Why Do You Punish Yourself, If It Is Useless?
Self-punishment is useless. That irrational anger with yourself, that way of treating yourself with contempt every time you feel shame or lack of control or every time you fail or experience rejection from others, is useless, and it is not healthy. Why are you punishing yourself? Shouldn’t you take care of yourself?
Self-punishment also involves self-injury, insults to oneself, isolation, and feeling unworthy of others. But with that we don’t fix anything either. You may know it, but you still don’t know what to do to let yourself be punished, how to get out of that cycle of destructive self-attack to move towards a constructive pattern of behavior.
Why is it so hard to stop punishing yourself?
Self-punishment is so persistent because it is a defense against the pain of life. And life is full of pain. We all have strong needs to connect with others, to be accepted, to achieve success and approval. But we are faced with the reality that sometimes others reject us, become disappointed in us, and put their needs ahead of ours. The people we love suffer and die, and our dreams don’t always come true.
When we feel this pain we draw energy because we are willing to do something about it. This energy can be experienced internally in the form of anger or rage. This motivates us to seek inner peace and overcome pain, prompts us to go out and try again to get what we want or need.
However, when we are repeatedly knocked down, ignored, despised or attacked for trying to satisfy our needs, the need for self-punishment can appear. The same can happen if we neglect the search for that peace to overcome pain.
This causes the person to feel insecure or useless, and he takes that anger and that anger and turns it against himself. At that point, you start to think of yourself as the cause of the problem. Guilt makes you reject yourself and feel the need to punish yourself.
Why is self-punishment useless?
These self-attacks are not seen as a threat, but as a form of hope that hopes that through pain the problem will be mitigated. But those punishments do not solve anything, and they leave you dejected and isolated.
You become so familiar with that habit of attacking yourself that you begin to feel it as a permanent part of who you are. That anger at yourself can consume and distract you from being present and committed to your life. Your relationships, your connections with yourself and with others, will affirm you more in that need to punish yourself in a continuous cycle that is increasingly difficult to break down.
How to free yourself from self-punishment?
To begin with, you have to recognize that self-punishment can be deeply ingrained. In fact, you may feel the need to punish yourself even more when you discover how deep your pain has gone. But that should not stop you , and t ienes to be honest with yourself, let it flow.
You must focus beyond self-esteem. If you were able to find self-love and acceptance, you would not have come to this, it is true, but you have to start somewhere. Creating a more positive sense of yourself is very important to improving your well-being.
Beyond the need to punish yourself, you need to get help to get your pain out, you need a way to channel your anger. If you can’t alone, find someone to support you, to guide you. You also need to experience the comforting sensation of calm, as a first step in learning to relax when you feel the need to turn your anger against yourself.
Finally, it is important that you learn to experience compassion for pain in others and that you learn to value human needs. Only then will you be able to experience compassion for yourself and value yourself.
Over time, we find that we have the resilience to handle real-life pain and the ability to identify and pursue what we want and need. Bravely, we free ourselves from the same self-punishment and direct our energy back to the world.
And you, are you still punishing yourself?
