As much as you try to be and look successful, is there a part of your inner voice that says you’re a loser? Most guys deal with this inner critic, that undermines their real success in the world. Jason looks at this negative self-beliefs in this 2 1/2 min. video, Kicking the “Loser” Thinking, and gives you some tips to think about when confronting these negative self-beliefs.
If we look closely enough, we find that a lot of our behavior we can trace back to messages that we received growing up from our families of origin, or, more specifically, from our parents. As small children, our parents are our original models, and we learn about how the world works from them.
A lot of those messages we need to incorporate into our worldview for survival. Unfortunately, many of those messages are outdated, and continue to run like tapes in our brain. Those outdated tapes may continue to play on loop, and our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts are a product of those repeating messages. The relationships that we get into as adults are, in some part, formed from those outdated tapes. We learn plenty of good things from our parents about relationships; we also learn plenty of things that just don’t help us.
Challenging your family of origin messages, or those negative tapes, is the first step towards awareness and waking up to the fact that those tapes or messages can be changed.
Specifically, a lot of our ways of thinking about critical issues come from our parents: money, sex, intimacy, gender roles, professional images, how we fight in relationships, and all types of negative behaviors. We incorporate those messages into our experiences, and have varying degrees of awareness about them.
For men, a lot of the messages about stuffing your emotions, the message that “real men don’t cry”, and about learning how to withdraw, come from having learned those behaviors from a parent growing up, often times from a guys dad. When we get conscious of those messages, we try to fight them, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes don’t. We often live in overcompensation mode, where we’ll “work harder, be better, be kinder, make more money,” and everything against what a parent did originally.
We have to challenge your family of origin messages to be able to grow up on our own. As long as we carry within us negative family of origin messages that are outdated, we stay stuck in the past and don’t consider alternative ways of being, and lose out on the chance to grow through those messages.
If we’re wanting to develop more confidence and better self-esteem, we have to deal with those early messages that communicated to us that we’re not good enough. If we want to develop healthier lifestyle choices, it may be that we have to face some ways of being that we’ve taken for granted, and have learned from our parents over the years. If we want to learn how to be a better money manager, it may benefit us to take a look at the internalized family tapes that play around money and the problems that result.
Challenging your family of origin messages is difficult. Many times, men stay complacent and don’t really challenge the status quo, where those tapes lie. If we can learn to become aware of some of those negative messages that play, we weaken certain challenge them and incorporate new messages that really will work for us. Change is difficult, and sometimes submitting to those early messages is just more convenient. The promise of being set free through shedding those messages is a promise you can’t afford not to make.
Ronald Siegal, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recently came to Phoenix to deliver a weekend mindfulness training, and he summed up mindfulness in this way: mindfulness connotes awareness, attention and remembering. Mindfulness includes non-judgment (of our feelings, thoughts or experiences), as well as acceptance.
There are many forms of meditation out there, and some traditions include visualization practices, among other things, but mindfulness meditation is different. When we practice mindfulness, we practice sitting with what arises in the present moment in our inner experience. We’re not changing anything, or pushing out any unwanted thoughts; we’re simply tuning into our immediate experience, which happens to include our thought stream, emotions and everything else that’s happening. It’s not a ‘touchy-feely’ as one might think, and you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate. Anyone can do it, and plenty of guys find this really helpful in reducing their stress.
The old adage, “what we resist, persists”, is applicable to how we sometimes ineffectively deal with our problems. When we sit in meditation, we can greatly reduce the experience of suffering by letting that ‘which persists’ just be as it is. In mindfulness meditation, we learn to sit with what “is”, or the thoughts, feelings and sensations that unfold from moment-to-moment in our inner experience.
This is different from how most of us live our lives: we often are hurried, mindless, and sometimes reactive to others. We sometimes live on auto-pilot, and forget that our behaviors and actions are the products of thoughts and feelings that drive them.
Here’s what to do when starting a mindfulness meditation practice:
And here’s what not to do:
Meditation is liking riding a bike. It takes a little time and practice to get started, and when you do, you’ll notice the benefits quickly. You’ll develop more peace of mind, overall well-being and happiness from your mindfulness meditation practice.
Out of anxiety or fear, guys sometimes reside in this perpetual state of limbo when it comes to figuring out if they want to stay put in their intimate relationship or marriage. Men make excuses for staying in bad relationships, like, “I don’t want to hurt her,” or “We used to be so good – there must be a way to get back to that point.” Do these questions reflect the truth of the matter, or simply make for excuses to keep us from changing a bad deal in our lives?
Often times, fighting relationships have a happy ending. And sometimes they don’t. Then there’s other times where a weird combination of the two gets created. Guys find themselves staying in relationships that they otherwise would have gotten out of a long time ago. Then, they make up all sorts of things in their head to keep them stuck in their bad situations, like quicksand. Men tread water to cope, as to not swim away or drown, but sometimes tread for some time, not necessarily unhappy, but comfortable enough not to make a change.
It’s hard to summon up the resources – courage, strength, intuition – to do a sea change in life, and negative relationships can truly be the hardest to break from. Even if we’ve gotten comfortable in our relationship suffering and misery, at least we’re familiar with it. It’s a security blanket. Change, on the other hand, is a whole separate thing. We’re not predisposed to change as human beings, and relationship adaptation is often times a sea change that many guys are not willing to make. So, we grin and bear it, sometimes for several years or decades, and we hope for the best.
Time gets lost really quickly when we live in this state of relationship flux. When we live like this, we’re not listening to ourselves, or our true desires for intimacy and happiness. We deny both ourselves and our partner a chance to find happiness in another relationship, or just to simply to not be trapped in the current one.
Here’s some ways guys get stuck in bad relationships:
Strong messages take over, like:
(a) Staying a “stand-up guy”
(b) Being a good relationship partner
(c) Feeling guilty
(d) Worried you’ll “hurt her feelings” by leaving
(e) All the above
Relationships are designed for happiness, and if you feel like you’re subscribing to the message that all relationships do is bring misery upon you, you’ve committed yourself to being stuck. There is relationship happiness out there for you, believe it or not. You can surely create the right type of relationship if you’re miserable now and want to make a change for yourself. There is hope, and if it’s not in your current relationship, maybe it’s in another one. It’s dealing with ourselves first that’s the hardest part.
I’m reminded of Al Bundy, patriarch of the Bundy family, from the TV show “ Married With Children.” In the show, Al’s proudest moment in life was scoring four touchdowns in one game. He didn’t achieve what he sought out to, and, long story short, ends up working as a shoe salesman. Al often spends time attempting to recapture his glory days, but usually trips himself up with bad decisions and worse judgment. Al blames and resents his family, and attributes his problems to them, which provides the crux of the show’s humor.
Al’s life ended up very differently than he planned. In high school, he shined. it was a successful football player but hopes of getting a college scholarship, but after he impregnated his girlfriend and broke his leg, everything changed. Al lives in his private world filled with the best times of his life, and it’s a place that’s too many men resort to living in when their realities prove disappointing and unfulfilling.
As men (or people in general), we have a tendency to avoid ourselves, our situations or our lives as they are in the present moment. Often times, we’re too busy living in and out our private universes of the past or of the future. We hold on to the good memories, often to escape the reality of our current situation.
We may have been star athletes, president of the debate squad, or more successful with women in the past. We may have felt happier at a time in the past where we were more secure, fitter, healthier, happier, and generally more equipped to deal with the world.
Through the process of stagnation, those experience wane over time. Maybe our lives didn’t end up the way we planned. Maybe our spouses didn’t bring us the happiness that we so hoped. Maybe our children disappoint us, or maybe we disappoint ourselves. Maybe we didn’t make a million dollars, or become a pilot or a deep sea diver like we planned when we were 8 years old.
Life is short, and it’s never too late to turn it around. So what can you do?
