How to improve your self esteem? Internal Family Systems (IFS) and becoming friends with yourself.
The most common mental health challenge I encounter in clients is that they’re too hard on themselves. The root of so much anxiety and depression is the habit of relentlessly beating oneself up.
People often have trouble forgiving themselves--for something they did in the recent past, like yelling at one’s child or saying something dumb at a party. Or they feel awful about something they did a decade earlier—choosing the wrong spouse or passing up a professional opportunity. There are any number of past “blunders” we can violently scold ourselves for.
What purpose does being hard on oneself serve? Sometimes by being hard on ourselves, we avoid a more complex and less tolerable emotion, like sadness. Sometimes we can be hard on ourselves so that we join forces with others who we anticipate would be hard on us. And on other occasions, beating ourselves up allows us to not have to do the work of being curious about why we behave how we behave.
There’s a quote from Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems (a popular and enlightening approach to therapy), in which he writes, “Several times a day, I ask myself if my heart is open. If it’s not, I ask myself, “What am I protecting myself from?” I love this idea, and have worked hard to develop this spiritual practice myself. When my heart is closed, it often means that I’m inconsolably upset about something. When I’m upset, I’m often caught up in being hard on someone else or on myself.
When I have the presence of mind to recognize and be curious about my closed heart, I become able to transcend silently scolding myself and others.
Nobody likes a scold! In any relationship—whether parental, marital, professional, or platonic, it’s invariably healthier to be curious about another person’s behavior than it is to scold them. It’s the same with our relationship to ourselves. The more we can be curious about why we act the way do, the more we’re able to change.
The late Tibetan Buddhist master, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, writes about the importance of having an open heart. “The heart of the matter,” he writes, “is the sense of being open, which is an attitude of continually being willing to learn more, to give more, and to be more.”
How do we become more open? Richard Schwartz’s practice is a good place to begin.
Sitting meditation is another way to develop compassion for oneself. Learning to focus on our bodies and our breath can make our repetitive thoughts less convincing. When you can more easily get out of your head, you have more space to be open and curious.
This is a subject for a separate post, but having a mystical experience while taking psychedelics, such as psilocybin mushrooms, has also been demonstrated to increase openness in adults.
My belief is that the more friends I have, the better. The best place I can start is to become friends with myself.