How to Challenge Your Negative Beliefs (Day 8/31 Days of Single on Purpose Workbook)
Table of Contents
· Context
· Day 8: Challenging your negative beliefs
· My false and limiting beliefs
· 1) I am unlovable.
· 2) My success is tied to my self worth.
· 3) No one understands me.
Context
As I continue on my personal development journey, I’ve had to answer a ton of big questions for myself. What’s frustrating is that most of these questions have the same answer: “love yourself”. But what does that really mean, and how the hell do you “love yourself?” — I’m the type of person that wants detailed step by step action items, not just some generic slogan.
So on my hunt for the answer to this, I came across John Kim’s books (aka The Angry Therapist). I met him at a conference in Vancouver (In Bloom), and the title of his book “Single on Purpose” caught my attention. I was volunteering at a merch booth so I borrowed the book from the book booth and read it, and holy shit did it speak to me. It felt like an older version of me, who went through exactly what I’m going through right now, wrote this for me. So I bought it and the workbook.
Day 8: Challenging your negative beliefs
As I continue my blogging journey I thought it’d be fun to document some of the stuff I’m doing. The workbook contains 31 days of activities, and today is Day 8. So that’s what I’ll be writing about. Here’s the mantra (the idea is you’re supposed to feel this in your body, not just logically process it):
And here’s the prompt and some examples from John himself:
But let’s be real, you didn’t come here to read his examples right? You came here to read mine. So here they are.
My false and limiting beliefs
1) I am unlovable.
Where did this come from?
From my childhood (where most things come from). Growing up, I was raised in an Asian immigrant family. My mom often told me this story of how, when she moved here, she was so poor she could only afford a bowl and some chopsticks. She couldn’t even afford a bed. So her and my dad had to hustle quite hard in order to make ends meet. This resulted in them being emotionally unavailable, and lead to an inconsistent sense of love. As a kid, I didn’t feel like my parents unconditionally loved me. I felt like they were there for me and they were trying their best, but there were many many times when I didn’t know if I could trust them (for example, to tell them what was wrong, or to share secrets/deep shit — like as deep as I’m sharing with these articles). Speaking of deep, it’s gonna go there so buckle up.
I recall a time where I was at Disneyland with my family. I had an argument with my Dad. He threatened to leave me there, stranded if I kept on talking. My own father threatened to abandoned his own son because of an argument. As a kid, I felt terrified. There was a part of me that went “fine, I wanted to run away from home anyways”. I don’t remember what happened after that. I didn’t turn into a hobo so I guess I must have gone back home with him or something. I hated my dad when I was a kid. Now that I’m older I’d like to (and try hard to) believe that he didn’t mean ill intent with the way he parented me — he just passed down his own fucked up version of how to raise a child, probably because that was how he was raised (hello generational trauma). Oh, he also beat me with a stick as punishment. Fun. You’ll get more context about my childhood in later articles, don’t you worry.
My dad was also pretty absent from my life because he was working all the time. My mom as well, but she was more present because she drove us (me and my brother) to school. Oh yeah, at some point I also made the decision to stop talking to my brother (and effectively my parents too) because he kept blaming me for things that got me into trouble (i.e. the stick). All of this lead to me isolating myself from the people that “loved” (didn’t feel that way tbh) me the most, at the time. This led to me being avoidant as fuck and taught me that other people are not trustworthy, and that I do not deserve love.
How can I prove this wrong?
As an adult now, I am trying to undo all of this programming, and I shit you not when I say this is HARD to undo. But I guess doing exercises like this help right?
If I change the perception, it’s not that I was unloved. My parents did their best. My mom and dad both had to work. They showed their love in different ways — like being able to provide for me and my brother so we would stay off of the streets. My dad punished us the only way he knew how — with a bamboo stick (he kept multiple around the house, fun). He probably thought he was doing us a favor by teaching us to behave properly, and he probably thought that that was the only way to do so because that’s what happened to him (I don’t know for sure, I haven’t confirmed this yet).
The TLDR of this is: even though my childhood wasn’t filled with love, my parents did what they could.
And that’s something I have to try to believe, even though it’s hard to — like it’s so easy to think “bro couldn’t you have tried just a LITTLE harder and loved me just a LITTLE bit more?” but I have no idea what it was like to be in their shoes back then.
Also, on the bright side, this has forced me to care about relationships — both with myself and with others. All of this fucked up shit I have to undo now has forced me to learn things that I would’ve never stumbled upon (and also gives me the ability to teach it to others). That is a gift. It may not be the prettiest one, nicely wrapped with a bow on top, but it is one regardless.
2) My success is tied to my self worth.
Where did this come from?
So above I told you a bit about my story — so you might be wondering: how did I survive? Grades. School. I found learning to be fun and so I put in effort and that resulted in high grades. Grades resulted in praise from others — teachers, other students, friends, and sometimes my parents (they cared less than the average stereotypical Asian parent about grades).
So if I couldn’t get that love, praise, and “I’m proud of you” from my parents, at least I could outsource that right? But this has caused me to tie my self worth to success — or any sort of achievement. This is an issue because real life is not like school. You will fail, you will make mistakes, you will need to start at 0 in order to reach 100 in any new skill. This has caused me to be afraid of “failing” — something I’ve had to try so hard to overcome. I guess this is why I’m afraid of looking at my YouTube analytics right? Because they pretty much tell me that I suck and that I am not worthy of love.
How can I prove this wrong?
There are so many other things that I should account for when talking about self worth, especially when it comes to the work that I’ve done on myself. Specifically — my past accomplishments. I shouldn’t sell those short. Just because I failed at one thing (launching a successful Youtube channel) doesn’t mean I should sulk and forever stay on the ground, and not try to pick myself back up. I should look back and consider how far I’ve come and count my wins — something I don’t do often enough. I am not giving enough credit to all the effort I put in at the beginning, even if there was no “progress” from a metrics point of view.
If I altered what I defined as “successful” (i.e. number of videos made and the learnings I obtained from creating those videos instead of subscribers or views) then I can feel slightly less shitty with myself. Not the most perfect solution but I’ll try to keep that in mind for now.
TLDR: count your past wins and don’t over look “learning” as a metric of success
3) No one understands me.
Where did this come from?
I remember a scene from my childhood (see the theme here?) where I was sitting at the far front edge of the room I was in. I was facing the window that was at the front of the house. It was a big house — like unnecessarily big (do other Asian parents buy this to flex on their friends or something?). Anyways, I was next to a mini piano. And I was crying — I don’t remember why, but I remember feeling incredibly sad. I felt misunderstood. I was all alone — my mom and brother were nowhere in sight. I felt so so so so alone. I was so bored and alone that I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I picked up a nearby coin. It was the coin that you get in one of the Pokemon deck packs (I’ll find a pic online and put it below). I was sobbing silently (my dad hated crying so I had to be quiet) and I let my snot drip and collect onto the coin. I remember coming back the next day and the snot disappeared and I was super surprised (I guess I didn’t fully understand the concept of evaporation back then).
Most of my childhood I felt invisible — like no one really understood me, or saw the ‘real’ me. I hid what happened at home. After all, I wouldn’t want other people judging my family for the way they treated their kid right? (something my parents probably instilled in me). Then I stopped talking to my brother and parents. That’s when I really felt like there was only one other person in this world I could talk to: me.
How can I prove this wrong?
I’ll tackle this question from two different perspectives: my past and my present.
Past: It might not have seemed like it, but my mom paid a lot of attention to me (maybe the same can be said with other members of my family). I know this because I picked it up as I grew older. I noticed she would ask me questions that only someone who paid really really really close attention to me would. It makes sense too, because since I became mute (basically) all she had to go off of was visual cues — body language, actions, decisions I made, etc. And plus, she was my mom. I don’t think I fully understand what it feels like to be a mom (until I have a kid of my own) but I’m pretty sure mothers care a LOT for their kid and therefore would try their best to understand them, even if their kid didn’t want to talk to them.
TLDR: I did have people that tried to understand me — my mom.
Present: Perhaps my threshold for who “understands” me is quite high. In my previous article, I wrote about my frustrations with this but maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe I expect people to understand me as well as I understand myself (unrealistic) or ask good questions and get to the deep stuff. But that’s simply not the reality. Most people don’t go through all this shit, and also put in the effort to fix all the shit from their childhood, so there’s no way they would be able to relate (and also ask good questions). Plus, relationships take time to build (and I am a hella impatient person, so expecting it ‘fast’ is also unrealistic). So perhaps I can pay more attention to the PEOPLE that ask me questions (which happens) instead of the AMOUNT of questions they ask me (and try not to associate the amount with how much they understand me). Lemme try that for now.
Thanks for reading. Expect a lot more random articles as I navigate how I want to run my blog and whether or not this is even going to be a long term thing. As always, your attention means the world to me.
Thank you. Til next time.
— Andy
