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The previous post listed eight negative beliefs that make us particularly susceptible to being exploited by others. This post will add another nine, as follows:
• I'm not likeable. This negative evaluation of self operates somewhat indirectly. As a client once shared with me, because she felt intrinsically unlikeable, she felt compelled to give into others--assuming that only through such deference might they see her as "worth" being liked. (I should add that as a child the message she regularly received from her parents was that she was trouble--a bother, nuisance, inconvenience. And it's hardly a coincidence that her parents deeply disliked each other, marrying only because of the accidental pregnancy that brought her into the world in the first place.)
• I have to please others (or, I can't disappoint others). If we couldn't get our parents' approval without going out of our way to please them, then we may have come to assume that the only way to garner others' acceptance is through granting their requests, meeting their expectations, or even sacrificing ourselves for them. Obviously, if we don't feel our relationship is safe unless we "give ourselves away" like this, we'll be unable to protect ourselves from those inclined, because of our very obsequiousness, to exploit us. (One way that I've come to view this is that if we project to others that we're "door mats," even fairly nice people may at times find it difficult to resist the temptation to walk all over us.)
• I can't stand up for myself (or, I can't set limits on others). The habit of deferring to our possibly coercive parents can be hard to break. When it continues into adulthood, we simply don't feel the freedom to "hold the line" with others. And when this is the case, we feel obliged to acquiesce to what they (not ourselves) want, or have decided for us. Certainly, we're "ripe" for external manipulation if we had parents who limited our autonomy, thereby inhibiting our ability to both discover and honor our own preferences and desires. It's difficult to feel comfortable standing up for our values and viewpoints if throughout childhood such affirmation subjected us to disapproval, punishment, or rejection.
• My needs and desires don't matter. If our parents constantly gave us the message that our wants and needs were a low priority, as adults it may be a challenge to state or fight for them in the face of adversity (if, in fact, as adults we're still cognizant of them). Additionally, if we can't value our preferences enough to advocate for them, it's all too easy for others, whose goal may be to manipulate or trick us, to convince us to forfeit them altogether.
• My feelings don't count. This negative belief goes hand-in-hand with the one above. If our parents were unresponsive to our feelings of hurt, anger, or anxiety--never allowing them to affect how they treated us--we may have been "taught" to discount these feelings ourselves. And so as adults, when our emotions tell us to refuse to accommodate what someone else (illegitimately) wants from us, our habit of dishonoring our feelings (as we learned to do earlier with our parents) can lead us to ignore, or even renounce them.
• My feelings are stupid. This belief is closely related to the above idea that our feelings don't matter. Here it's likely that our parents not only refused to take our emotions seriously, but also communicated to us that these emotions were invalid, or "dumb." Thus as adults--when deep inside we still harbor ideas about our feelings' not making much sense--it's hard to accept the likelihood that they might in fact "reasonably" guide us. When the present situation just doesn't feel right, and we need to trust our gut, we simply may not be able to. (Compare this belief to "I can't trust myself. . ." above.)
• I'm weak (or, helpless, powerless, vulnerable). We may not be able to stand firm or say no to another's pressures or demands because our subjective experiences of weakness and vulnerability from earliest childhood still linger. Thus haunted--or hindered--by the past, we can't help buckling or caving in to others' deceptions or chicanery.
• I can't think for myself. Needing in childhood to alter or "adapt" our thoughts to those of our coercive parents (so as to avoid antagonizing them, or weakening a bond already felt as fragile or precarious), we're much more likely to get hoodwinked by someone vigorously questioning our thought processes. We may still be afflicted by the belief that we're really not able to think for ourselves, that we can't be cognitively autonomous. And so anther person's spirited rationalizations, however duplicitous, may trump our own reasoning, which we can adhere to only feebly.
• I can't take care of myself. Although parental "sheltering" isn't generally considered a form of abuse, to the degree that being overprotected stunts our initiative and gives us the message that we're unable to fend for ourselves, it can prompt us as adults to look indiscriminately for others to count upon. And of course such dependency increases our susceptibility to being deluded or duped.
Admittedly, there's not yet any hard-core research that corroborates the various psychological hypotheses for gullibility above. But I think it's only common sense to infer that significant correlations exist between the distorted negative tapes "running" automatically inside our heads and our regrettable gullibility to others. And I've little doubt that in years to come scientifically exploring the various ramifications of gullibility will inspire many a doctoral dissertation.
Note 1: Parts 4, 5, and 6 will suggest many ways that we can shield ourselves from being misled, or taken in--something that Greenspan refers to, half-facetiously, as "gullibility proofing." But I'm sure he'd agree that given human nature the best we can realistically hope to achieve is greater gullibility resistance.
Note 2: If you could relate to this post and think others might as well, please consider sending them its link.
Note 3: If you'd like to check out other posts I've done for Psychology Today online—on a broad variety of psychological subjects—click here.
© 2009 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
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