Have you ever been around someone who constantly belittles themselves and beats themselves up for the way they act or the way they acted in the past? Have you ever noticed these people who beat the shit out of themselves all the time aren’t even any good at it? First and foremost, they’re usually beating themselves up for transgressions or ‘flaws’ which, in all honestly, are rarely even one of the Top 10 Biggest Problems This Person has. My mom, for example, a World Champion of Beating the Shit Out of Herself, was recently visiting and she was mercilessly self-critical as she thought back to when she was 19 and she started smoking cigarettes so the people she met while studying abroad in Spain would like her. Not only is this reason for starting smoking - to be thought of as cool or to be liked - the reason every person in the history of cigarettes started smoking, my mom also quit smoking 28 years ago. In other words, this decision from 40+ years ago which my mom is holding a grudge against herself about was totally normal behavior and has absolutely nothing to do with my mom’s problems today. Except it does.
The logic of corporal punishment is basically you beat the shit out of someone so they understand the physical consequences of their bad behavior and don’t do it again. Whether the bad behavior is mouthing off, hitting your sister or spray painting cars in Singapore, the point of corporal punishment is for the punished to learn from it. This is where people who beat the shit out of themselves really fail. The purpose of remembering moments in your past when you acted inappropriately and feeling shame when you remember these moments is not so you can linger in the shame and use it as a cane to flog yourself for the rest of your life; the purpose of your vivid, shame-inducing memories of your past mistakes is to learn from those mistakes and behave better now. This misuse of memory is where people who beat themselves up about their past truly fail: they don’t learn anything from how they misbehaved. That’s why they should really hate themselves, they aren’t growing and adapting.
Part of the curse of looking back at the past is feeling helpless because you can’t change things. Obviously, there are objective realities which cannot be changed. For example, my Mom can’t undo the physical damage 20 years of smoking did to her body. But, to focus on blaming oneself for what one did wrong and the unalterable nature of the past instead of using your past mistakes to learn to behave differently now is to to strip memory of its greatest power. Those things happened, you did them, you felt ashamed or guilty or embarrassed; but, if you learn from them AND behave differently, then you aren’t that person anymore. You remember those things so you can stop behaving that way, not so you can shit on yourself for not having known better. In my mom’s smoking example, the lingering issue isn’t that she started smoking because she quit long ago. The issue is she made a self-destructive choice in the hopes it would make other people like her, which unlike her smoking, is a bad habit my mom can’t seem to break. However, like many people who beat themselves up regularly, she’s too busy caning herself about her past actions to learn anything from the outcome of those actions. At a certain point, if they’re honest with themselves, people who beat themselves up all the time should really be beating themselves up for not learning anything from all the self-induced ass whippings they’ve forced themselves to endure through their life. They should beat themselves up for wasting so much of their precious little energy on a fruitless task. We all make mistakes, we all act inappropriately - that is the nature of being a human being; but, if we learn from our errors, there is no cause for shame or regret. It’s a life lesson, not a life sentence.
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