How to Love Yourself by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb

How to Love Yourself

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

The 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

think about everything.

A rule under this was developed by Donald Hebb in 1949 who noticed that when some various neurons are activated together once, they will be more likely to work together in the future. The axiom for this is: Neurons that wire together, fire together.

So, let’s say, for example, that Jeff is scared when he hears a loud noise in his house, and sure enough, a piece of pipe falls down from the ceiling. The neurons that fired then might be activated more readily in the future as he hears loud noises. Depending on the degree of fright he has or the level of pain anyone suffered, this may become a problem later on because the fear response will be activated too quickly for random, loud noises.

It is interesting that a fear or stress response do not even start in the brain. They start atop the kidneys in the adrenal glands. Messages are then sent to the brain, and different parts become activated. This loop of activation can become so entrenched that all the greatest cognitive therapists and others that rely on thoughts, opinions, and feelings as filtered through your words can’t stop it.

The next step most therapists will resort to for a problem such as the one Jeff has is medication.

Medication is a stopgap, a BandAid. It is fine to get some control of these physiological events if another approach can’t. But, to quote a colleague of mine, Dr. Ronald Cohen, a psychiatrist in Great Neck, NY, “People have a fantasy that meds will be a cure-all. Developmental issues and trauma issues aren’t affected by medication.”

Why would that be?

Ah. Now we get to the issue, the ikker.

The psychiatrist I’m quoting also said something else that is noteworthy. He pointed out that you don’t have to have been in a plane crash to suffer trauma. He calls the daily insults to our self-worth “trauma with a little t,” and that is the kind of trauma he is referring to in the above quote.

He didn’t invent this point. Bessel van der Kolk, whom I’ve quoted a number of times, said this in his book, “The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.”

So if you put together general, ordinary family life with the “little t” trauma, you get a picture of someone whose brain will just fire and whose body will just react to triggers that

you and I would not understand as triggers.

But it is precisely that lack of understanding of it as a trigger that causes a waste of valuable energy in the therapy room.

So the alternative to talking about “issues” in the marriage or simply spouting all your emotions there is to discover and catalogue your own triggers, trace them back to their childhood origins, and then use alternative methods to change the wiring and firing of neurons in your brain.

Evidence-Based Alternative Methods

One alternative method started in the last century with Milton Erickson, the medical doctor who introduced hypnosis to this country. Hypnosis and visualization are based on using our imaginations.

Current research has found that when you recall a memory such that you just about feel the experience in the present moment, the protein molecules in that memory soften and are capable of rearranging.

Isn’t this amazing? (Hashem, You created such truly awesome things!)

So, if during that process of re-experiencing a memory, you change it around a bit, when it reconstitutes, it will be a different memory.

That is why hypnosis works, and Milton Erickson is the grandfather of hypnosis in this country. This is why guided imagery works, and this is why when two people have been hostile to each other, their previously positive memories are no longer positive.

“Oh, that trip? It wasn’t such a big deal.”

“But you said at the time that it was heaven.”

“I couldn’t have.”

Well, she did. But present circumstance reconstituted that memory. It’s not the same, now, and you can’t

go back, either.

We use various forms of this today and there are literally thousands of research studies on the use, for example, of mindfulness meditation in correcting painful memories, helping with creativity, and stopping physical pain. So mindfulness is one alternative (along with hypnosis).

I’ve been writing about the second alternative method, also leaning heavily on our imaginations, the Internal Family Systems work of the brilliant Richard C. Schwartz.

Please refer to the last couple months of articles for more on IFS.

The use of the imagination literally changes protein molecules in the brain. This means that memories no longer feel painful or anxious, or triggering, when you use a method to understand their source and relate to it differently.

This is true, deep healing at its best. When each person in a couple heals in this way, their self-love easily blossoms. And then they have enough in their hearts both to give love to each other and value the love they are given.

You don’t have to have been in a plane crash to suffer trauma.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.