Growing self or borrowing self?

-


This concept has been coming up in sessions a lot lately so I thought it would be worth discussing. Borrowing self refers to when we rely on external factors (most commonly, other people) to drive our motivations & behaviours. The 3 most common examples I hear in sessions are:

  • the need for others approval/praise in order to perform well in a task or to be productive
  • the need for others advice before doing our own thinking or making our own decisions
  • the need for others to calm us down when we are feeling stressed or overwhelmed
This reliance on others often results in anxiety as we cannot always guarantee it will work or that we will get what we are seeking from them. It also prevents us from building skills in areas where we are more vulnerable. One way of countering this would be to look for opportunities to grow self as appose to borrow it.
Examples of what this could look like for the examples used above could be:
  • finding motivation that is founded in our own values & principles in order to perform well, be productive or complete tasks
  • taking time to think for ourselves before consulting others & having a go at doing our own problem solving first
  • working on our awareness to notice when we are becoming overwhelmed/stressed & utilise our own developed tools & strategies to remain/become calm
There are so many ways that we fill our own gaps by borrowing from others & we all do it to varying degrees!

Do you know what yours are?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is telepathy ruining my relationship?

-
Image
I was asked recently what is the most common challenge I see couples facing in my practice and I found it surprisingly easy to answer... can you guess?  Telepathy. The dictionary describes it as "the supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses" . I'm not sure about you but I am yet to meet someone who can prove to me that they are indeed telepathic and able to read the minds of others. And yet, almost every couple that sits in front of me in therapy are behaving in ways that suggest they have the gift, and spoiler alert, it is not leading to enriching & satisfying relationships.  A fictitious example: Julia arrives home from work to her partner Rob. The house is a mess & Julia thinks to herself "Aargh, Rob is so lazy! He never helps out around the house, he knew I had a big meeting today couldn't he have at least tidied up a bit before I got home? He clearly doesn't care about how important my day was." Julia ...
Read more

Starting school/daycare - a lesson in growing pains.

-
Image
It's a new year and a lot of families are managing an array of big changes including kids starting daycare/preschool/school/high school or kids moving into a new year with new teachers, classrooms and peers.  Change is just one of those things that naturally tends to produce some degree of discomfort for most people (the unknown is not a popular place to be) and this becomes even more complex when a parent is a bystander of their child facing change - cue anxiety!  A lot of parents (myself included) already begin preparing their child for the change well before it's even taken place. In the circumstance of school changes, the lead up is often filled with social stories, orientation visits, play dates, books, meetings with teachers, new backpacks, lunch box prep and so on. These are not bad things, in fact they can be really helpful, but can you see how much energy is already being directed towards managing the change for the child? Before the school year has even begun our min...
Read more

When anxiety shows up uninvited – how to prevent it from taking control

-
Image
“Anxiety can be defined as the response of an organism to a threat, real or imagined. It is a process that, in some form, is present in all living things.” — Murray Bowen Everyone experiences varying degrees of anxiety at different points in their life. If you meet someone that says they haven’t, they may not be aware of how anxiety shows up for them. Bowen theorists tend to use terms such as tension and/or discomfort interchangeably with anxiety, I find that most people can relate to the experience of discomfort/tension but often do not attribute that to anxiety. In the end, what we label it doesn’t actually matter – what matters is an ability to observe it in ourselves and to become acquainted with how it shows up in our body, thoughts, behaviours and emotions - and further, what automatic patterns of behaviour we have developed in order to manage it. These behavioural strategies for managing the discomfort are often so automatic that we have no idea we’re doing them – a lot of them ...
Read more