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MARCH 11, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
How to Love Yourself By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
T
he catchword these days is “you have to love yourself to love others.” Great. But how? The root of depression, for example, is self-hate. Since the only way to get out of it is to stop beating yourself up and start accepting who you are, it does seem important to get there, right? (This is a great example of why I don’t like diagnostic labels. Here’s a case where the label – depression – is the last step in a process that needs to be fixed at a deeper, more personal level.) So let’s talk about how to get there the right way. Let’s look at two solutions and why they haven’t worked. Then we’ll take a look at two that do work.
1. Why Affirmations Haven’t Worked – And How to Make Them Work You’re going to hate this – because it requires some work on your part that may be tedious. But if it works, why not? The reason affirmations haven’t worked for those of you who tried doing them is that the process feels too canned. It doesn’t feel real, and they don’t hit home. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, affirmations are statements you make to convince yourself of a trait that you wish you had but clearly don’t have. Or at least that’s the way they’ve been presented to the public. Well, of course that doesn’t work. It’s a silly idea, actually. How can you expect to have a miraculous change in your attitude toward yourself that way? You’re suddenly believing something about yourself that you never believed before just because you say it over and over again?
I don’t think so. But here is what I ask my private clients to do: Create an “evidence journal.” This is a notebook that you enter events into which “prove” the affirmation to be true. Let’s take an example. Suppose Chaya wants to lose weight, and she has been unsuccessful in the past. She creates an affirmation that says, “I enjoy stopping my meal when I notice how satisfied and comfortable I feel in my stomach.” Now, she has two tasks. One is to notice how she feels – the enjoyment of eating when she’s hungry but also the satisfaction and pleasure she gets when she’s comfortable after the meal. The second is to write that down. (This is not a food diary. I’m definitely not a nutritionist.) This is her “evidence journal.” So, if, on March 13, she notices that she was starved and wanted to enjoy every bit of her Shabbos meal, she has a delicious piece of challah, and makes room for the main course and dessert, too. But she only eats some of everything so there’s be room to enjoy it all. After Shabbos, she makes an entry in her journal with the date and the details that she did indeed notice how her
stomach felt both before and after the meal and how comfortable it was not stuffed. The same method could be used for anything at all you want to cultivate. Robert has always been scared of public speaking, but his new job requires it. He has no choice. So he prepares hard and practices like crazy. He’s sweating bullets but manages to give his presentation. Afterwards, three people tell him that they found it highly informative. So, he writes that down in his journal under the affirmation, “I am learning to become a good speaker.” See how it goes? When you feel down on yourself for the particular thing that you’ve been working on, you look in the journal and there’s the proof that you’re changing. I actually have a total of twelve methods of making affirmations work for you.
2. Why Therapy Hasn’t Worked – And How It Can When therapists ask you good questions that make you think, it clears space in your head for new ideas. When therapists reflect back (mirror) what you say, you feel heard
and that is wonderful, especially if no one else has heard you so far. When the therapist challenges your thoughts and conclusions and points out that your thinking is negative or that it makes entirely too many assumptions, that is good, too. These are three excellent approaches to therapy, but they are not necessarily enough. The reason is that all three of these appeal to the part of your brain that thinks, your cerebral cortex. It may be necessary to appeal to other parts of your brain. We’ll come back to this in a moment. When a therapist asks you how you feel, that can be the beginning of trouble. Feelings are vital, but since a person came into therapy because something wasn’t right, it may be more problematic to dwell on what isn’t feeling good. On the one hand, all emotions are important and we don’t want to invalidate any of them. On the other hand, the wrong line of questioning can leave a person stuck in depression, anxiety, anger, or whatever is bothering them. Certainly, for marriage and family work, a couple or family could end up arguing and miserable with no progress made if the focus is on negative feelings. And I can assure you that once the “feelings” lid is off, there won’t be space to talk about positive feelings. And in this way, a couple makes no progress. What is needed in therapy is a better awareness of the role that our bodies play in creating moods and actions. To understand this, let’s just notice that most of the brain’s activity is out of awareness. This is based on the principle of economy. It is quicker and easier for the brain to produce automatic reactions than for us to
