For
years I have been telling myself the story that I was humiliated and
disrespected as a child by a parent (my mother) and that the solution was to
strive for more worthiness in order to prove my self worth.
This
has been a long slog towards overcoming real and imaginary obstacles to self
change, changing my beliefs regarding what is real and what is unproven because
there were no true tests conducted in the real world. There were no tests
because I was too hemmed in by fears of rejection, of failure and of
disapproval.
As
I have had some successes in meeting various challenges over time, it has
occurred to me that my strength lies in having a powerful conscience that
demands conformity with various oughts and shoulds. Evidence has recently appeared in the local press.
It
seems like the mind has different faculties that provide the foundation for
different abilities. The rational faculty is the cause of
rational action; the willing faculty
(the ability to do, to decide, to choose) is the origin of volition. And the conscience faculty is used to distinguish
between right and wrong, good and bad.
For me, advancing towards moral outcomes has always had the most appeal.
These
moral imperatives have appeared in my efforts in the domains of personal health
as for example in weight control, sobriety and smoking cessation. In every instance there was a ‘going against’
kind of resistance since a part of my self was always unwilling to follow the
better course. In all these instances success came but only after the passage
of months and years They were all
examples of persistence after much trial and error and much self encouragement
after numerous fall backs. The guilt that followed these set backs always
spurred me to try again and I have personally found guilt a far better inducer
than self compassion, as argued by Mcdonigal.
Both
in this area of health and in the area of career achievement there has been
examples of self confluence that bears out what is known about valued based
motivations: they tend to be much stronger than those based on whim or caprice.
Without an analysis of where my deficits were, I probably never would have
found the where with all to keep up the
struggle
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