#82: Stop policing yourself
How well do you know yourself? Are there feelings that you have, or things that you care about, that you're in complete denial about? Trust me, there probably are - you just haven't noticed. And it's a problem, because until you can acknowledge the things that make you happy (or unhappy) and the things you care about, you can't even begin to build the life you want. Get the kettle on and join your Imperfectionist chum for some self-policing troubleshooting.
Episode transcript:
Are there feelings and values that you won’t allow yourself to have?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi everyone, and welcome to spring, at least here in the UK. As I’m recording this, the teaching term is drawing to a close. Just one more teaching day left for me. I always have the sense, as the term progresses, of my energy levels gradually diminishing, like a tyre with a slow puncture. I never manage to recharge fully in between teaching days, and so when the term finishes I’m a blathering deflated oaf. It’s not just the activity of teaching that depletes me, I think. There’s the commute, too - public transport isn’t a viable option, so I have to drive, and it’s all on boring motorways that get congested, which is stressful no matter how interesting a podcast or audiobook I listen to on the road. There’s a ton of anxiety too - worry about whether the students are all having a nice enough time, whether there’s something more I should be doing to support some, and whether doing that might mean that others get neglected. And then there’s the fact that a few hours of teaching involves more talk and interaction than I’d do in a month, left to my own devices. The result is that on my teaching days I arrive home utterly drained, and it feels like a huge cognitive challenge just to form a sentence or make a cup of tea (which, by the way, I am always in dire need of when I arrive home after my commute). It seems bizarre to say, given what I’ve just told you, that it was years before I even allowed myself to acknowledge that teaching days knock so much out of me. It wasn’t simply that I was telling myself to grit my teeth and carry on despite the level of exhaustion that I felt. It was that I would not admit to being exhausted in the first place. I was in complete denial. My line of thought went something like: I need to shut up and stop pretending to be tired, it’s not like I’m chipping away down a coal mine, or even working at a supermarket checkout. What a spoilt bitch! I have a secure job that plenty of other people would kill to have, how dare I behave as if I’ve just been through a huge ordeal. I was, in effect, policing my own feelings, telling myself what I was and wasn’t allowed to feel. I was making no attempt to tune in to how I felt, accept it, and reflect on that. If I’d already decided that I wasn’t entitled to have a particular feeling, then I didn’t have it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Bonkers, I know. I might be embarrassed to admit any of this if it weren’t for the fact that I know I’m very far from being alone. I know lots of you police your feelings in similar ways. Plenty of you are, like me, influenced by the thought that unless you are the most oppressed and miserable person in the entire known universe, you are not entitled to complain about anything whatsoever. If there’s anyone worse off than you, you’re not allowed to complain. This is the mindset that leads us to say things like, ‘I should shut up, I’m lucky to have a job at all’, ‘I should stop being such a spoilt brat’, ‘All I’m doing is sitting at a desk, it’s not like I’m smashing up rocks for a living’. These are all ways of denying what we’re feeling, of pushing it all aside, trying to shame ourselves into feeling something different. Repressing feelings - which is what this is - is not healthy, emotionally. Freud taught us that, and dealing with the problems caused by repressed feelings continues to draw people to therapists’ couches around the world a century later. You can’t hope to be happy if you’re not willing to acknowledge what makes you unhappy. It’s not just feelings that we police, though. We police our values too. We tell ourselves that we shouldn’t care about things that we do in fact care about. Here’s an example. I was talking to a coaching client recently whose application for promotion at work had been rejected. This person was, understandably, disappointed. They really wanted the promotion, and as they were explaining this to me, they said, dismissively, ‘I know it’s just ego, though - I shouldn’t care so much’. Other people I’ve spoken to, who are overwhelmed by the demands being made on them, say things like, ‘I don’t know why I’m complaining, I should want to help’. It’s all, ‘I should care less about this, I should care more about that’. This value-policing is a real problem. In these podcast episodes, I’m constantly urging you to get to know your most deeply held values. I point you towards the Core Values exercise more than any other exercise on the Resources page of my website. That exercise gives you a list of values and asks you to reflect on which ones are most important to you. In order to do it, you have to be open to all values on the list. You can’t go in having decided antecedently that there are certain things you’re not allowed to care about. Given that building a satisfying life requires making decisions that are aligned with your most important values, that’s a real problem. If you’re policing your values, or if you’re policing your feelings, or both, you’re standing in the way of your own happiness in a big way. So, what can we do? Well, fixing this, and becoming open to whatever it is that we feel and care about, regardless of what that might be, is tricky. When we police our feelings and our values, we often don’t even realise what we’re doing. When we say ‘I can’t feel that bad’ and ‘I shouldn’t care so much about this’, we often think we’re making legitimate observations about our lives. We think we’re giving ourselves a reality check - noticing when we’re exaggerating, or over-reacting, or over-thinking. And, to be fair, reflecting on what bothers us and asking whether it really matters as much as we think it does can be a positive thing. It’s what helps us be balanced, reasonable people who are capable of seeing things from other people’s points of view and keeping things in perspective. It’s also what helps us move on from difficult experiences that it’s not helpful to ruminate about - you know, those moments when we realise that we’re throwing way too much thought and energy into brooding about a colleague who was rude to us or a neighbour who did something inconsiderate, and tell ourselves to snap out of it, move on, yes we were treated badly but it’s not worth any more of our time and attention. But sometimes we police our feelings and values in a way that effectively silences ourselves and prevents us from knowing ourselves and making choices that are aligned with what we really care about. We need to learn to tell the difference, and that’s not always easy. A big problem here is that, very often, our inner critic has great PR. She frames things in a way that makes her assaults seem totally reasonable, and it’s only when we pause and try to frame them differently that it becomes clear that all is not what it seems. Let’s go back to that client of mine who was telling themself that they shouldn’t care so much about promotion because it was just an ego thing. That’s a really pejorative framing of the issue. Of course nobody wants to be someone who cares way too much about their own status. And this framing also encouraged a binary view of things: either you don’t care at all about your promotion, or you’re a deranged egoist. Nothing in between. I pointed out that, framed differently, this client’s feelings about their promotion rejection were less easy to dismiss. What if, I suggested, instead of viewing it as all about ego, we instead viewed it as a wish to be recognised and acknowledged for good work, and a feeling of hurt at not getting that recognition and acknowledgement? There’s nothing deranged about that. We all value having our achievements recognised. We can do something similar with the way I used to respond to my own feelings of exhaustion after a day of teaching and commuting. I couldn’t really be exhausted, I’d tell myself, I’m lucky to have a secure job, etc. That, too, is a pejorative framing: I’d linked being exhausted to being a spoilt brat who is incapable of counting her blessings. And, like the previous case, it encourages a binary view: either I’m an exhausted spoilt brat or I’m completely fine. But, of course, those aren’t the only possibilities. It’s possible to be exhausted from a demanding day while also recognising that things could be much worse, and that for some other people things really are much worse. It’s not always obvious that we need to reframe things, of course. If it hasn’t occurred to you that the way you think about a particular issue or situation is skewed in a way that’s holding you back, then it’s probably not going to occur to you to reframe it in a more positive way. This is where self-compassion comes in. I’ve talked about this before, several times, and I’ve also pointed you towards Dr Kristin Neff’s work on this. You should check out her website, if you haven’t already. She has a ton of resources, many of them free, and I’ve just noticed that since I last visited she’s added a free 5-day self-compassion challenge. Why is self-compassion important to being able to spot when you’re policing your feelings and values? Well, because if you have … room for growth in the self-compassion department, then it’s likely that you’re in the habit of saying mean things to yourself without even realising. You think you’re just saying neutral things. The meanness only becomes obvious when you imagine saying the same things to other people - because, of course, you have no problem being compassionate to them. So, while it didn’t strike my coaching client that they were being mean to themself when they dismissed the value they placed on promotion as ‘just ego’, I’m going to bet that there is absolutely no way they’d respond in the same way to a friend’s disappointment about their unsuccessful promotion application. And while plenty of us are happy to tell ourselves that we should shut up and stop complaining and be grateful to have a job at all, there’s no way we’d respond like that to a friend who feels exhausted or overwhelmed. While you’re working on your self-compassion, then, a good, easy way to notice whether you’re policing yourself is to get into the habit of asking yourself, ‘Would I say this to a friend?’ about the things you say to yourself. If the answer is No, then you shouldn’t be saying it to yourself either. It’s useful to do the opposite too: imagine how you’d respond to a friend who is in your situation, and then respond to yourself the same way, which I guarantee is going to be kinder and more sympathetic than whatever it is that you usually say to yourself. Another thing you can do is to separate out noticing what it is that you’re feeling, or what you care about, and judging it. These are two separate steps. But when we police ourselves, we run them together. We notice how we feel and then, in the same breath, we immediately shut it down. We stamp it out. Like, ‘I feel overwhelmed but I have nothing to complain about, what a spoilt brat’. Or ‘I’m disappointed but I’m just caring too much about my ego’. Or simply, ‘I care about this but I shouldn’t’. When we do that, we’re not leaving ourselves any space to be curious and explore how we feel and why and whether what we’re feeling is actually the way it seems at face value or whether there are other things going on too, and doing all that is actually really valuable. So, for a start, accept that noticing how you feel and judging it are separate steps. That itself is important. And then hit pause on the judging. Focus instead on simply describing how you feel - articulate it, name it, without labelling it ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Anything you’re feeling is fair game. You’re allowed to feel it all. It can help to write it down. And once you’ve described how you feel, read what you’ve written and ask yourself if there’s another way you could describe it. Would you describe it the same way if it were another person who was feeling it? Really turn it over and look at it from every angle. You’re getting to know yourself here. So, once you’ve done the noticing and articulating, what about the judging? When do you do that? Well, I’m sorry to shock you, but you actually don’t have to judge yourself at all. It’s not a crime to have feelings. You don’t do anything wrong by just having them, so what is there to judge? I promise you that, if you can form a habit of noticing how you’re feeling without judging, you’ll make some really important progress with learning about yourself and what sort of life you’d like to be living. So, try not to judge your feelings, if you can. Become your own safe space for feeling whatever it is that you’re feeling. It can be hard not to judge, of course, and obviously I don’t want to encourage you to be perfectionist about this. You’ll probably find yourself getting a bit judgey - but bear in mind that it’s progress if you manage to notice what you’re doing. Being able to reflect and say, ‘Ah, ok, I’ve moved on now from describing how I’m feeling to judging it’ is huge progress from doing the hybrid noticing/judging thing you’re used to. But in any case, even if you can’t help yourself, you’ll probably find that having thought carefully about exactly what it is that you’re feeling, your judgments will be a little different. In some cases, you might not do it at all. You might find you have a lot more compassion for yourself than you did before, and your judgments will be less harsh than they used to be. As long as you’re giving yourself more space to notice and articulate what it is that you feel and care about, you’re moving forward. That’s it from me this time, friends. Before I go, I want to let you know that I’m currently experimenting with taking a break from social media, so I won’t be sharing this episode on Facebook and Twitter/X/whatever/who the fuck cares the way I usually do. I signed out of all my social media accounts after being inspired by listening to Cal Newport on the Huberman Lab podcast. Newport claims that, if you don’t have social media, you don’t get distracted by your gadgets - and I sort of want my money back here. I might not have been posting on social media, but I’ve spent a lot of time watching knitting videos on Youtube. Maybe Cal hasn’t discovered those yet. Anyway, I digress, and I need to get the kettle on and finish watching a knitting video. Catch you next time.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!