Alright, guys. Non-gendered. Y'all are getting extras from me right now, I guess. Is it because I have the time and energy available? No, not really. Still teaching, still currently moving across the country, etc. But because my guts are telling me to do this work before I lose inspiration,
and then never share these slides, which I do sometimes. And because I listen to my gut. Yeah, you're getting some extras from me. So here we go with a follow-up. We're back, this time talking about perfectionism, self-hate, self-punishment, rumination, big ego problems, which means to...
TUT! All aboard, fuckers! We're really rolling back into this recent self-spooktacular station. The memories of not-your-best moments and the never-ending self-harassment about them. So, let's do a recap here before we move along with our new point. Last time that we spoke, we talked about some pretty important things.
which are also really easy to dismiss and not truly absorb and apply. We discussed the fact that your brain, yeah, it fucks up just like every other brain fucks up. You can accept that and use all of the education that you've so responsibly gathered.
and give yourself some grace. Or you can continue hounding you, making your brain and body into very harrowing places for you to try to be. Essentially, you have the power to see how your brain is acting towards itself and to referee those behaviors with higher insight when they get out of hand.
Jess (02:27.104)
insight that seems like it comes from beyond the brain, somehow. You can recognize that someone has to shepherd this little thing, your brain. It really cannot be trusted to just operate on its own. And then you have the power to be that shepherd, to do that, to be the wise, well-informed referee that you have always needed.
maybe inside and outside of yourself, calling unfair shots that your brain has taken at it and at your larger overarching being. You have the power to name where your missteps have come from, the original hiccup event, the triggering stimulus, and the learned behavior of hurting yourself more.
for whatever negative consequence you perceive you received. You have the power to apply your education and really process those origin stories and see how they have spun out of control into maybe lifelong recollections and subsequent instructions that include a lot of fear and self abuse.
And then you have the power to choose differently for yourself, stating, I will not hold honest mistakes against me. I understand that my brain, you know, it has small errors sometimes like every other brain. I will not humiliate myself with every opportunity I get in my own psyche.
I will not take up the charge that my social environment taught me. I will not abuse me. I will not recreate my own trauma anymore. I instead will be my own teacher and my own guide, the force that I have always needed. Or not. You can do none of that. You can keep letting your inner monologue
Jess (04:51.936)
or dialogue, depending on how your mind works, roast you day after day with harsh critiques that feature very few constructive concepts. You can be your own worst enemy, your greatest opposition. It's a world of free will. The choice is yours. So take some time, consider the fact that
unmonitored human brains on trauma are like kamikaze pilots trying to die for their own causes. Those causes being protecting and repeating that trauma, generally to the demise of the host and the people closest to them. And then, make your damn decision. Do you want to live and die in honor of unseen trauma?
and forever abuse onto yourself, which you pass onto your own head via shaming and blaming and guilting and regretting those key moments or long durations of time. Do you want to keep doing that? Do you want to be technically informed, but not in a way that actually helps you to let yourself off of some really unnecessary hooks?
and therefore don't help the people around you either? It's your brain passing torture unto itself. So what do you want to do about it? Live in testament to your trauma, beating yourself up for bad times, slip ups, and trauma brain reactive behaviors, which by the way, doesn't stop you from repeating those mistakes or making new ones.
In fact, the more you wear yourself down with negative thoughts about yourself, the more likely it is that you spawn additional, not-your-best moments. Because your brain is preemptively scared, self-critical, and triggered via your own internal abuse, you are not acting as your own full self. So it takes very little to then nudge it.
Jess (07:17.258)
into a full trauma response or just some sort of error where unwise behaviors tend to cascade forth. Or you can choose to live in honor of your real life and your real self, comprehending your actions in bad times and trauma brain reactive behaviors, adding context to what you've seen, understanding your conditioning.
the ways that you were trained to react without conscious thought. Realizing you're the same as everyone else spoken about in the literature. Just a person operating a brain which wants you to live, but has a tendency to get things adorably wrong sometimes. You can choose to give yourself the compassionate grace of reality deeply.
considering that your brain just gets excited and jumps the shark like everyone else. Your brain thinks that it's right because it has already thought a thought just like everyone else. Your brain falls into the same extreme and misguided survival patterns, assessing A equals certain death, so we better jump to B just like everyone else.
you can choose to seal in the very real truth. You and your brain are not different from anyone else's. And therefore, yeah, you sometimes make mistakes like everyone else and are innately eligible for understanding and care and forgiveness anyways, just like everyone else.
And I just wanted to repeat all of that because it's easy to hear at once and think, aha, relief, and then to immediately forget it as you fall back into patterns of negative self-regard. So all of that having now been said twice over, here is another reframe for you. If you continue to hold a grudge,
Jess (09:45.568)
against you, focusing on your worst moments and using them as fodder for your own dismissal and destruction. Figure, you're really saying implicitly, I expect perfection from myself. Mistakes are unallowable. Which means you're really, really saying implicitly.
I am special compared to the rest of the humans who are not perfect because it is not possible to be. Also, they still find forgiveness for their imperfect actions and beings. But that's not for me. I should do better. I should be able to be different than everyone else. Always.
A mind is really saying, I am different from everyone, my brain should be unfollowable, and unique special rules apply to me because I am special. In the worst way, which results in hating yourself forever, pretty intensively. But still, in harassing oneself,
for a sense of safety or correctness. It's the right thing to keep doing. In trying to push your face into the mud forever, you actually elevate yourself to be different from and better than every other person through your own expectations for perfection and incapacity to see yourself as
suffering with the same condition as the rest of us. The condition of being a person with a brain that is capable of mistakes, just as it is capable of self-rumination about those mistakes. Punishing yourself forever is also not a special feature of your head. There is no morality in it. It does not signal a heightened
Jess (12:13.976)
capacity to harass yourself non-stop. Actually, it signals unhealthy ego problems. To hate yourself, to hound you for your own difficult memories of self, it's really putting you up on a pedestal and then resenting you for not meeting your own
expectations. I'll go ahead and say that again. To hate yourself is to hound you for your own difficult memories of self. And in doing so is putting you on a pedestal and then resenting you yourself for not meeting your own expectations. New part. Expectations which are really
probably the unfair and unrealistic expectations that have been put on you by others. That pedestal was probably shoved under toe by someone else, someone who was not capable of seeing you as human. They needed you to be both more and also less than human. That's because they needed you to not need
anything from them so that they wouldn't have to think or feel about you. If you are less than human by their estimates, then they can ignore you having real feelings, thoughts, and needs. And at the same time, contradictorily, if they also see you as being more than human, then they can create this narrative that you're tending to your own emotions and thoughts and needs.
just fine. You're a big girl. You don't need your mommy. You're a tough boy. You can take care of yourself. And any mistake in between? Well, that's just not going to work because it suggests that you do need help, care, and attention. I'm saying that in being abused, we often accept these impossible and nonsensible
Jess (14:39.016)
inhuman and inhumane expectations. We're good, we're fine, we're always good. Unless we are bad, in which case, holy balls, we will never stop being reminded that we're bad. So then we form these contrasting programs in ourselves, right? We hold these impossible oppositional expectations against
us, accidentally accepting that pedestal, though the pedestal is ultimately for the purpose of dismissing and diminishing ourselves for not being good enough to rest upon it. So just like our caregivers, who were of the preoccupied variety, we learn that we also don't want to have to think so much about us.
When something takes place that causes us concern about ourselves, such as times that we make mistakes or expressions of unmet needs that we might have, like pesky sadness and grief, what do we do? We get mad. We get resentful at us, ourselves, for the inconvenience of having needs. And we stoke the self-hate narratives
that we should be perfect and should be fine all the time, instead of issuing ourselves care or rectifying the self-neglect that probably has become very routine. Thus, we continue our own abuse infinitely and deepen it in only the way that a brain trapped with itself, knowing all its secrets, its fears,
its hopes and dreams can manage. Self abuse is always worse than other abuse, isn't it? No one knows how to hurt you like you do. Anyways, you hear what I'm saying? It's in this way that abuse gets spun around and becomes illogically and impossibly high standards that a person holds themself to.
Jess (17:07.002)
Perfectionism that leads to mental and corporal punishment. By being put down all the time, we learn that we need to keep ourselves up, impeccable, faultless, in order to be safe. And in this way, we stop relating to ourselves as real people. We become accident-prone, inconvenient, anxiety-inducing,
hateable machinery to us. We become targets of our own frustration, angst, regret, and aggression. It's a dangerous position being on a pedestal that is built of Jenga blocks. So I ask you to deeply consider if all the hate that you send at you is really demonstrative of unhealthy expectations.
which maybe are really remnants of early abuse, which sometimes results in unhealthy expectations for ourselves because of an unhealthy ego. Okay, this might be a new definition for you, but I think it's a helpful shift. Having a big unhealthy ego simply means
The boundaries between you and others are highly exaggerated. So, a too big ego doesn't have to mean, nothing can touch me, I am God's gift to Earth. It can contrastingly mean, I'm not even a human being the way that everyone else is. Different rules apply just to me. Does that?
sound familiar to anyone else, that certainly has been the narrative in my head for most years of my life. But in this way, having too big of a separation between you and others, you have such an extreme distance between you that your self-standards are wrongly justified, you believe, in their inhuman quality.
Jess (19:34.688)
and your missteps are perceived as being worse than or somehow unallowable compared to everyone else's. Because, again, in a negative way, you expect perfection from you. Maybe only you. Maybe nobody else. Just you. And doesn't that give you something to think about?
Here's just one more thing before we get out of here. Brains love to ruminate on themselves for safety, right? Always looking for ways that they can improve their actions so that they're not in a survival situation. And maybe we can't change our obsessive analyzing or intrusive memories of perceived fuckups so easily, but
Let me try to remind you that rumination contains two parts, reflection and brooding. So using a brain that loves to think and think and think and think, you can self-reflect, combining information and experiential knowledge and using them together for what they logically add up to, material to forgive yourself.
and heal via the recontextualization that is available to you. Your fuck-ups are not worse than anyone else's, and there are reasons for everything that you do. Or, instead, you can self-brood, focusing on the negative complaints and what is perceived lacking, and staying stuck in dehumanizing trauma patterns as long as you want to.
You somehow are the worst human out of billions of them. Again, aren't you so different than all the rest? Again, yeah, an unhealthy ego is suggested.
Jess (21:49.784)
With it, you can keep humiliating yourself while also implying that you are goddamn special by getting stuck in this negative self-speak loop. You can keep seeing yourself as less than others because you've made an error like everyone else, but somehow you are supposed to be flawless. Or you can break neutral ground by reframing your least favorite knowledge.
of how brains and humans function. Imperfectly. And unreasonably, mind you, especially when trauma is involved. Behaviors become unsane and unself-like whenever they are sparked by traumatic stimulation. And use that real knowledge of psychology
pressed onto your existence to let some shit go. Lighten your load and create more distance from your trauma and abuse by spending less time negatively imparting them on yourself.
ditch your implicit abuse patterns. You do not have to be the critic in your life. The world will take care of it for you. It's okay to let go of some of your critique. Allow for reconnecting with and embody your real, authentic self as you create a more hospitable environment in you in which you can finally, peacefully,
securely, neutrally reside. Please come on with me and recognize that as far as being a person with a brain, you are unique in being you, your real, full self. But you are not special in being capable of flawless living or unaffected by trauma, or in hurting yourself when those goals
Jess (24:05.936)
prove impossible. Every brain fucks up. Every person fucks up. We know the reasons why. We study them here together every week. And the people who succeed despite their fuck ups, those are the ones who see their behaviors, their missteps in context, in the circumstances of just being.
a human.
This has been another entry of embarrassing memories, not your best moments, yet another reason why it is so motherfucking hard to just be with you. A constant showing of your worst goddamn memories of your behavioral slips and slides based on unrealistic standards for yourself that you maybe didn't even know you had.
In conclusion, self-hatred means big, unhealthy ego, and you just ain't that special. Cheers, y'all. I'll talk to you soon. I love you to death. Bye-bye.
