How a research-backed technique can help you overcome out-of-control self-judgment
“I should be embarrassed.”
That’s what I said to myself (repeatedly) during a, well, embarrassing patch a couple of months ago. If you’ve ever felt locked in a shame spiral, maybe what I’ve learned to say instead will help you, too.
When Self-Judgement Runs Amok
In January, after 65 months of consistent publishing on my website, I discovered that most of my content had suddenly disappeared.
Everything I had created across thousands of hours of missed family time and lost sleep was broken. Poof. Gone.
If you’ve ever given your heart to a project that went kaput, I don’t have to tell you I was devastated.
But I didn’t stop there. Feeling upset over this problem as I poured over my past posts, I began to feel upset about my whole self, past and present.
“What a dumb, pointless sacrifice this time spent had been,” I told myself. And for what? Terrible. It was all terrible. I was terrible. Past Me needed an editor. Past Me had so much to learn. Past Me was so naive. The definition of cringe.
Fueled by a storm of stress and shame, I decided to try to fix the website. I would make the stupid thing work again. I figured out the problem (a failed site migration), which meant the hundreds of pieces of content were well and truly gone from my domain. I went into detective mode, searching my social media posts, Google photos, iCloud, and email to recover all the content I could. I began to put the site back together.
I was making progress. And I hated myself the whole time.
Self-Hate Is A Powerful, Poisonous Fuel
Self-hate is a potent but poisonous fuel. I could have finished the website repair project like that, but ouch. It was painful.
And not just for me.
When I’m honest with myself, I can admit that judgment, as with any mental state, is like a muscle. When I flex this critical part of me, it gets stronger and more easily recruited, spilling easily into how I see others, especially those who remind me of Past Me. Compassion goes out the window, and judgment fills the vacuum.
On the third day of this, I admitted it wasn’t working. I needed to find another way.
Your Job Is To Love Yourself
What else could I say to myself? What would be more true – and still powerful enough to keep me going through this frustrating website repair project?
It didn’t come to me immediately. But after quiet reflection, it landed in my lap with the warm reassurance of a purring cat: “Your job is to love her.”
Maybe for you, “Your job is to love him” or “Your job is to love them.” Whatever our pronouns, I believe it’s ultimately true for us all. Love offers a sturdier, values-aligned filler for the deep, destabilizing ruts that criticism and judgement can form in our minds.
I’m not alone in thinking love is important. The world’s major spiritual traditions all tout the importance of love. Loving kindness is one of the Brahma-viharas (sublime attitudes) in Buddhism. “Love thy neighbor” is a powerful Jewish and Christian commandment.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget that love isn’t just for other people; it’s for us, too. We are our own stewards. You could say that caring for ourselves is our cosmic task.
Using Self-Distancing To Get Closer To Compassion
It can be hard to get from loving others to loving ourselves. That’s why saying “love her” instead of “love yourself” can be a game-changing pivot.
Using the third-person is part of a set of techniques psychologists call self-distancing. Self-distancing uses simple hacks, such as picturing yourself older or younger (called mental time-travel) or speaking in the third-person (a linguistic trick), to get a less immersed, more balanced perspective on a distressing situation, according to a book chapter by psychologists Ethan Kross, PhD, and Ozlem Ayuduk, PhD, published in Advances in Experimental Psychology.
Research shows that self-distancing helps emotional self-regulation in at least two ways. First, self-distancing can make strong negative feelings, like embarrassment and shame, less intense. In a series of studies, self-distancing was linked with lower emotional and physiological reactivity as measured with surveys, cardiac activity, and blood pressure. Second, self-distancing can make these bad feelings more brief than they otherwise would be, per results of another study. (This body of evidence is partly why, when I interviewed Dr. Kross for an Everyday Health article on how to cope with sadness, time travel was one of his top tips.)
Self-distancing one of those science-backed techniques it’s easy to see test out for yourself. For me, using linguistic self-distancing via the third-person pronoun (she) helps make self-compassion feel less self-indulgent. This grammatical sleight-of-hand builds a bridge from loving others (which seems obviously right) to loving myself (which sometimes feels hokey). It’s not natural for me to think this way, so I put up a Sticky Note on my external monitor as a reminder. Time traveling with photos of Past Me (circa age 2) as my co-pilot helps, too.
How Self-Love Helps
To be clear, the love I’m talking about isn’t a limp-noodle pushover or undiscerning cheerleader. Love is an active, knows-what’s-best sort of force.
Shame homes in on your weaknesses: “Look at what you didn’t know. Look at the directions you went that you no longer want to go.”
Love sees the beauty: “Look at the values you lived by then. Look at your willingness to grow.”
For instance, maybe it’s true that I can write better now. But a loving perspective says that’s a good thing. One would hope that in 5.5 years, you grow, change, and evolve. It would be strange if you hadn’t changed at all, if you had been alive without taking things in, without maturing, without becoming more complex.
The website repair project required that I go over each piece of content I’d created in more than half a decade. Having to touch each one allowed for a unique opportunity to practice loving myself through everything those years entailed.
Operating From Love Instead of Shame
“Your job is to love her” is a linguistic cue that uses a science-based self-distancing strategy to engage self-compassion and help you emerge from a self-hating rut.
Beginning to say it created an inflection point in my week of website repair. Instead of operating from a shame orientation, I powered through from a place of love. And it worked. I still did what was needed, but I felt better doing it. “Loving her” meant taking the time needed to make sure her hard work wasn’t lost forever.
Surprisingly, the task became easier, too. Feeling calmer and more curious instead of furious at myself made the creative parts of the project quicker. Turns out embarrassment hampers the imagination.
Even after the project was done, I kept the sticky note up. In the weeks since, “Your job is to love her” has continued to be a steadying phrase in many diverse scenarios.
Ruminating about a conversational faux pas? “Your job is to love her.” Perhaps asking that question was a little awkward, but it wasn’t catastrophic. You can repair the relationship.
Trying to punish through a planned workout when you’re sick? “Your job is to love her.” A day of gentler activity won’t set you back much, and it could help you recover more quickly.
Your job isn’t to be hard on the person you are. Your job is to love them.
My Latest Writing
Ever heard the advice to punch a pillow when you’re angry?
Please don’t, say mental health experts.
To learn why and what you should do instead, read the anger guide I wrote for Everyday Health. In it, you’ll learn all about the science behind anger, including the dangers of unchecked anger and healthy ways to cope with this common but sometimes hard-to-manage emotion.
This article includes smart insights and advice from anger experts Nixaly Yakubov, LCSW, Julie Catalano, LICSW, and Raymond W. Novaco, PhD.
Read All About Anger: Definition, Health Effects, and How to Better Manage This Common Emotion.
For more on how to cope with anger (and leverage it for personal growth) read The Anger Alert.
Book Recommendations
The Mindful Freak-Out: A Rescue Manual for Being at Your Best When Life Is at Its Worst by clinical psychologist Eric Goodman, PhD is a lovely book. Reading it gives you the sense that you’re sitting across the table from a wise, experienced therapist. With a skillful blend of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), Dr. Goodman walks you through exactly what to do when you feel like you’re freaking out — in other words, hijacked by panic, anxiety, or other strong, unpleasant feelings. But this isn’t simplistic self-help; he knows this is hard stuff and has the experience to advise what will make it better. The book is written for newbies, but even though I’ve studied ACT and CFT at some depth, I thought the book was fresh, including both novel ways of seeing things and helpful reminders throughout.
Thank you to Exisle Publishing for the advance copy. See my disclosure statement for my policy on accepting books for review.
Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society by Arline T. Geronimus, ScD, is arguably the magnum opus of Dr. Geronimus, who is a public health researcher and professor at the University of Michigan. In it, she unpacks three decades of research exploring the devastating physical health impacts of poverty and structural racism. An important read for anyone who cares about health, social justice, and how we can build a better world. (Content warning: If you experience marginalization — for instance, due to your race or class — this might be an intense read. Take care of yourself when deciding whether and when to read the book.)
A meandering yet direct book, The Vulnerables: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez, is excellent company. Funny and wise, her lyricism and observations created the kind of literary space I never want to leave. It’s also a “pandemic novel” that’s not so much about the plot of the Covid-19 era as it’s about an unnamed narrator’s reflections on life, writing, aging, and intimacy attuned to our times.
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