Comedy Therapist

I’m not going to lie to you: making mistakes still freaks me out. There’s something about getting things wrong that causes me to break out into a cold sweat. Even if I’m at home playing music by myself, just the thought “What if I get it wrong?” induces enough panic to throw my concentration out, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Does Making Mistakes Still Freak You Out Too?

It’s easy enough to see where this paranoia comes from. I grew up with a mother who criticised my father for almost everything that he said and did, and this led to arguments that I found very frightening. Most of those arguments were about who was right and who was wrong in the previous argument, so I learned from a very young age that it was extremely important to be right all the time if you wanted to avoid degrading humiliation and terrifying conflict.

Add to that a religion where you burned in hell for all eternity for being a flawed human being, if you didn’t accept the correct saviour. Even as a young child I knew that there were other religions from the one I was being indoctrinated with, so there were other possibilities to choose from. Being wrong about my choice of religion/saviour/deity had eternal unpleasant consequences.

And then there was an education system where your social status bequeathed by the teachers in the form of grades and your position in the class hierarchy depended on me giving the answers that they liked. Get too many things wrong, and I would find myself condemned to the class full of dead-heads.

This kind of thing can leave a lasting impact. I’m still upset about being marked wrong in 5^th grade for answering that π equalled 3.1415926535897, rather than the “correct” answer of ²²/₇.

When I look at the beliefs that I internalised about making mistakes and getting things wrong, they pretty much boil down to these two:

If I make mistakes, people won’t love me

If I get anything wrong, I will be punished

I’ve long since abandoned much of the perfectionistic family, cultural and religious belief systems that I grew up with, so I no longer consciously believe that making mistakes is a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. But just try telling that to my hyper-vigilant limbic system.

So lets see what happens when I run these beliefs through the 26 “Mind lines” from L. Michael Hall and Bobby G. Bodenhamer’s book Mind Lines: Lines For Changing Minds to see if I can neutralise them with a little neuro-semantic magic.

The book makes a distinction between External Behaviour and Internal State. In these two beliefs, the external behaviour is “make mistakes” and “get anything wrong”, while the Internal State is “people not loving me” and “being punished”.

Bring on 26 Ways To Get The Hell Over Your Fear Of Making Mistakes: (more…)