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If my parents couldn’t love me, how can I ever love myself? And if they always found me inadequate, how can I ever be worthy of anything?
OK, let’s all take a breath, and no, I am not suicidal. I have indulged in what is known as hyperbole for effect. But under the dark humor is an interesting puzzle. And to solve that puzzle I turned to a book by Dr. Alice Boyes, “The Healthy Toolkit.”
Boyes wants us “to talk to ourselves with compassion.” She goes on to say that often, “we are our own worst critic,” and in moments of anxiety and frustration, we speak and treat ourselves harshly, and are way more critical than is necessary or healthy. In other words, dude, lighten up a little.
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New research suggests that our personalities are far from fixed and, with effort, we can transform ourselves in real and meaningful ways.
Driving home from a family gathering or a dinner with friends, you might conjure up a being who looks like you but behaves differently. He or she was more gregarious at the party, slower to anger at a sister-in-law’s snarky comments and assertive when a colleague offhandedly dismissed a solid proposal.
Pretty much all of us, psychologists say, harbor visions of a new and improved version of ourselves. “A vast majority of people want to change at least some aspect of their personality,” says Nathan Hudson, Ph.D., a researcher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. A study he co-authored found that when it came to tweaking personality traits, 87 percent of participants wanted to become more extroverted while 97 percent said they’d like to increase their conscientiousness.
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The first COVID-19 lockdowns in March jolted a lot of us into new habits. Some of these changes were healthy; others, not so much. We started cooking more, which is