If we always beat ourselves up, how will we ever heal and grow?

By David McElroy · June 4, 2019

I’ve never been very kind to myself.

I didn’t realize that for a long time. Because my internal dialogue was all I’d ever known, I didn’t realize there was any other way to live.

I’ve always been vicious to myself when it came to my physical appearance. When I was a child, I was honestly convinced I was the ugliest boy around. As I got a little older, my worst fear was that no woman would ever be attracted to me.

For my entire adult life, I seem to have been looking for one reason after another to feel shame about myself. Even when there was nothing objective to feel bad about, I couldn’t seem to help myself. I found things to criticize, to doubt and to cause shame.

This has been my template for so many things in life. One of the reasons I know my faults so well — and am willing to admit them to you — is that I’ve spent so much time cataloguing my failings and setting up plans for improving myself.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself dialing down the shame. I’ve started feeling that maybe — just maybe — it’s OK to accept myself, even as I work on becoming a better person.

The biggest source of shame in my life for a long time has been my weight. Ever since I gained a lot of weight about 10 years ago — as an emotional reaction to a difficult breakup — I’ve been stuck in a spiral of shame that can become self-hatred at times.

Because of this, I’m terrified of people seeing pictures of me. I know they’ll be horrified. They’ll talk about me. They’ll think I’m too lazy to exercise or to stop eating. They will see that I’m really just as ugly as I always thought I was.

I feel ashamed of everything about myself which isn’t perfect. (If you have awhile, I could go over the list with you.) I do have plans and goals for myself about all sorts of things. I’m constantly working on improving one thing or another. I do think it’s important to be aware of your faults and to constantly be getting better.

In fact, I think there’s some truth to the notion I once heard that experiencing hell would be for the person you are at your death to meet the person you might have been at your best. The fear of never becoming my best self does stalk me.

But I’ve been seeing something different lately. I’m not sure why.

I’ve found myself thinking that if I keep myself in a constant state of shame and fear, there’s no way I can become what I need to be. If I’m constantly fighting myself — constantly shaming myself for not being perfect — I’m not going to fulfill the vision I have in my mind for who I really am.

If a sick man is in a hospital bed and has to exhaust all of his energy physically fighting off those who want to attack him — for the sin of being sick — he’s not going to get well. And I’m coming to see this very much the same way.

I still have a lot of things about myself that I want to improve. I came across something from a book about personality last night that speaks to that. In their book, “The Wisdom of the Enneagram,” Don Riso and Russ Hudson gave this advice to those of my perfectionistic type.

“Realize that you are not going to quickly get rid of the parts of yourself that you do not like,” they wrote. “Stop treating yourself as a self-improvement project and learn to accept yourself. Be with who and what you are right now.”

For me, that is profound, because nobody has ever really given me permission to just be the imperfect person I am. It doesn’t feel as though anybody who loved me has ever said, “Just be yourself while you deal with what you need to change. I’ll love you while you work on it.”

Instead, I was always afraid at every moment — afraid of losing love, afraid of being shamed, afraid of not being good enough. And now I understand that I have been the accuser. My father was the accuser when I was a child, but something in my own mind took over once I became an adult.

Three times recently, I have intentionally posted photos of myself online very prominently. (One was this photo and the other two are here and here.) It’s not that I’ve suddenly become a vain person who wants to share my good looks with the world. It’s strictly a part of my effort to accept myself — to learn to be OK with what I am, while at the same time continuing to work on changing the things I still dislike.

I find myself thinking — every now and then — that I’m not the ugly creature I’ve always believed I was. I even wonder if I can reach the potential that I’ve always had, that I might be able to have the big success I’ve always wanted. Most of all, though, I feel a sense of awe — almost fear of a false god who I no longer believe in — that maybe I might be worthy of love.

I’ve never been very kind to myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start now. It doesn’t mean I can’t unlearn the shame of the past and finally accept myself for the imperfect but loving man I really am.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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