Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We continue with what we're calling cognitive distortions as brought down in the book Etzot V’Hadrachot, by Dr. Greenwald.
Mistake number one is that you think that, “If you want to properly respect yourself, then you need to be perfect in all types of qualities and talents to be successful. And only then do you have a value and importance.”
This is a big cognitive distortion- to think “When I reach perfection and greatness and success in my life, then I can start respecting myself and feeling that I have a value and a worth.”
Try living like that!
This is a mistake. It is not the way of our Torah, because the Torah was not given to angels.
He says people that are exacting on themselves and stringent to the nth degree will never be happy with themselves. A person like this will never respect anything that he does because nothing is perfect. This is absolutely contrary to the Torah. There’s a Mishna in Pirkei Avot that says You shouldn't be wicked in your own eyes. Rabbenu Yonah says that a person who acts that way will end up thinking that he can ever fix himself, that he’s no good, and so he'll just throw in the towel on everything.
This attitude causes all kinds of emotional and physical illness, and it all comes from a distortion in the way you think. Constantly demanding of yourself causes constant stress. He can't live with himself because no matter what he does, he doesn't think it’s going to be successful, or he’ll think it’s sinful because he doesn't have any respect for what he does.
There’s a pasuk in Mishleh that says,
“All the days of the poor are bad.” The Maharsha explains that poor doesn't mean poor physically, it means poor mentally. It refers to, “Someone that's constantly worried, in his eyes, even his mistakes he considers as malicious.” The reason why he’s always worried is because for him, if it's not perfect, it's nothing.
The proper way to look at life is that, I do my best according to my abilities and my talents that God gave me. And I don't look at other people and compare myself and feel jealous of their success. The main thing is that what you do is Leshem Shamayim. Otherwise, you're just going to get yourself confused, what he calls Bilbul HaDaat.
In between the the third and fourth gate of Rav Chaim Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChaim (Shaarim section) he brings down that one of the things the Yetzer Hara does all day is say “Rak Rah kol Hayom,” simply this means, “Only do bad all day.”
But he says there's a deeper explanation Rak Rah Kol Hayom also means, ‘He tells you all day that you are bad.’ That is one of the ways of the Yetzer Hara, not to give yourself any respect, not to think that anything that you did is worthwhile. This is a huge distortion and it's something that's quite common. People are on top of themselves in this way, so it's something to be aware of. We can call it perfectionism, but it's more than that, because added to the perfectionism is that his whole self-worth only comes from perfection. This is something to be aware of and hopefully overcome.
Have a wonderful day.