BPDFamily.com

The "why do people overdiagnose them as psychopaths" thread is closed, but this came up on my fb feed and I thought it was relevant. 

When I had a terrible self-concept, I could never admit I was imperfect or that I was wrong. My healthy ego was not developed yet, so admitting my shadow was too much to bear. I so wanted to see something good about me, after a childhood of negative feedback. It’s important to remember that people often cannot acknowledge their flaws and mistakes, because their self-concepts are not strong enough to handle the admissions. Swimming in a pool of self-hatred, they can't take one more drop of contempt. After working hard to work through my shame-body- healing it, and proving my value with various achievements- it became a lot easier to admit my shadow characteristics, my mistakes, my arrogance. And, then, because my issues were more transparent, I could actually begin the journey of working them through. This is why the ego bashing intrinsic to the shadow jumping community is a dangerous thing. It confuses people and discourages them from developing the healthy ego necessary to manage reality and value themselves. We need a certain degree of egoic strength to evolve and flourish. Kudos to the healthy self-concept. Really.

- Jeff Brown

(emphasis added)

I am not sure what he means by "proving my value with various achievements", because I don't see how that would heal shame, hey, I have numerous achievements and I minimize them!  Maybe he means finally letting himself acknowledge what he had achieved.  Or when the achievements were goals chosen by himself, not done out of compulsion and self-protection.

Hi Eeks,

It's an good quote. I think you're right and that "proving my value with various achievements" he suggesting he built his self esteem through positive and constructive action which he used as a foundation of his self worth. I've read some CBT material, which espouses the same idea, changing how we think is critical, but changing how we behave is the best foundation for building self esteem. I suppose it's it's about being accountable to ourselves

I'll also agree that learning to give ourselves credit for our achievements is just as important. I suppose the challenge is to strike a healthy balance between the two. The right combination is a great foundation for healthy self worth.

Do you think clarifying our values and getting to know ourselves can help us set our goals?

Reforming

For sure.  I think I've spent a lot of time trying to meet the "shoulds", standards of other people and not me, and that's a very anxious state to be in because I cannot discern within myself if it is "right" or "enough". 

I think that parental perfectionism is a sort of boundary invasion of the child, in the sense that the parent is putting their own anxieties about life onto the child.  And perhaps even, arguably, asking the child to meet their needs rather than the other way around.

And that guilt, "see look I'm trying so hard," is something I possibly took on as the only way to carve out any autonomy for myself (refusing to meet their standards,  yet not appearing so).  I'm not too sure about that yet, but it's an interesting thought.

We feel guilt when we think we did something bad or wrong, we feel shame when we think we are bad.  Setting goals and achieving them are behaviors, but considering ourselves achievers is an identity.  We are human beings not human doings, but doing certain things, things we've committed to ourselves to do, accomplishing them and acknowledging that accomplishment builds references for the belief that we are achievers, accomplishers, and a belief about who we are is an identity.  So who do we want to be?  Acting congruently with our identities and within our values, and acknowledging those actions as good and holistic because we say so, builds references for the belief that we are whoever we want to be, empowering identities, the option being to assume assigned identities from external places like critical parents, which may or may not serve us.