HealthyGamerGG - Why Self Love Isn't Enough

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Sometimes self love and self-compassion not only doesn't work but may be harmful. In this video, we look into how self love can be the problem. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Finding a good therapist in L.A. is so damn hard. Everyone's practice seems to be based on self-love, self-forgiveness, and self-affirmation. Swear to God, I wish there was something like a Marine Corps boot camp for fat, lonely men. I don't need to live in a bubble of stupid aphorisms. I need someone to kick my ass. Absolutely. I had two reactions when I read this. The first is an internal frustration with the field of therapy.

And this sort of like idea that self-compassion and self-love is the end-all be-all of what we're trying to do in therapy. And in my experience, not only does it not work some of the times, in some cases it's actually harmful. And the second thing that happened is I got curious about boot camp in the military. And I remember that like I've done a lot of veterans work. And when I talk to veterans, one of the most interesting things is, that almost all of them think about boot camp as a very positive experience. I've had a ton of patients who went to boot camp and transformed their life. And so I started to investigate what happens psychologically in boot camp. What happens that makes people confident and resilient?

And I actually discovered a couple of really interesting things and we're going to teach you how to implement the most important aspect of boot camp psychology in today's video. So we're going to start with baby Dr. Kay. When I was a tiny wittowitty intern at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I had a lecture on psychotherapy. And in walked, someone who is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who then asked me a question, if a patient walks into your office and says, doctor, can you help me find a girlfriend or boyfriend? What are you supposed to say? And my dumb ass is like, yes, this is what we do in therapy.

We help people accomplish their job. goals. And it turns out that I was wrong and that in therapy we do not help people accomplish their goals. The right thing to say when someone walks in and says, hey, can you help me find a girlfriend? The right thing to say is not to say anything, not to answer the question. Because heaven forbid, as a psychiatrist, you answer a patient's question. Instead, you have to turn it into a question. Invite curiosity, what is it that makes you want a girlfriend? How do you feel about not having a girlfriend. Why do you think it is that you haven't been able to find a girlfriend? What's going on? Tell me about your feelings. Let's talk. Let's talk some more. Let's talk some

even more. And this is what I found incredibly frustrating as a therapist, is that we're a profession of people who don't really focus on the outcomes of our patients. I know it sounds kind of paradoxical, and if you're a therapist out there and you take offense to that, there's a good reason that you will, and we'll get to that in a second. But if we sort of look at the profession, We're a profession that will do therapy with people for 20 years. And we'll keep on talking about feelings, talking about feelings, talking about feelings. And then like, it's not clear to me what the patient gets out of that. And so there are a couple of things that we have to say kind of in defense of therapy because

it's not all bad and sexually really good. The first is if this is so bad, like why does everyone focus on self-love and self-compassion? And this is what's really important to understand. Is that for about half of patients, the single, most revolutionary thing you can do for them is to teach themselves love. So I think the reason that we're biased this way as the field of therapy is because for half of the people, if we can teach them self-compassion, all of their problems will be fixed. And that's kind of the goal of therapy, right?

That's the approach is that like the problem isn't that you, you lack knowledge to solve this particular thing. The problem is that there's something inside you that as long as it's broken and isn't really functioning properly, you can try to go on fixing things. out there and it'll never work. And that's a really valid approach. Like literally in my practice, I'd say like the most transformative thing is teaching people self-love, but for half the people. The real problem is that for the other half, it doesn't seem to work. Because not everyone is traumatized and not everyone sort of needs more self-love and self-compassion. And in fact,

for half the people that walk into my office, if I tell them, hey, bro, you need more self-love. They hate it. Because these are people and you may be one of them, that don't deserve self-love. You don't deserve compassion because you suck at life, right? And like, I'm not here to teach myself how to love this pathetic version of me. This is not what I'm interested in. I actually don't want to love this person. Give yourself love to someone who deserves it.

What I actually want to do is create a life that I can be proud of. Something where I deserve love and confidence and, like, all that good stuff is, like, appropriate. And if people come into our office that way, unfortunately a lot of my colleagues will be like, no, no, you need to suffer, love. You are deserving of love. You're not pathetic. Like love yourself, love yourself. And that can actually be damaging in a couple of ways. The first is that it's incredibly invalidating because your patient is coming in and they have a fire to transform their lives and here you are telling them, no, no, no, let's shut off the fire. Which brings us to the second thing, which is that let's remember that negative emotions are drivers for positive

change. So if I get angry at someone because they steal for me, instead of like processing that anger with a therapist, I can use that anger to set boundaries with them, block them, right? The other thing is, if we look at emotions like guilt and shame, like we can go into a therapist's office and we can metabolize them with the therapist, but why do we feel guilt? We feel because sometimes we do the wrong things. And guilt is an emotion that helps us do the right thing. That's how we know the difference between right and wrong. If we didn't have guilt, we wouldn't have an internal moral compass.

And so this is the real problem, I think, with a lot of this self-love approach to therapy, is that we forget that not loving yourself can be a really, really good motivator. And this is where we kind of come to a really important part of, like, the alternate way. Okay? So if we're not going to do this, not going to do self-love, which can absolutely be very, very positive. But for some people, it doesn't work. And for those people, and if you're one of these people, let's remember that there are two ways that you can deal with emotions. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy

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And then I've got two options to deal with these feelings. I can either process them internally or I can change the search. circumstances that make me feel a particular way. All right, so here's an example. Let's say that I go to the beach. And when I go to the beach, I feel a little bit embarrassed about the way that I look. And so I've got two options in this situation. One is that I can go and talk about my feelings, which can be really effective, right?

So let's say I'm going there with my partner or my friends and I voice to them, hey, I'm feeling a little bit embarrassed. And they're like, look, man, it's totally cool. Like, you're a sexy beast. Like, look at you. You're so sexy. Oh, my God. you're so sexy, right? Or that, hey, like, no one really cares and we're here to have fun,

and, like, they can give you some reassurance, they can give you a little bit of TLC. Yeah, you can feel a little bit embarrassed, but you can work on it internally. The other thing that you can do if you feel embarrassed about the way that you look is you can exercise and you can change your diet and you can actually transform the circumstances that make you feel a particular way. Now, this is the big problem with therapy, is that generally speaking in therapy, we don't really focus on the latter. There are some absolutely great clinicians who do focus on that. We can look at evidence-based techniques like motivational interviewing that are really designed around behavioral change and stuff like that.

But generally speaking, most therapists don't specialize in changing external behavior. And when I was sort of super interested in this at this place called McLean Hospital, I talked to the chief of psychiatry there and I was like, how do we actually get patients to change their lives? And that's when he told me he was like, hey, you should check out this place called the Institute of Coaching, which is all about creating external change for our patients as opposed to using psychotherapeutic models to heal the pathology. So it's super cool and I looked into it and I really found that it was a good fit. So let's remember that when it comes to us feeling a particular way and like if you're ashamed

of who you are or how you look or how much money you make, there's actually a whole different way to manage those emotions, which is to actually fix the crap in your life that makes you feel that way. It's not just about metabolizing that emotion. And this is what happens is if we start to focus entirely on emotions, then what starts to happen is sometimes we can stall. So I had a patient, for example, who was like in the clinic that I was working at for 20 years, and they kept on getting passed on from one resident to another resident to another resident. And so there's a, you know, one argument to be made there is like maybe they should have worked with someone who's not a training psychiatrist and worked with a real psychiatrist who's fully trained and that could have helped them.

They'd done that too. But I think the bigger problem is that this person kind of came into my office and was like, you know, I'm really unhappy with my life. I'm depressed all the time. I'm like, why are you depressed? Well, you know, I'm depressed because of this, this. And we'd talk about feelings, talk about feelings, talk about feelings. And then I asked them, you know, are there times in your life when you haven't felt depressed? And they were like, yeah, I was dating this person once who like, you know, had a really nice car and we'd drive somewhat recklessly. And then we'd have really wild sex. And it made me feel like James Bond.

And so like I did what I was supposed to do, right? Because I had the professor of psychiatry who came in and told me, no, never never change a patient's life, just talk about their feelings. And so I was like, okay, well, you know, like, let's just talk about your feelings and what feels so great about having James Bond sex. And towards the end of our therapy, like, you know, I started to get frustrated with that. They started to get frustrated at that. We'd been doing that for a couple years.

And I was like, bro, do you want to change your life? And he's like, yeah. And then we started working on that. And we made huge progress. And so if we kind of look at this externalizing approach to our emotions, which generally speaking is bad. So for example, if we look at a lot of what gets men into trouble, it is that this is the only strategy they have.

So if someone makes me feel a particular way, I'm going to change my circumstances so that they no longer make me feel that way. This opens the door to things like emotional manipulation. This opens up, this is how bosses will kind of squeeze their employees because they make you feel guilty. And if they can make you feel guilty, they can shape your behavior. And if they can shape your behavior to make you feel less guilty, now they can control your behavior by controlling your emotions. And so a big part of very successful therapy is actually helping people get away from this sort of approach of, let me feel. fix the outside world to make myself feel a different way. On the flip side, though, sometimes we

actually want to use that. And this is where I got kind of curious about military recruits. And like, let's remember that military recruits will oftentimes join the military because they're unhappy with their lives and they're depressed and they're not going anywhere. And then after serving some period of time in the military, like sometimes there are cases of trauma and sexual assault and things like that. I've seen that working with veterans. But actually, I would say the majority of patients I've worked with really appreciate being in the military. They learned so much and they developed so much confidence. And what's going on there? How is it that the military can be so overtly abusive? You've got a drill sergeant who's telling you,

hey, you suck. You're going to fail. And yet you come out of that experience feeling stronger. Does a swift kick in the ass actually work? And if it works, what is the underlying psychological principle at play? So let's actually look at research on the psychology of people who go to boot camp. So there are a couple of really interesting aspects to it. The first is that while they are verbally abusive, which is bad, right, they actually are implicitly very, very, like, invested in you and don't give up on you. I think this paradox is really important to understand. So if you go to, if you actually join the military, there will be drill sergeants, and I went to a military school for a little while, so I have a little bit

personal experience, who will tell you that you're going to fail out. You're pathetic. You're never going to make it. You're never going to make it. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. You're so pathetic. But they never kick you out, right? They sort of teach you one really important principle, which is that even though I'm telling you you're going to fail, I'm not actually going to kick you out, ever, ever. You can fail today and I'm going to be here tomorrow. You can fail tomorrow and I'm going to be here the next day. No matter how many times you fail, what determines whether you succeed or fail here is actually you. You can quit whenever you're ready. And you should have quit a week ago. You should quit today and you should quit tomorrow. But until you quit, I will actually

like continue to be here for you. And this is a really fascinating kind of perspective. And there's actually research on this where this is also kind of a masculine sort of thing. So, If we look at men, we do something called the negative expression of a positive affection. So when I started dating the person who was going to be my wife, like, my friends were happy for me, but they could not keep, they could not stop giving me shit about it, right? They were technically, they were happy. They were like, and I could tell they were happy. They're like, oh, my God, Alok, you're so whipped.

Bray, you're so whipped. Bray, you're so whipped. You're so pathetic. Like, oh, my God. Like, oh, did you go to Victoria's Secret and buy some lingerie for your sense? because yo ass is whipped. And this is what we do to each other as men. When we are proud of each other, we actually express it in a negative way.

So it is the negative expression of a positive affection. And it turns out that this is actually useful in a couple of ways. So if you have some degree of self-loathing or hate yourself, if you sort of have this negative expression, it can be very validating, right? Because someone else is telling you like, yeah, man, like I can see that you're a loser. like you're you're technically correct. I can see that. What are you going to do about it?

So this is the really important thing that we sort of discover from the psychology of military recruits is that negatively expressing stuff is okay as long as there is faith underneath that like you will make it in the end. And what we actually discover is that what boot camp does to people is it improves the psychological concept called grit. And grit is the very opposite of like all this self-love and self-love and sense. self-compassion stuff. So in 2007, there was a psychologist named Angela Duxworth who discovered this concept called grit, which is sort of like this personality characteristic, which is like

people don't give up. It's not self-love, it's not self-compassion. It's not like, it's related to resilience, actually is the closest thing. But she basically noticed that some people like quit when things go bad and other people like stick with it. And if you really look at like boot camp, what does boot camp do? It boosts grit. Hey there. Thanks for watching. And I'm glad these videos have been helpful. A lot of times I'll read the comments and see people asking, well, what do I actually do about it? Which is a great question.

And unfortunately, the resources out there haven't been that great, which is precisely why I started at HG in the first place. HG coaches are trained on a curriculum that integrates my understanding of what motivates us, what paralyzes us, and most importantly, what leads to lasting behavioral change. If you're ready to take the next step,

HG coaches can help you build the life that you want. They've helped people build careers, help people find relationships, build networks of friends, and even do things like discover their passions or pursue hobbies. So if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in, check out the link in the description below. And so there's an alternative to going down the route of self-love. And if you're someone who gets incredibly frustrated by like, I don't want to love myself, I don't deserve to love myself. I actually want to make something of my life.

You don't need to force yourself into doing something that feels unnatural. Instead, what you need to focus on is building grit. And building grit is not about doing it or accomplishing, because let's remember if you lack of confidence, you can't accomplish anything. Instead, building grit is just about not giving up. And so if you are able to make this cognitive reframe, and instead of focusing on even succeeding, what you really need to focus on is I'm going to keep trying

and I'm not going to give up no matter what. And if you're able to do that, this is going to be the alternate path to transform your life. so that if you can shape the circumstances around you by not giving up, then you will deservedly feel love and pride and confidence for what you've accomplished. So this frustration that I have with the field of therapy and the sort of introduction to coaching is literally why we started a coaching program. It's one of the things that I got the most frustrated about

is that if you look at therapists, we do not take responsibility for improving external things in people's lives. We absolutely take responsibility for improving clinical outcomes, like reducing feelings of depression. But therapists generally speaking, if you walk into an office and you say, hey, can you help me accomplish this in this amount of time, most therapists will shy away from that. And that's because that's not what we're trained for. And this is why the field of coaching is emerging so much. It's because there's a whole ability to use everything we understand about the psychology of the mind,

but point in a different direction, which is. is not healing on the inside, but accomplishing on the outside. So hopefully this has been a helpful video for y'all. I'm with you in terms of like, I don't really care much for the self-compassion and self-love. It's not how I put together my life. I decided to walk this other path of let me understand myself and then craft a life that is worth living. And if you all want to do that, the most important place to start is with the development of grit.