Ok from now on I'm going to section my blog. There will be a part with something funny, a part with something that corresponds to my blog (ie music video, motivational speaker...etc) and then my blog.
Today's Funny Video;
NHL Woos Fans By Increasing Scoring With Bigger Nets, 3-Point Line
My friend actually sent me this video and it was really profound and actually lead me to the topic of this post. The power of Vulnerability
In this video the speaker talks about vulnerability as well as the diffrence between people who believe they are worthy of love and connection vs the people who don't. After alot of research this lady realized there is only one diffrence...check it out!
I watched the video and kept it in mind but didn't post anything at the time but then after a situation happened that questioned my belief about helping others I knew I had to post. See there was this one guy whom I could see that he was struggling with things and with the knowledge I've learned doing cognitive behavioral therapy I could see some of the cognitive distortions and errors and wanted to help the guy out. I tried asking questions in order to get him to figure it out on his own but that only backfired and he took offense. This same technique works on the forums for the cognitive behavioral therapy program that I post in so why didn't it work for this guy? Well from the guy's response I realized that the people on the forums are out there looking to change their lives and their behaviors and such and the guy who got offended was not looking to do so. He told me something along the lines of how he doesn't want me to save him or to change him and I realized that I do try to do that and I base my worth on helping others. Its a huge trap! If I don't get through to another and help them then I get to feel worthless and I lose self-esteem. Worth shouldn't be tied to anything, worth shouldn't be something you always have to work on but thats exactly what I've been doing for most of my life. I felt I had to help people in order to be worthy of love, connection and happiness and so I would spend alot of time not feeling worthy of those things and then I wouldn't experience those feelings even if someone express them to me or I really was worthy of them. Its like I had to help fix other people before I could feel good. This interfered with my relationships, it has interfered with how I view the treatments I give to patients, it has interfered whenever I saw someone suffer or thought of a problem that causes people alot of suffering.
So what determines worth? Well you could ask 1000 people and potentially get 1000 diffrent responses. Some people link up worth with success, approval of others, love of others or something else. The only problem with each of these things is that if you don't achieve which ever one you link your sense of worth with, you get to feel worthless instead! With success as well you could even succeed at something and feel somewhat worthy but not really fully enjoy the success because you're already focused on the next thing you need to accomplish and then you're constantly having to succeed in order to feel loved. Do you ever feel this way yourself?
There was one book called "Feeling good" by David D Burns that had some really positive beliefs you could use. He talked about 4 diffrent ones and I can't remember all of them however there was 1 that kind of stuck in my mind. It was that "we are all born with worth and its permenant. It cannot be lost nor gained and we all have the same ammount of worth" I like that one alot and how much easier would life be if you didn't feel worthless or you didn't have to continually work on being worthwhile or valueable? So how can you make something like that stick? Well for me I just ask myself a series of questions about how my old belief about worth affects my energy level, my relationships, my determination/courageousness, my health (both mental and physical), my ability to feel love, my productivity at work, my peace of mind and several other things and then I would choose a new belief like the one above and use that as the replacement (because you need to replace an old habit with a new one in order for this to work) and use the same questions and go into alot of detail and actually visualize and feel the answers. Another thing would be to look at how both beliefs can affect the future as well, that seems to workout well.
There may be concern that changing these beliefs might destroy your motivation but thats not true. You're still going to feel good about yourself when you make accomplishments, when you receive love and when you get approval from others. Its just that you won't have to depend on only those things to create those feelings, they only add to it and i'm sure you don't hate feeling good do you?
Mike
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