The Self-Acceptance Project by Tami Simon

Author:Tami Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

12

WHAT IF THERE IS NOTHING WRONG?

Raphael Cushnir

When we’re in the deepest, darkest, and worst emotional state, when it seems like self-acceptance is the farthest away, we are in fact one instant from the awareness that can transform us completely.

The hatred and cruelty we direct toward ourselves is usually rooted in two things: the brain’s negative bias and early wounding. Here’s how that works.

When our brain tries to protect us from what it thinks is wrong, either in the world or with us — but especially with us — this creates negative bias. We’re constantly asking ourselves, “How am I doing?” and often this becomes, “How am I screwing up?” This negative shift is a function that evolved to keep us safe, to allow us to thrive, but in our society and the way that we’ve developed at this point in our history, it’s in overdrive and mostly unhelpful. This internal feedback system evolved with a positive purpose — to tell us how and why we suck so that we can fix a problem so we’ll be okay. If you were the slowest runner in your clan of cavemen, for example, you needed to recognize and correct that right away, or else you’d likely become a saber-toothed tiger’s dinner. Negative bias is still perceived as a force for good, even though today it rarely is. We can never get off that hamster wheel. That’s because it’s not balanced by a part of our self that says, “Yay, you’ve finally gotten it right, and now I’m going to let up.”

Negative bias works within us in a way that we can’t control by simply fighting or trying to change it. Neuroscientists have spent a great deal of time studying and explaining the brain’s negativity bias, but it is something that is easy to see in our daily lives even without neuroscience. When my stepdaughter was about six years old, we went on a vacation. I knew about negative bias, and I wanted to cement the positive aspect of the experience for her. I said to our gathered family, “Okay, everyone, we’re going to go around the circle and say three things that we loved about our vacation.” My stepdaughter went along with it and found three things to say. Then, as soon as we had gone around the circle, she rubbed her hands together with relish, had a devilish look on her face, and said, “Okay, now can we talk about three things that we hated about our vacation?” That always stuck with me because it shows we cannot defeat the negative bias by fighting against it.

What we can do is correct for bias. This means we recognize that we’re going to tilt in the negative direction, and we can correct for it by adopting a clearer view that is probably more in the middle. It helps to balance the negative and the positive by putting a little bit of extra effort on the positive side. In that process, what happens is that we weaken the grip of the negative bias.

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