You don't have to punish yourself when something goes wrong in life. If you don't get what you want, something disappoints you, someone else is disappointed in you or anything bad happens for any reason, you don't need to add to the problem by punishing yourself. In most trouble, people have 20-20 hindsight. It's too easy to see exactly which decision you didn't make might not have led to things turning out the way they did. That's no more or less than the process of learning. If you do pay attention to that new knowledge as information, it may serve you well next time something similar happens.
But don't beat yourself up for not seeing it before the consequences bit you.
Sometimes in life, things happen that you have absolutely no control over. For some reason it's culturally popular to deny that. The idea that bad things never happen to good people is what's at risk.
They do. Good people have bad luck all the time. Bad people get good luck. Good people get bad luck. Things happen without a reason that has anything to do with human ethics. Anyone born in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans did not deserve to have their home flooded out and historic neighborhood destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.
I'm sure that like all other places on earth, both some good ethical people and some rotten nasty jerks lived in the Ninth Ward before it sank. Most of the people in the Ninth Ward were like the majority -- consistently just themselves, middling, good on a good day and nasty on a bad day, right more often than not according to their own beliefs but severely offending others who have different views on life.
If there was a feedback system in the physical world where people always got exactly what they deserved for the way they live, all the brownie points for doing what their culture defines as good and demerits for what their culture defines as bad, there wouldn't be any need for churches and religions to define those things. Or any need for different cultures to define them differently depending on where and how people live.
What's a good set of daily habits for a farmer in Thailand is not the same set of habits and customs for a desert dweller in the Middle East. Odds are the habits could get someone killed if they moved, such as wasting water in the desert.
So how does this relate to not beating yourself?
When you punish yourself for making a decision that turned out badly or for having had something bad happen to you, all you do is make it worse. You're preserving a foolish idea that's a bad interpretation of several religious precepts.
Even if you believe in a God that is in charge of every single thing that happens on the planet, by defining humans as having free will that means other people are responsible for it when they do something nasty. If they are violent, you probably didn't deserve it. If they are critical or insulting, they can be completely wrong or so insulting in how they present it that any constructive suggestion in their criticism is lost in the need to defend yourself from it.
Surrender is a form of defense. Surrender is a way of getting it over with and making the critical person shut up about how rotten you are. No one likes being insulted. But it doesn't actually work. It invites more punishment and triggers a sadistic impulse -- one that oddly enough, most of the sanctimonious cherish as one of their few pleasures in life.
So when you stop agreeing with people who don't like you and surrendering to personal attacks, you will grow a stronger personality. Anything about your connection with the divine is personal -- don't let other people's ideas interfere with that. They can be wrong.
Beyond that, a lot of ideas that started in religion have turned into a kind of God-free evangelism -- carrying on the principles of certain ascetic religions without the religious source. The idea that self denial is good for you or that self punishment will make you a better person is one of those ideas.
Ascetic religions do have a purpose. It's deep and fascinating, it's mysticism. Those who go that intensely on ascetic paths do achieve a deep spiritual joy after a hard road. Most people are not mystics. A few steps on that road without actually walking it are just going to diminish your joy in living without accomplishing anything.
I'm not writing this essay in the normal psychobabble. It's not about self esteem or self actualization or any psychological focus, although these things are often described in terms of individual psychology -- a bastion of God-Free Evangelism if I ever ran into it.
I'm writing about them in terms of society and anthropology because a great many personal problems in life are social problems. Social problems have a domino effect. One obnoxious person lashing out can create a constantly growing radius of cruelty and unethical extreme selfishness, breaking down everyone that has contact with them or those they had contact with.
When a fourth of all Americans suffer from clinical depression and lash out with symptoms of a real mental illness, the consequences around them crash back and forth setting off every other depressed person or unstable person and wearing down the 3/4 of people who aren't depressed at the time.
Most often the greatest risks to any human being are other human beings. Crime kills more people than sharks. Accidents kill even more people. Accidents happen when people are angry, depressed, or caught up in personal arguments where emotions run high and are a lot more important than noticing that truck is too close.
Those are just the biggies.
The petty grinding day to day troubles of life can accumulate. One obnoxious person bugging you for fifteen minutes is a pretty minor thing. When that happens twenty times during the workday with different people and you don't get anything done, that's a normal kind of bad day that sets the whole mood of the workplace back.
The way I handle trouble is to stand back from it and look for reality checks.
I ask myself where it came from and don't look for anyone to blame. Very often every one of the people who were cruel, obstructive or obnoxious believed he or she was right to behave that way and had mitigating circumstances I would honestly understand. Someone who's just found out about a major health problem or has a relative dying of cancer is going to be grumpy and harder to get along with. Someone who's at risk of losing their job or just came out of being criticized brutally by a superior for two hours is not going to be objective and honest in evaluating what you do -- they'll be fault finding to let off some steam.
These patterns of culture are so universal that it's not practical to shut them out of your life entirely. The best way to defuse them is to understand them and disagree with the people who expect you to be stupid and go along with any negative thing they say about you.
Weigh it as feedback, yes. Ask if it's true and if it's important, yes. Self honesty is the key to a serious defense against negative social pressure. One important question to ask yourself is "If it is true, how important is it?"
OK, maybe it's true and you did snap at someone in a bad mood because you had a bad headache coming on. At that point a casual apology may end it and ease your conscience. You may want to slow down and try to be more patient -- and expect less of yourself in general till the headache's gone. Take things like that into account and don't expect yourself to be at your peak best every minute of every day.
There's a reason that peak efforts are peak efforts. What you can do in a crisis or emergency is not meant to be something you do all the time. There are different gears in the human body and mind like the gears on a bicycle. The highest gear is a sacrifice level where everything else gets devoted to that priority and your body and mind eat the damage in order to get through the emergency.
You need that level when it's the final push to do something important like win a race, or to survive if a predator is attacking you. I do mean human predators too. But if you try to sustain that, you will wear out completely and be no good to anyone.
There is also a steady marathon pace below that which goes back to humans being able to run down deer. That "patient effort" pace is the best for accomplishing long term goals. That's reasonable to expect of yourself and reaching it does take pushing through a "wall" the way marathon runners do.
There's also the grit to function at all when things are very bad and you don't have the resources to do everything you think you need to. That's when to back up and reprioritize.
Nowhere in any of this motivational effort does punishing yourself do anything but add more misery and another thing to worry about.
What works in training animals works in training people too. Baby steps with positive reinforcement. When you do want to change something in your life, either an attitude you're trying to get rid of or a social situation that's intolerable, the best way to do it is by choosing your goal and making it small. So small that it's easy to accomplish.
Then praise yourself and make a note of it every time you succeed. Do the next step and the next.
So use that process of rewarding yourself for progress to get out of the habit of punishing yourself. Whenever you do face any trouble, from disaster to inconvenience, and stop yourself from blaming yourself for it and going on a fault finding mission to find out why you weren't good enough, reward yourself for the common sense to look at what really happened and why and act on it.
Cut yourself some slack, especially when reality is not going to respond to anything you do. Don't believe it when people play mind games and try to hook you into a perfectionist outlook. Reward yourself for progress instead of expecting the sun, the moon and the stars from yourself over someone else's inconvenience.
Then cut some other people some slack, but not unlimited slack. Where there is a consistent destructive pattern, accept that it's real and take what they say with a grain or a tablespoon of salt. Look at the conflict and its reasons. It could be irreconcilable -- and their being wrong doesn't make them evil, it may just mean that a circular argument is making both of you that miserable and letting go is the best for everyone.
Building a new way of looking at life isn't an overnight process. The insight may feel like a turning point. After the turning point and the emotional high of recognition, the journey is all little steps that become gradually more and more pleasant as your small successes accumulate.
I think the biggest change it's made in my life shifting my attitude to self reward rather than self punishment is that I'm happier. Other people wind up stunned that I accomplish a lot, but I don't think of it that way. I do what I'm doing at the moment and what's in reach.
Enjoy. Life can be a lot easier than it looks when you stop punishing yourself.
