How often are we surprised at the constructive help and good advice we give to others? Yet, why don’t we help ourselves and follow our own advice? I believe cripplingly low self-worth and self-esteem can lie at the heart of this emotional conundrum. We deny to ourselves that we deserve the help and advice. And fallaciously, we feel it must reward us somehow if we offer our help entirely to others for their benefit! Additionally there can be a dose of creative avoidance at work here too! Does all that make any kind of sense? Yes! And It can be explained even if it is not actioned!
So where do we see this example of human nature occurring? Everywhere! Take wills, you would think every lawyer at least would have made one! Some haven’t! You would think doctors would adopt the healthiest lifestyles! Some don’t! You would think those involved in healthcare would be the same, yet often they too can be marvellous at their jobs but some almost crazily overweight!
Do we not realise this illogical aspect of ourselves where it occurs. I believe we do, but we may prefer not to acknowledge it to ourselves too openly!
However if we analyse this behaviour, interesting angles are unveiled.
We each find it almost impossible to avoid soaking up highly relevant information about our interest, speciality or profession. We become increasingly and, often in our own eyes surprisingly wise in how much we can help friends, clients, customers or patients. More particularly, other than for the very selfish among us, we feel good when are able to impart that good advice or help other people.
Why then don’t we always respect our own wisdom? Why don’t we apply it to better helping and advising ourselves?
I believe there can be a number of reasons.
The first can be that we jolly well know that we ought to apply the advice to ourselves. It is as if by accepting the very responsibility to help others, it means we really ‘have to’ follow our own advice too.
But this ‘have to’ can have a perverse effect. As soon as we perceive something as a ‘have-to’, a contradictory cognitive behaviour can then kick in to sabotage us. This is triggered simply! At that moment that we feed our sub-conscious with a message that we feel we have to do something, it volunteers to assist us! It sets up for us a strategy of creative avoidance. This enables us to put the perceived have-to off.
The second form of sabotage can be a bizarre attitude of mind. We can seek to detach ourselves from our own wisdom, seeing it as universal wisdom rather than our own. We can then tell ourselves that others deserve it more than we do. What causes that? Often it is some emotional behavioural pattern. This was more than likely formed by us as a child or a teenager. It traps us in the ridiculous belief that while others deserve to benefit, we do not.
Next we can consolidate the belief. We can try to make a virtue of this lack of sense of self-worth. We can do this by de-selfing ourselves entirely. We do this to the point where we provide all this help and advice for most moments of our working day. By doing this, we can avoid all opportunity to apply it to ourselves for our own benefit.
At the same time, we can hope that our selflessness is rewarded somehow some day In the meantime we can hope that our activity for others is judged as praiseworthy. The truth is it is self-defeating. In any event, most of the time, the recipient of our help senses the mis-match intuitively.
Even if they don’t, we know the mis-match exists.
So what should we do if we become aware of our behaviour? We should ask ourselves why we feel we can’t or shouldn’t help ourselves? We should then reflect back to try to find the origin of the pattern – that is to say the reason we formed it.
This can be done but may need help. There are some excellent books and programs available to help with this.
With that cause clarified, we can learn to disable the emotional pattern. We can then achieve a better balance between attending to our own needs, fairly and conscience free, while still helping others according to our skill.
Not only do we then secure a better life balance, we improve our sense of self worth and self-esteem at the same time.
Sir Gerry Neale recommends that the reader researches The Hoffman Process and considers reading a book by Tim Laurence called ‘You Can Change Your Life.
Sir Gerry is the author of a cognitive novel called ‘Squaring Circles’ ISBN 9780956868824. More information is available on www.squaringcircles.co.uk and on http://psychologysimplified.blogspot.com. He is also a mentor and an artist.
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