Becoming Your Own Enemy

You become your own worst enemy when you turn your preferences into “shoulds” & “musts”. Psychological distress is often maintained by cognitive processes, “People disturb themselves as a result of the rigid and extreme beliefs they hold about events more than the events themselves.” (Albert Ellis). Our emotions are mainly created from our beliefs, which influence the evaluations and interpretations we make and fuel the reactions we have to life situations. We actively reinforce our self-defeating beliefs through the processes of auto-suggestion and self-repetition, and we then behave in ways that are consistent with these beliefs. Hence, it is largely our own repetition of early-indoctrinated irrational beliefs that keeps dysfunctional attitudes alive and operative within us. We have strong tendencies to transform our desires and preferences into dogmatic “shoulds,” “musts,” “ought’s,” demands, and commands. When we feel disturbed, it is a good idea to look into our hidden dogmatic musts and absolutists should.

When our preferences are turned into shoulds & musts, we start drawing conclusions without supporting evidence. This includes catastrophizing, or thinking of the absolute worst scenario and outcomes for most situations. You convince yourself to think just because you didn’t act in a particular way a “must” or “should” that would have been followed in the process, isn’t followed which led to the undesirable outcome or you start forming conclusions based on an isolated detail of an event while ignoring other information. The significance of the total context is lost somewhere in the process, just because of the irrational pattern you hold on to: disables you to look at the event/scenario otherwise.

When the strong belief held in mind doesn’t take a place in the real world and you fail for even once you start holding those extreme beliefs based on a single incident and apply them inappropriately to dissimilar events or settings. If you face difficulty in one situation you will conclude that you are unable to do the task in any situation, just because of the irrational pattern of demands and commands that you have faith in.

One might start labeling, involving portraying one’s identity on the basis of imperfections and mistakes made in the past and allowing them to define one’s true identity. If you are not able to live up to all of the expectations (should and musts), you have created for yourself, you might say to yourself, “I’m totally worthless”. You might measure your worth by your errors and weaknesses rather than by your successes. You might magnify and minimize by perceiving a case or situation in a greater or lesser light than it truly deserves. You might make this cognitive error by assuming that even minor mistakes could easily create disasters. One might even reach to the extent of personalization i.e. a tendency for individuals to relate external events to themselves, even when there is no basis for making this connection. You might tell yourself, “This situation proves that I really let that client down, and now she may never seek help again.”

Blame can be at the core of many emotional disturbances. If we want to become psychologically healthy, we should better stop blaming ourselves and others and learn to accept ourselves fully and unconditionally despite our imperfections, by keeping our life easy with preferences, instead of shoulds & musts.

Inflexible “shoulds”, “musts”, “ought’s”, ‘demands’, and ‘commands’, only make you stuck between a path which leads to nowhere exactly or at least not somewhere you expect yourself to be, leaving you feeling lonely, stressed, and miserable. Pursuit of excellence is a healthy habit, it is always important to do your best when trying to achieve an important goal. We feel unworthy when we let an inflexible-irrational belief control us and we fully submit to the unhealthy pattern of thinking which we have adopted to the lengths it doesn’t seem insalubrious or wrong anyway and we unfortunately end up repressing our emotions, bottling up negative emotions because they’re uncomfortable, or because you tell yourself that your are not “allowed” to express them so you you must not express them. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make them go away. Instead, they build up until they’re too intense to keep inside and then we explode, usually in a destructive way. You become your own enemy when you ignore the need of learning to understand and communicate your irrational beliefs, because understanding and communicating your irrational thoughts is the first step to learning to manage them. Once, you are able to do that, you can start to change the way you talk to yourself and think about where to go from here.