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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we are talking about self-esteem which is a topic that I'm very excited about and today in particular we're talking about
Heidi Priebe explores how toxic shame fuels an addiction to self-improvement, outlining five warning signs and how to build a healthier, self-loving approach to personal growth.
Key Takeaways
- Self-improvement is healthy when it expands your authentic self, but toxic when it aims to replace or escape it.
- You cannot climb out of shame by rejecting your present self; self-acceptance in the moment is the foundation of change.
- Signs of an unhealthy relationship with self-improvement include isolation, burnout cycles, and contempt for your current self.
- Compassionate, present-focused growth tends to be more sustainable than idealized, fantasy-driven goal-chasing.
What the video covers
- Introduces toxic shame and explains how it can turn healthy personal development into an addictive escape from one's authentic self.
- Defines 'ego' as the part of us that manages our inner world's relationship to the outer world, noting that ego-building is normal and healthy in moderation.
- Draws on John Bradshaw's view that anything temporarily relieving the pain of being oneself can become an addiction, including self-improvement routines.
- Notes that self-improvement addiction can take the form of literal actions or fantasizing about an idealized future self.
- Uses the metaphor of a person trying to climb out of a well toward an idealized self, arguing that internalizing dignity is what allows lasting change.
- Sign one: feeling contempt for your present self while rooting for a future idealized version, since only the present self truly exists.
- Sign two: using self-improvement as an excuse to isolate and hide from friends and family.
- Sign three: cycling between extreme self-work and burnout or collapse.
- Sign four and five involve avoiding openness to the world and using self-improvement to dodge emotional and relational reality.
- Recommends a healthier approach: show love and respect to the self doing the work, treat shame as information about belonging, and attune to present needs.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Self-Esteem and Toxic Shame
- 01:56Ego, Personal Development, and When Growth Becomes Toxic
- 03:50John Bradshaw and Shame-Driven Addiction
- 05:30Forms of Addiction: Action vs. Fantasy
- 07:40The Well Metaphor and Internalizing Dignity
- 09:00Five Signs of an Unhealthy Self-Improvement Relationship
- 17:00Reframing Parts of Self and Shame as Information
- 23:00Building a Healthier Approach and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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the relationship between toxic shame and the addiction to selfimprovement now if you don't know what I mean when I say the term toxic shame I do have a video Linked In the description of this one that goes over what that term means
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and how you can recognize it showing up in your own life and your own psychology but for those of us who are all too familiar with this term we're going to dive into how struggling with toxic shame can lead us to get overly fixated
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on personal development now when we talk about personal development I'm essentially talking about any habit or routine or goals that we set and take on in an attempt to build up our ego and it's important to note here that ego building
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is a very nor Al part of life when I use the term ego what I mean is essentially the part of ourselves that is monitoring the relationship we have between our subjective inner world and how we fit in
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the objective outer world so our egos help us secure resources they help us think about things like hey what skills do I have and what job might I be able to get that allows me to exchange my skills for things like money so that I
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can develop more Security in the world or so that I can go pursue more opportunities and open more doors for myself so our egos are very important things and there's nothing wrong with being strategic and thoughtful about which skills we want to develop and what
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ways we want to work on ourselves so that we can have a more easeful exchange between our inner worlds and our outer world but like anything in life what is benign under the right circumstances can be absolutely addictive and destructive
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under the wrong ones so if we are pursuing self Improvement not because we want to bring more of our authentic self into the world but because we are wanting to distance ourselves from our authentic selves and put more of our
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fake selves into the world because we believe that that's the only version of our self that would be accepted by the world this is when we start to develop a toxic relationship with self-improvement because we are essentially trying to
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kill off our Essence and start living fulltime as a version of ourselves that leaves out a lot of who we are at our core we're going to talk about what that looks like as a video goes on but for
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now I also just want to hark back to John Bradshaw who wrote The Incredible Book healing the shame that binds you and the way that he kind of looks at addiction through the lens of toxic shame so he says that for the toxically
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shamed person anything that temporarily takes away the pain of being oneself can become an addiction so this this can be drugs and alcohol or it can be online shopping or it can be romantic Obsession or liance or it can be planning out
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goals habits routines and regulating with this idea of an idealized self that we don't have to be ashamed of if thinking about that is giving us reprieve from this underlying condition of toxic shame that we live with where
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we feel as though it's unbearable to be ourselves this can very easily become an addiction so we're going to go over five signs that this might be an addiction for you and then we're going to talk about how to develop a healthier
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relationship with self-improvement because again it's really wonderful to think about which skills you want to develop and which ways you want to show up in the world that are different from how you're showing up now but we want to
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make sure that when we're doing that we're taking ourselves with us we're not neglecting and leaving behind major parts of who we are I want to make clear that we can get addicted either to the actual actions so to going out and
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starting new routines or setting new goals and working really hard towards them or we can get addicted to just thinking about it so to sitting at home reading self-improvement blogs or watching videos on ways in which we would like to change and then
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disappearing into a fantasy world where we have already made all of those changes and finally we can be proud to be ourselves so either the literal actions or or fantasizing about the actions can become an addiction and if
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you find yourself more of the fantasy persuasion I do have a video on self-regulating through fantasizing about the future that I'll link in the description of this video and it's likely going to be a really nice compliment to this one now when I
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picture someone who has toxic shame thinking about their idealized self what instantly comes to mind is this kind of image of a person trapped at the bottom of a well and they're looking upwards at this idealized vision of themselves
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standing outside of the well in the sunlight and they're desperately trying to climb up out of the well to get to that person but the problem is they're so panicked about the fact that they're in the well that they're not really
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taking the time to understand their surroundings they're just kind of clamoring up the wall as quickly as they can and then continuously falling back down or they might actually make it out of the well a few times but then within
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a number of weeks months or years somehow find that they have fallen back in the well itself being a metaphor for our deep shame and the only way to get out of that well and to get to the place
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where you are standing in the sunlight with a sense of Pride and dignity is to accept that you first have to internalize that sense of dignity inside of the well it is the thing that will allow you to climb out and stay out
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because that sense of dignity and that sense that it is okay for me to be inside of this well it makes sense that I have fallen into it that kind of belief is the sort of belief that calms
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our nervous system enough to be able to start actually looking around the well getting to know it and understanding the most effective route out as well as how to avoid falling into it in the future so before we talk about how to do that
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we're going to quickly go over five signs that you might be using self Improvement as an addictive way to stay out of the present moment where you experience yourself in a toxically shamed way the first sign that you might
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have a toxic or unhealthy relationship to self-improvement is that you are very willing to root for the future version of you that you are trying to get to but you feel nothing but contempt and disgust when you think of the person you
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are now so you might feel really good when you're taking steps to change yourself or when you're imagining yourself taking steps to change yourself because you're imagining that you're doing that work in service of someone who you actually love which is your
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idealized self but you don't love the self who is doing the work and the self who is doing the work in the present moment is the only self that exists everything including our visions of the future and memories of the past are all
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happening right now you either love yourself in the moment or you don't love yourself the those are the only options so when we start talking about how to shift into a healthier relationship with self-improvement we're going to talk
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about how to show love and respect for the person who is doing the improving rather than only having respect for the idea of ourselves who is done improving sign too that you might have an unhealthy or toxic relationship with
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self-improvement is that you use self-improvement as an excuse to isolate and to hide yourself away from other people so there's this video that went viral I think sometime last year that was pushing this idea that if you're in
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a rough Place take six months disappear from your life and come back as a version of yourself who your friends and family won't even recognize and I remember thinking that is such a toxic relationship to self-improvement why would you want your
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friends and family to not recognize you those are the people who love you for who you are if you were to fundamentally change in a way where the people who love you for who you are no longer recognize you that would probably mean
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you'd made some pretty negative character changes but the kind of implicit message behind this video seemed to be people will love you more if you take a big break and come back as a more superficially impressive person and I think that for a lot of people
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with toxic shame this is truly and deeply a belief that they hold and I was no exception to this for the majority of my life when I lived with toxic shame anytime I started feeling an overwhelm of shame I would use self-improvement as
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an excuse to isolate from the world get really focused on some objective thing I wanted to improve like getting fitter or making more money or developing some new skill and I would kind of disengage from the rest of my life for long periods of
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time while I was making those improvements believing that I could only engage with other people and with the world if I were as close to perfect as possible and so when I started feeling an overwhelm of shame I would head into
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a period of reclusion and self-work believing that I would come back as an acceptable version of myself now not everyone is able to do this because maybe they have long-term commitments like full-time jobs that they can't simply Retreat from for six
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months so another version of this sign number three that you might have an unhealthy relationship to self-improvement is that you are using it to hide in plain sight so maybe you're not literally retreating for 6 months and not answering your phone
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calls or showing up to work but maybe you are refusing to relate to other people as the person that you are and the only thing you're willing to talk about is the person you are becoming so when people ask you what's new with you
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or how you're feeling the answers you might give are chronically answers about plans you have for the future you're not staying present with people you're not talking about what's going on for you today or right now or this week you're
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almost frantically trying to get them to not notice there is a present you and to Instead try to kind of sell them on this future version of you that you believe is less shameful and you might get really angry triggered or disregulated
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if people say anything even in complete and total innocence that reminds you that who you are right now is not that future version of you and that there are literal tangible differences between the you in reality and the you in your
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future fantasies or the you that you are taking steps towards becoming so again this is a way of kind of hiding in plain sight we're trying to get the people around us to not notice who we actually are and obscure that with a vision of
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our future selves that we want them to treat us as though we already are because again that's the only version of oursel that we think deserves respect and fair treat now sign number four that you might have an unhealthy relationship to
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self-improvement which very naturally follows steps two and three is that you go through cycles of extreme work on yourself and then burnout or collapse and the reason this happens is because if we are self-improving in a way that
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is not bringing our whole self with us so let's say we decide we're going to get really fit or we're going to earn an extra $100,000 in the next year and we start gunning for these goals without giving ourselves any sense of relaxation
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or comfort and in fact Talking to Ourselves quite abusively if those needs come online so saying things to ourselves like oh come on you're so pathetic just stop whining and stay on track with your goals or when we become
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depressed or lifeless in pursuit of them telling ourselves that doesn't matter we'll be happy once we get there when we are compartmentalizing ourself like that and denying ourselves things like Comfort or rest or Joy because we think that people who need those things are
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pathetic and weak what we are doing is guaranteeing future burnout because human beings need all of those things and if we do not intentionally give ourselves those things for long enough our bodies will eventually Revolt to get those needs met in other ways we will
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become sick or depressed or angry or anxious beyond measure if we try to go on for long periods of time denying humongous parts of our emotional experience so again when we have a healthier relationship to self-improvement we are bringing our
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whole selves with us as we're doing the improving so we are attending to things like our need for rest and comfort and co-regulation while we're making our improvements which might mean that the improvements happen at a slightly slower
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Pace but this is akin to climbing up out of that well at a steady but slow pace instead of scaling 3/4s of it really quickly and then falling back down and having to start again and then falling back down right so it slows our progress
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but it means that we actually make progress and we're going to talk more about that very soon the fifth sign that you might have an unhealthy or toxic relationship to self-improvement is that one of the main things you are trying to
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do through self-improvement is stay in control of which feelings you are having when so I talked about this a little bit in the original video that I made about toxic shame but when we have toxic shame essentially we are terrified of
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experiencing spontaneous feelings because we believe that there are some feelings it is deeply shameful to have in the first place we can't possibly leave ourselves open to what is just the natural state of living which is experiencing a wide range of emotions in
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a somewhat unexpected way you can wake up one day and if you are authentic Ally engaged with your life and not blocked off to any particular feelings feel everything from Rage to lust to Joy within the course of a single day but if
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you are terrified of experiencing certain feelings what you might do is become incredibly rigid about your habits and your lifestyle and what you do and don't engage with in the world in order to guarantee that you're getting the hits of dopamine that you need to
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stay functional but only in ways that do not bring up shame so I'm only going to focus on hitting my goals and I'm not going to leave myself open to let's say Taking Chances on letting people and relationships impact me because those
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things are unpredictable so I'm only going to engage in relationships that feel very low risk and that I know are unlikely to bring up significant feelings of Shame so if we are self-improving and doing work on ourselves in a way that is actually
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making us less open to being impacted by the world around us we are engaging with self-improvement in a toxic way real wholehearted self-improvement where we bring our entire true selves into the goals that we set and the work that we
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do makes us more open to the world around us and the people who make it up and all of the spontaneous emotions that are consistently arising as a result of being open to the world as it actually is and as the people we actually are so
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so again healthy self-improvement often looks like making ourselves more resilient in the face of Shame so that we can stay more open to all areas of our life rather than trying to control the conditions of our life so that we
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don't experience shame this is the core difference between healthy and unhealthy self-improvement are we becoming more shame resilient so that we can actually tolerate shame or go take many more risks in the world and expose ourselves to deeper relationships and experiences
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of life or are we trying to narrow our world so that we are keeping shame out and now we're going to transition into briefly talking about how you can heal your relationship with self-improvement so that you're coming at it from a more
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holistic and effective place so my personal belief is that if you have toxic shame what you need to be focusing on is not self-esteem because for you self-esteem is likely to look more like a dis associative fantasy and what you
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need to focus on first and foremost is developing dignity dignity is the art of respecting all parts of ourselves even the parts of ourselves that we wish were different so refusing to kick ourselves off our own teams if there's something happening
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within us that we wish were not happening and instead being willing to stay present and on the page with ourselves the way a loving parent would stay on the page with their child who is struggling in some way when we have
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dignity it means we have the strength to face whatever pain is coming up for us in the present moment and stay on our own team when we are able to stay present with the things that feel very shameful in our lives what happens is
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we're able to focus on and attune to our lives as they exist right now which helps us find real solutions to what we are struggling with solutions that are not dissociative and unrealistic but ones that are actually going to help us
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gain some foothold to take steps out of the problems that we've found ourselves stuck in in life dignity is your inner parent saying to your inner child it's okay that you have ended up where you have ended up in life it makes sense
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based on what has happened to you that you've ended up here so let's look at where we're at together with compassion and let's figure out what we need to change as a team so that we can end up
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somewhere better where we feel less defended and more open to the world around us I am going to stay present with you and I'm going to help you get there I am not going to abuse you along the way so how do we start developing
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that sense of dignity the first thing we want to do is start using self- neutrality as a tool for showing respect to our shame bound parts so I do have a video on what self- neutrality is and how to practice it which I will link in
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the description of this one but essentially self neutrality is the willingness to just look at our lives including the parts that we're very ashamed of from a place of total Detachment and objectivity so instead of asking ourselves why am I in all this
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debt why can't I find a partner what's wrong with me why don't I have any friends we ask the same or similar questions in a totally different tone why am I in debt what happened to me in life that made managing money so
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difficult why don't I have a partner what skills around intimacy did I never learn why do I feel like there's something wrong with me where does that belief come from and am I 100% sure that it's true why do I isolate so much what
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purpose is that serving for me we start looking at all of these parts of ourselves that we might be really angry at ourselves for and actually ask those parts how are you trying trying to help me what do you think that your job is in
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my life and this is an area where something like internal family systems which is a therapeutic model that looks at the self as a series of Parts all of which are functioning to serve you but which might get into conflict with each
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other can be really helpful so a book that I heavily recommend on this is called no bad parts by Richard Schwarz and it's all about learning to appreciate even the parts of ourselves that we feel really mad at understanding
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how they're trying their best to serve us and then figuring out how we can work more effectively and get all of these parts communicating with each other better so that we get those same needs met in ways that lead to or cause less
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negative side effects but this step of developing dignity is essentially just learning to respect the parts of ourselves that we are used to abusing and becoming willing to see them in a different light when we have respect for
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all parts of ourselves we don't have to frequently dissociate from ourselves because we don't have that belief that there are very bad corrupt shameful parts of ourselves we understand that there are just wires getting crossed internally and that it's possible if
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we're willing to stay Associated to ourselves to uncross those wires and develop a new system which leads us to step two if we're able to stay more Associated to our lives what we're also going to be able to do is reality check
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our shame beliefs and when necess NE adjust our shame environments so what does this mean there is a psychologist named Dr Marsha linan who has this concept of checking to see whether our shame fits the facts of a given
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situation so in her kind of conceptualization of Shame Shame is the feeling that lets us know we are going to get rejected by other people if we continue to behave in this certain way and she recommends that when you feel
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shame you might want to check in with yourself and go am I actually going to get rejected from this environment if I behave in that way or if I say that thing or is this something that I developed a shame belief around because
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at the time that I formed this belief this thing would have gotten me rejected but maybe here it doesn't apply and the cool thing is that we also have the opportunity to start becoming self-aware about which environments we're placing
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ourselves in maybe we have self- selected environments that have the same rules about what gets us rejected that our early caregiving environments did but we have the option to start selecting new communities new workplaces new types of Partners who will not
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reject us for the parts of ourselves that would like to exist more fully in the world so if I'm an artist at heart and I've chosen a career in finance because my creativity is shame bound the more self-aware I become the more I can
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start looking at how have I created a life for myself unconsciously where my creativity and this part that makes me feel really alive is something that isn't really accepted or encouraged inside of my life as it stands and what
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environments might I want to go start engaging with where creativity is actually really celebrated and helps me get ahead and the more I put myself in those environments the more I realize that keeping my creative impulses shame bound is actually holding me back and it
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actually serves me to give the world more and more of what I'm naturally excited about so this is the type of self-improvement that allows us to bring more of our authentic selves into the world rather than less and this is a
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long process it might be that the first time we go put ourselves in a room full of creatives we have a lot of contempt and disgust come up and anger how dare they be expressing themselves creatively and this might be something we have to
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work through by doing Shadow work on ourselves or we might have to refine and get really clear on what type of creativity do I feel proud of and want to express myself through maybe the way that these people are expressing
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themselves just doesn't work for me but I can keep exploring different environments until I find one that I feel really excited to be a part of so this is an exploration of the ways in which we could develop our ego to
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reflect more of our authentic selves and to grow in a direction where we are bringing more of our authenticity into the world through exploring different Avenues or contexts for self-development third thing we want to be watching for as we're developing our sense of dignity
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as we get more present and Associated to our lives as they are in the present what we also start to notice is ways in which our beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies and we're going to talk a lot more about this particularly around
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perfectionism as this month goes on but for example I might have this belief that I'm just an unattractive person and nobody would ever want to get close to me because of that and then what I might do is go out and just try to act in a
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way that is totally inauthentic to me and that might come across as really in congruent to other people and they might just get kind of weird vibes from me and weird energy and so they're not going to feel attracted to me because I'm an
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uncomfortable person to be around energetically and that's just going to reinforce my belief I knew it I have to double down on being my fake self because everybody seems uncomfortable and repelled by me when in reality the reason I might be repelling people is
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because I am hiding so much of myself and people can sense that and it makes them uncomfortable and if I were just to relax and learn to be more comfortable with myself and who I authentically am people might feel a lot more comfortable
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in my presence which might lead to much deeper connections romantically platonically on every level but in order to really notice how people are responding to us and why we have to be not afraid of the present moment because
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all of the feedback we get from other people especially all of the nuanced feedback happens in the present moment so again the more we've gotten comfortable and learned to respect ourselves the more we're going to be able to stay attuned to other people in
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the world around us in the present which gives us extremely valuable information about what changes we might actually need to make in order to get more of what we authentically want out of life and less of what we don't as well as how
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we can stop accidentally bringing more shame into our world by acting inauthentically in ways that leads to rejection and essentially where this all leads us to at the end of the day is that associating to our present selves
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and having dignity for who we are in the present allows us to find holistic rotes to self-improvement so as we're figuring out who we are and which environments we're going to be able to exist the most authentically within and actually
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celebrate and build upon on the parts of ourselves that maybe we've spent our entire lives hiding we're also going to learn how to treat ourselves well in the process of developing new skills which again means we make consistent progress
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towards them because we aren't berating ourselves and judging ourselves and tossing ourselves off of our own team the second we make a mistake we're using all the skills we built in that self- neutrality process to ask ourselves questions like oh if I made a mistake or
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if I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now why might that be what might I be needing that I'm not getting right now and how can I potentially pause give myself that thing and then keep going once I feel more energized we're going
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to forgive ourselves more easily for making mistakes because we're going to understand the context of why we made that mistake and how we can potentially avoid it in the future or simply accept that we can't get things right 100% of
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the time and that's an unrealistic expectation to hold ourselves to so now instead of going into a shame spiral and getting horribly off track with our goals we can just keep going at the end of the day the first step
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towards healing from toxic shame means dropping the Redemption fantasy of some future where the person you are right now with all of the feelings that the person you are right now has does not exist and you are some idealized version
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of yourself and instead understanding that what true healing looks like is being the version of yourself you currently hate without hating them okay so the thing you want to change first is not your external environment and your external conditions it's the part of
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yourself that hates you for being in those conditions when we learn to respect ourselves and have dignity for ourselves at the bottom of the well it gives us the strength to start climbing out of it and eventually we can build a
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life that exists in the sunlight not because we have traded ourselves in for this fantasy version of ourselves at the top of the well but because we have brought the person we were at the bottom of the well out into the sunlight and
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let them know it's okay to live there it's okay to be me in the world there's nothing fundamentally broken bad or wrong with me I can come back from mistakes I can treat myself with dignity and I can treat other people with
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dignity and respect and this person the one who was at the bottom of the well is also allowed to live a long happy life outside of it all right that's all I have to say for today on this topic as
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always let me know in the comments what you guys are thinking feeling any questions that you have as you go through this video and if there are any particular topics you would love to see covered during self-esteem month please
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let me know and I will see what I can do as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really [Music] soon
Topics:toxic shameself-improvementself-esteempersonal developmentaddictionJohn Bradshawself-acceptanceinner childburnoutemotional healing
