thoughts (because
emotions are the tools we use to survive), and that's why
it's actually easier to change feelings in order to
naturally change thoughts than the other way around. Susan
had tried positive thinking, but had just felt guilty for
not being positive enough.
Here's what I did for Susan, and it can help you too.
3 Ways to Improve Self Image
1. Be kind to yourself by being calm about yourself
Learning to view yourself 'from the outside' - that is,
calmly and objectively - lets you appraise yourself not
through the distortions of fear or narcissism, but through
calm, fair, and objective assessment. We don't have to
believe we are as beautiful as Jennifer Hawkins or as rich
as Richard Branson. We just have to objectively understand
and accept that everyone is different, and be calm and
objective about that rather than tormented. I helped Susan
relax deeply into a beautiful hypnotic trance and used an
approach called 'The Helping Hand Technique'.
I helped her to first build up a sense of her self-worth
and life wisdom by focusing on what she had learned
throughout her life. Then, when she felt fully associated
with her resources and strengths, I encouraged her to
hypnotically help her younger self as if that younger self
was someone else.
When she came out of trance, she found that her memories
of being criticized and bullied as a child, though still
hurtful, no longer affected how she felt about herself now.
This was the first step in undoing the negative conditioning
from her past. I was helping her to change her feelings
about herself so that her thoughts - her self-image - could
naturally and easy update, modify, and change.
Improving self-image isn't about trying to force yourself
to switch from negative to positive, it's simply about
gaining more self-objectivity. Seeing yourself calmly 'from
the outside'. But that's only the first step.
2. Don't compare your inside to other people's outside
Feeling we have to be perfect is an imperfect way of
travelling through life. It's easy to compare ourselves to
some kind of impossible sense of who we imagine we should
be, or to a person or people we have deemed 'perfect'.
There is always going to be someone richer, more
classically beautiful, more 'successful' - whatever that
means. More, more, more. But there are also millions who
will always have less of some of your attributes. We all
need to try not to compare ourselves to others- but you will
slip, and when you do, at least make it a fair comparison.
Be careful whom you compare yourself to.
But even then, are we actually comparing ourselves to who
other people really are, or who we imagine they are?
It's so easy to look at someone and think they have
everything. But they may be looking at us feeling the same
thing. Even the most beautiful, witty, clever people have
their own inner doubts. After all, nothing is forever.
Beauty fades, bodies fail, relationships end, money runs
out. Nobody has everything.
One final way we can harness the understanding that
self-image stems from feelings rather than logic is through
metaphor. Here's how I used this with Susan.
3. Improve self-image with hypnotic metaphor
"It was like I was trying to con myself or something,
because although I was trying to think good things about
myself inside, I just didn't feel that way."
That's how Susan described her attempts to try to improve
her self-image just by trying to think more positively. I
explained to her that there are more connections leading
from the emotional parts of the mind to the thinking parts
than the other way around, which is why trying to change
feelings by changing thoughts can be so hard.
Every time I would try to challenge Susan's negative
self-image, she would argue with me. Not that I was
surprised. Negative self-image is resistant to direct
disconfirming feedback, which may even make someone cling
more tightly to their painful self-image. That's why
metaphor is so useful. Metaphor is an indirect way of
communicating with the powerful unconscious mind - the part
that actually produces the horrible feelings of inadequacy
in the first place.
I took Susan into hypnosis, and I told her metaphorical
stories. In this deep state of relaxation, her feelings
could calm and adjust, making it natural and easy for her to
think in healthier ways. Here's one story I told her that
really did seem to have an immediate effect - and it may
well help you too.
The Freed Princess
In a dark castle lived a princess who had never seen her
own reflection. She'd been locked up for her whole life,
until one day found that the door to her palace dungeon had
accidentally been left open. Amazed, she stepped free for
the first time ever. She walked outside and down to a
shimmery lake - another thing she had never seen before.
With wonder, she peered into the lake and, for the very
first time, saw her own reflection. But it was stormy, the
wind was whipping the water, and her reflection was
fractured and warped.
Naturally, the princess believed this was how she really
was, how she really looked. Jagged. Distorted. Ugly. She
began to cry at the 'true nature' of herself. Then a serene
elderly lady quietly approached her with a kind smile and
warm, understanding eyes. The lady comforted the princess
and, as she gently reassured her, the warping wind calmed.
Almost instantly, the surface of the lake became even and
calm. The sun emerged, and everything felt gentle and
peaceful once more. After a moment, the old lady encouraged
the princess to observe herself again in the reflection of
the now calm lake.
With everything - the elements, her mind, and the very
atmosphere - calm and balanced, she now saw herself as she
truly was and started to come to know herself.
You can tell yourself how awesome you are until you're
blue in the face, but this is not the path to restoring
healthy self- image. Calm self-observation is the first step
to seeing yourself as you are meant to be seen. As you
really are. Not perfect, not terrible - but worthy of
respect, and full of potential above and beyond what
yourself or others may have said or thought.
Healing not hating
Over the coming weeks we worked on removing the emotional
charge from Susan's most troublesome memories so they no
longer colored and dictated her feelings or thoughts about
herself. We worked on strategies to help her meet her
emotional needs. And she began to use her mind to heal, not
hate herself.
We helped her recognize, not as just an idea but as a
felt reality, her attributes, her beauty, and her array of
potentials. She began to respect herself not because it was
something she should do, but as a natural consequence of her
newly developed calm after overcoming past harsh
conditioning.
Toward the end of our time together, long after I'd
assumed she'd forgotten the story I'd told her at the start,
Susan looked at me and said: "I am the freed princess,
aren't I."
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