We all like to think that we prioritize the most important things in our lives every time. However, in truth, we don’t. Sometimes this is through conscious choices where we choose things we want over other things that we feel are more important to us according to our value system. Dr. Terry Warner, author of Bonds that Make us Free, calls this self-betrayal – where we betray our core selves and values by ignoring moral imperatives or promptings of conscience (which many consider spiritual promptings).
This self-betrayal is quite common, and we many times don’t realize we’re doing it – or we ignore that we’re doing it through denial and distraction. When we betray ourselves, it tends to diminish our self-worth and acceptance and causes us discord, tension and discouragement in our lives.
From a psychological perspective, we have other parts of us that also betray ourselves and inner value systems that we often aren’t aware of. This is related to our thinking habits – both conscious and subconscious. Our thinking habits are with us 24/7, 365 days a year but I have found in my professional work that many people don’t recognize the mental and emotional problems their internal thinking habits cause them. It’s like part of your brain works against you and your best interests.
Our thinking habits tend to lock us into patterns that we just keep doing without thinking. Internationally known success author, Og Mandino stated, “As a child I was slave to my impulses; now I am slave to my habits, as are all grown men [and women]. I have surrendered my free will to the years of accumulated habits, and the past deeds of my life have already marked out a path, which threatens to imprison my future.”
Additionally, in my work with people, I find that all of us have thinking habits that self-sabotage us and create dysfunctional patterns in our emotions and actions. So, we need to reflect deeply and be brutally honest with ourselves to detect these self-defeating beliefs and mental habits.
One key source of self-sabotaging thoughts is in how we appraise and value the world around us – and the people and things within it. Dr. Robert S. Hartman, a Nobel Prize nominated mathematician, developed a revolutionary breakthrough to mathematically measure how we value things in our world. From his work, he discovered three ways we value the world: intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic. In short, intrinsic are things in our life without a quantifiable value (e.g., people and relationships); extrinsic are things that do have a concrete or quantifiable value that we value externally, such as their worth monetarily, their appearance, or function (things in essence); and systemic, which involves things that are mental creations of our human minds (e.g., ideas, rules, principles, concepts, and even our goals and dreams).
From Dr. Hartman’s work, we now know that these three ways of valuing our worlds have a mathematical rank order. Which one is most important do you think? If you guessed intrinsic, you are right. That has the highest mathematical value of the set. However, even if people’s value system says that people and relationships are most important in their lives, we have found that most people’s thinking habits flip this hierarchy in ways where we don’t prioritize the intrinsic functionally in our lives – and we don’t even realize it.
How many times do we treat people like objects or just value them based on external properties, or their performance or compliance with standards or expectations we have? That is favoring extrinsic over the intrinsic. We lose sight of their intrinsic worth. Or more commonly, how many times do we declare people as enemies or put them down because they have opposing opinions or don’t think the same way as we do? How many times do we hold a principle about how a friend and family member should be at a higher priority than our feelings for them or our relationship with them? We put them in mental boxes and lose sight of their intrinsic worth in favor of our systemic thinking.
There are many other examples of how they can cause us problems in our lives. What would the world be like if we really valued people more for their inherent, unconditional worth? What would our world be like if we valued people and our relationships over our ideas, expectations, or critical assumptions? I believe we would have a more peaceful and caring world. That is probably what John Lennon was getting at in his song, “Imagine.”
In closing, I encourage you to examine your thinking habits and see where they guide you in how you value yourself and others in your daily life. I hope you will look for ways you can be more intrinsically validating with others around you – and yourself.
Darryl Haslam, Ph.D., LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker (therapist) and the director and owner of Emotional Freedom Child and Family Counseling in Provo. He is also a personal success, relationship, and emotional resilience coach for entrepreneurs and business leaders He performs assessments on individual’s and team’s core thinking habits in Dr. Hartman’s three areas described above, to help them see exactly where their habits support their highest success and happiness and which ones block and sabotage it. For more information, contact Dr. Haslam at (801) 998-2513.*
