The Hilary Silver Podcast - You’re Not Broken, Stop Fixing Yourself

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

EP20 - You’re Not Broken, Stop Fixing Yourself   The key to true personal growth isn’t fixing your flaws, but embracing them as part of your wholeness. Hilary dives into this idea, challenging the widespread obsession with constant self-improvement. Do we really need to fix every perceived flaw, or is there a better path? In this episode, she advocates for a radical shift—moving away from the relentless pursuit of perfection and embracing unconditional self-love and acceptance.   Episode Highlights: Hilary explores the exhausting cycle of self-improvement, where individuals continuously question “What is wrong with me?” and seek ways to fix themselves. Hear the powerful story of a client who found freedom by letting go of the need for self-fixing, allowing herself to enjoy life without the burden of constant self-criticism. Delve into the concept of shame and how it can prevent true self-expression and authentic connections with others. Hilary emphasizes embracing both the light and dark parts of oneself as essential to forming a complete and authentic identity. Discover how viewing imperfections as opportunities for growth, rather than flaws to be fixed, leads to a more fulfilling journey towards wholeness.   Episode Breakdown: [00:00] The Concept of Constantly Working on Oneself and Seeking Self-Improvement [02:06] Client Story [03:09] Desire for Acceptance [06:28] The Light and Dark Parts of Ourselves [07:10] Truths to Accept [14:40] Integration and Self-Love    Listener Takeaways: Learn why self-acceptance and unconditional love are the foundations for true personal growth and fulfillment. Understand the importance of stepping away from the never-ending quest for self-improvement to embrace who you are, as you are. Find out how embracing all aspects of yourself, including perceived imperfections, can lead to deeper, more genuine connections with others. Shift your mindset from fixing flaws to integrating and accepting every part of yourself, paving the way for personal fulfillment and achieving your true purpose.   Helpful links: Loneliness - The Other “L” Word Nobody Wants To Talk About:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hilary-silver-podcast/id1739660144?i=1000657906255 If you’ve ever felt trapped in the endless cycle of trying to “fix” yourself, Hilary’s insights will be a breath of fresh air. Tune in to start your journey toward true wholeness and fulfillment.   

A work in progress. Have you referred to yourself that way? I know I have, and many people have, because we know we're not perfect and we want to think about ourselves as being open to learning and growing. The problem with this way of thinking is that it can also mean that we are always, always working on ourselves. People spend years in therapy, one therapist after another, trying this technique or that method, reading book after book until there are stacks of books on your nightstand. Podcast after podcast, it is a constant quest to work on or quote, fix some broken part of yourself.

It's a never-ending seeking of answers to the question, what is wrong with me? Or why am I like this? Or how can I fix this thing about me that I just don't like, this part of me that feels broken? It can become a way of life. It's literally where the term self-help junkie or lifetime therapy goer come from. All this time spent seeking to no end until today. Because I don't know about you, but I don't want to spend my life and all my time and energy and attention focusing on how to fix myself. I just want to live and be and be free from all of that.

What I'm saying today will radically change your life and completely free you from all of this if you are really ready to let that shit go and get your life back, get your time back, and if you are willing to hear what I'm saying. I always save my best tips for the end, so make sure that you stick around if this is really resonating with you. So let's get to it. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Hillary Silver Podcast. Thanks for tuning into the conversation today. If you haven't already, it would mean so much to me if you'd take a minute to just click that five-star rating on your podcast app, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss one of my episodes. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend because if you like it, they will probably like it too. So I'm going to start with a brief little story and maybe you can relate. In 2018, I had a client named Kim. That is her real first name. When we finished our time together,

she thanked me and said, Hillary, you just gave me my life back. I no longer have the need to seek answers about what is wrong with me. No more self-help books on the nightstand. And gone is the feeling of pursuit, a constant feeling and seeking of how to fix myself. She said, I'm actually free now to read for pleasure. Imagine that. She said, I asked my two adult kids, a son and a daughter, what their favorite fiction books are. And she picked one for each kid and read them and then had an in-depth conversation about those books with her kids. She was able to be free from this distraction in her life that was actually keeping her from just living it. Imagine being free from feeling like you have to constantly work on yourself or fix yourself. Okay. Here's something else. I hear this all the time. Hillary, I just want to be seen for who I am. I want to be appreciated for who I am. I just want

to be loved unconditionally for all of me. It's something that we all ultimately desire. It is a basic human need to be witnessed. Okay. It doesn't make us needy. It is a human need that we have. The problem is the one person who has the power to do this for you is not doing it. You. When you are constantly seeking to fix some broken part of yourself, you have yet to accept and love yourself unconditionally. You refuse to see the parts of you that you don't want to see, denying them, suppressing them, repressing them, hiding them, condemning them, punishing yourself for having these traits, facing your own recrimination, and being the way that you are with all of these certain parts of you. Okay? So you have shame about these parts. You can be mean to yourself because of these parts.

You withhold love to yourself because of these parts. Let that sink in for a minute. Are you hard on yourself for being a certain way, for some part of your personality or some of your traits or characteristics? So let me ask you this. Where do you think you learned that? You may have learned that love is conditional from parents or caregivers who withdrew love or withheld affection or positive regard for you when you didn't please them or when you behaved in a way that they didn't like. You got a bad grade. You didn't get a straight A or whatever. They were critical of you in some way. They didn't like how you were acting or behaving, so they cast you off. They literally went cold on you. Maybe it's from society or

religion. When you aren't a certain way, you aren't loved. As a society, we deem certain traits or behaviors as negative or bad. And so when we are that way, we feel unable to claim those parts. We learn that there's a certain way to be in this world. And if we are not that way, we are cast off. We don't belong. And so it goes, we then do it to ourselves, sometimes without even realizing it. And it is so harmful to our sense of self. It is not a very kind way to be, nor is it an unconditionally loving relationship with ourselves. Our own love for self becomes conditional. Can you see that? So imagine just living without the deep need or drive or determination to desperately seek

solutions, to fix a broken part of yourself, to stop putting your life on hold while you figure out what is wrong with you, or that you stop putting your life on hold while you figure out what is wrong with you or that you're living your life on the surface and going through all the motions, but being at war with yourself on the inside. It's like an inner little secret pursuit that you have hiding or condemning and fixing these broken parts of yourself. Happy on the outside, but discontent on the inside. Or worse, really suffering and struggling. Carefully curating the parts of yourself that you do share with the world is putting yourself

through a filter. And as long as you are condemning these parts of yourself, you won't let anyone get close in case they discover what you are hiding. So then you represent yourself or present yourself as this very carefully curated, edited version of you. The parts of you that you don't accept, don't like, or even hate about yourself are cast off into what I call the naughty corner as if they did something wrong or those parts are in trouble. They're being punished. This is what Carl Jung called the shadow.

While meanwhile, claiming the good or the positive traits and sharing those. So I call it the light and the dark parts of ourselves. We have lots of parts and we judge them as light or dark, positive and good, negative or bad. So what I want to do now is I'm going to share a few things with you that I want you to know. And these things are the truth. I want you to listen and accept what I'm saying as true. And if you can do that, this will radically change this part of your life. It will set you free. It will change everything for you. So let's start. What you put in the naughty corner is your self-judgment and may not be something that someone else would put in their naughty corner. It's entirely subjective.

One of my clients once said she thought she was boring or serious and not funny enough. Yet here she is a brilliant veterinarian, smart, successful, beautiful, an amazing woman. So that's just an example of how we carry around these shameful bits and parts of ourselves that we can't accept, whereas somebody else wouldn't at all put that in their naughty corner. We are hard on ourselves. We are our own worst critics. How we talk to ourselves, what we say to ourselves, our inner world can be a cold, harsh environment. It is not a hospitable place to live. We can have a tough inner critic and often cannot give ourselves a fucking break. The next thing I want you to know, number two,

the things that you find unacceptable about yourself become shame. And as long as you have shame in your mind, you are disqualified from receiving the good things that you want in this life because you're not deserving yet. Love, success, happiness, we delay our joy or pleasure or reward until we have fixed these things. So in a way, our life is on hold. For example, we're not good enough for love. I used to do this to myself. I used to think that I first have to fix this one broken part of myself and then I'll be able to be in a relationship. Then I'll be lovable. Have you ever had that thought? Or maybe you're seeking a new job and you won't go for the promotion until you acquire one more skill. You won't start the new business

until you learn one more thing first. You won't go shopping for new clothes after you've lost weight until you've lose all the rest of it. I won't shop until I lose 10 more pounds. Nevermind the fact that you're walking around with clothes that are hanging off of you looking like a schlub. You can't reward yourself with new clothes until you've gotten to that final destination. We put off our joy, our success, our happiness, our pleasure. We put off living our lives to the fullest until we feel deserving of receiving that which we want. And it's because we have these parts of ourselves that are broken and we feel we have to fix

first. Number three, as long as you have shame, you will not allow yourself to be truly seen. You will hold people at a distance. You won't be vulnerable. You will not share yourself openly with anyone in case they get close enough to discover all those things that you are hiding in the naughty corner. Make sense? Why would you want to let anyone close enough to discover that? And that leads to a lack of authentic connection and therefore loneliness at the soul level, an existential

loneliness. I did a video on that, so I'll put the link in the show notes for you all. But shame is what does this to us. Okay, number four, only focusing on the parts of you that you like or that you are happy with or proud of, and only sharing those parts makes you a flat, two-dimensional, boring person with no depth. Yes, it's true. And you're not fooling anyone. So I want to give you a metaphor to help illustrate this. Imagine you're at an art gallery and you're looking at a portrait. Maybe let's just say you're looking at the Mona Lisa because everybody knows that. You're looking at the Mona Lisa from 20 feet away. And from that distance, you can't believe how lifelike this portrait looks.

Everything looks so lifelike. It's almost like she's a real human. But step forward five feet, and then five feet more, and then five feet more. And before you know it, you're nose to portrait. You're that close. And all you can see are brush strokes, individual brush strokes. Some brush strokes are light, white even, and some brush strokes are dark, black, light and dark, okay? Black and white. We have traits about ourselves that we consider light and dark, right? And when you're that close, all you can see is the one stroke, which is in this metaphor, an example of your traits. So when you're that close and you're putting yourself under a microscope, you're only going to see one trait at a time. But you are not

just one trait, you are all the traits. And one trait, one brushstroke without the other makes no sense. We need all the traits, all the brushstrokes to come together to share and to make up who you are. You are not a full human with just the light. You are also the dark. And we have to learn to value all of it together. You cannot just be the parts of yourself that you like and that you're proud of and that you're happy with. What makes you an interesting, dynamic, complex, interesting human is that you have all these traits together. There is no one in this world like you, like your fingerprint. There is no one like you who has the combination of all of the traits put together just the way they are, like you, like me, like each of us. We are each complex, dynamic,

interesting, rich, deep people. And we are not that if we are not whole and integrated with all of these parts coming together. So another example, metaphor. When I was in my 20s and 30s, a long time ago, I liked to go rock climbing. In fact, it was my husband and my first date. It's what we did on our first date. The wall, the rock wall that was smooth was hard to stick to. Some people really like that challenge, but it makes it really hard. It's difficult. You're not sticky. Whereas the rock walls that had the cracks and the jagged parts and the craggy parts and the ugly stuff actually, made it easier to cling on, made it sticky, made it more fun to climb. So I want you to be sticky. Think about how all of the features

that make you you, make you sticky, alluring, endearing, magnetic. People are drawn to that. If I acted all perfect here, you would be bored or suspicious or you just plain wouldn't like me. What makes us human is how dynamic and complex we are. It's the dark that makes us interesting and brings the mystery and the depth. Number five, your imperfect parts are not broken and they do not need fixing. Yes, we all have parts of ourselves that we want to refine or we want to do better at or to just grow. Those parts that aren't, quote, there yet don't make us imperfect as they are. We aren't broken until they are better. So just stop.

Give it a rest. Stop trying to fix them. And instead, we're going to integrate. That's what the rest of this video is really going to be about. Remember, you're not standing so close to the portrait that all you see is one brushstroke. You're not putting one trait under a microscope. You're stepping back to see the whole picture. All the brushstrokes coming together in concert, the traits that are dark and light together that make you, you. Integrating is required to be a whole human. Until you do this, you are only

half of a self. You are not your whole self. Those parts that you struggle with, it's okay. You have to first accept and love the parts that need attention and then gently work on growing them. They're not broken. So for example, maybe you're emotionally reactive, okay? That just means that you can learn to grow your ability to emotionally regulate. Maybe you're judgmental. Well, just catch yourself having those thoughts and recognize how being that way

or thinking that way makes you actually feel bad about yourself. And then have a follow-up thought about that person you just judged and give them a break. Being impatient, that's me. You can learn to grow your tolerance for waiting with breathing and self-talk that's talking you off the edge and keeping you calm. Lastly, understanding that some of these traits that you deem unacceptable are serving you in some way. How has being impatient served you? I find it's what helps me take action in my business. I'm a fast implementer so I can pivot when I need to, or if my team has a new idea, I create it quickly. Being emotionally reactive means that you're also

someone who is likely passionate. You don't have issues being fully expressed. Maybe it can get you in trouble if you don't channel it correctly or properly, but you can learn to use this to your advantage. So yes, it's okay to want to grow and to work on these parts. But before you will ever be able to make any changes, you first have to accept them and love them as part of you in order to make any progress. It starts with self-love and self-acceptance as you are first. This is at the core of it all, having an unconditional positive regard for yourself no matter what. No self-loathing, only self-loving. Being self-centered is knowing that all of these parts are required. They are a part of you. They are serving you. They are what makes you uniquely who you are. And you have to integrate them to be whole. Unconditional love

is available to you, by you, from you, for you. You have to give that to you. It is why we are here. I truly believe that that is why we are here on this earth. Until we learn to accept and integrate and love ourselves the way that we are, to unconditionally love ourselves, we have not yet achieved what we are here to achieve. So that's all I have to say about this today. Thanks for joining the conversation. I hope you found it valuable. And if you haven't done so, please just remember to subscribe so that you never miss one of my videos. I'll see you next time.