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You Liar!

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Don’t take it personally – we are all liars! This month we are considering what lies we tell and why. So, what lies do you tell? I expect it is something along the lines of, ‘I’m so rubbish at…’, ‘I’ll never get the hang of / be able to do…’, or it could even be as distressing as, ‘If you really knew me, you’d know what a bad / hopeless / worthless person I am.’

 

Often our lies are little ones; we say we are ok or fine when we are not. This can be a helpful strategy since we don’t always want to be divulging our inner feelings and experiences to all and sundry. It also doesn’t help to dwell on difficult experiences all the time, so asserting that we are generally all right can be a good reminder that most things in this moment are ok, this helps to offset our negativity bias and boost our ability to notice pleasant experiences that we often miss when preoccupied with worries or discomfort in the body.

 

The danger is the unconscious repeating of ideas and beliefs that we came to believe as true at some point, but that we formed when we didn’t know any better about ourselves or the world. These beliefs get hard-wired into the brain and we end up just repeating them without ever checking whether they are still, or were ever, true.

 

Writer and therapist Marissa Peer calls these beliefs lies, and quite simply says, ‘tell yourself a better lie!’

 

How does that help?

 

Her approach encourages us to stop believing that our thoughts are facts and remember that they are just thoughts (also known as ‘decentering’ or ‘unhooking’ from thoughts). But she goes further – if a thought is really lodged in there and has become a belief, e.g. ‘it always rains if I organise an outdoor event’, or ‘I’m not clever enough to do such and such,’ it can be so hard-wired that whilst we can decentre or unhook during our meditation practice, we go straight back to the belief next time it is relevant.

 

Marissa suggests that in these cases we simply tell ourselves that it is a lie. Every time we notice the thought returning, we just say, ‘well, that’s a lie!’ and then think of a new lie to tell ourselves. We can make a conscious choice to rewrite the story we hold about ourselves and write a new one, the one where we are living the life we want to live.

 

This is particularly helpful when dealing with an over enthusiastic inner critic.

 

In this case, as Ashok Gupta reminds us, we need to turn our inner critic into our inner cheerleader. Tell your inner critic that she/he is lying to you and that if they are going to lie, they could at least come up with something more helpful. Tell them that you need them to help you identify your strengths and to praise yourself, to encourage you to try new things, because at the moment they are just holding you back.

 

I always like to treat my inner critic with some gratitude – she may be an old harridan at times, but she really does have my best interests at heart. She doesn’t want me to fail, so she would rather stop me trying. She doesn’t want me to get hurt so she will pre-warn me that others probably won’t like me much. The problem is that these beliefs formed at times when things were going badly for me, if I keep repeating them for the rest of my life, I will never change how I think about myself and I will never find out just what I could achieve.

 

One of the biggest lies most of us believe is that we shouldn’t ever make mistakes. But mistakes are how we learn. Psychologists have demonstrated that making mistakes is part of a growth mindset and that this mindset is the only way we can truly flourish and develop. We can either beat ourselves up when we make a mistake (cue the inner critic) or we can say to ourselves, ‘oh I’ve learnt something useful here – next time it would be better if…’ this is growth mindset. If we get stuck on the criticism that’s where we stay and we never get past that.

 

Up until a couple of hundred years ago if we were rejected by our group, we would die so part of us is terrified of this rejection and we imagine all sorts of ways we may have upset people that might lead to this rejection. This fear can be crippling. Of course, we don’t want to completely ignore how our behaviour may affect others, but we also don’t want to believe everything our overimaginative brain tells us.


But this isn’t easy. As Jon Asaraf says, we need to start by recognising that a thought pattern (a neural pattern) takes time to change. We are not going to relearn a life-long pattern in an hour. It’s like learning a new language, we have to keep practicing, and ‘practice makes permanent’ (not perfect!)

 

He says that the brain resists change because it takes effort to change these patterns, and the brain is hard wired to take the most effortless pathways whenever possible. But by changing habits, we change the patterns, then the beliefs and then the behaviour. So, if your habit is to tell yourself something insulting and untrue – simply choose to tell yourself something different, and keep experimenting until you find the truth, which is that you matter, and you are worth the effort. And don’t give up too easily – change takes time. This is where self-compassion practice makes all the difference.

 

So here are a few reminders:

 

  • Give yourself a break

 

  • You aren't perfect you are flawed – just like everyone else

 

  • The people who matter don't care when you make mistakes, and the people who care don't matter.  

 

  • Mistakes are ways to learn

 

  • It’s not how hard you fall but how well you bounce that matters

 

And to round off this month – here is a link to one of my teachers, Shamash Alidina, and his 5-minute self-compassion meditation for when we are facing difficulty: Self compassion Meditation Script and 5 min Meditation

 

 I hope you like it!


All the best,


Natalie x

 

 

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