PUA, the full name (Pick-up Artist, strike-up artist), has gradually evolved into a synonym for emotional suppression, attack, and control. The definition of “self-PUA” is: applying PUA techniques to oneself, and destroying oneself by denying oneself. Self-confidence to achieve emotional control of self. In short, it is self-loathing and self-deprecating.
A classic example of a film and television drama is Tong Xiangyu in “Wulin Gaiden”. She often belittles herself and puts the “forehead wrong” on her lips whenever something happens, and is recommended by netizens as “the predecessor of self-PUA.”
Although PUA has been criticized as one of the “buzzwords abused”, the 580 million reads on Weibo may reflect the dilemma of modern people and self-confrontation.
How do modern people conduct self-PUA?
In self-PUA, when you act as your own judge, the trial strength is only stronger, not the strongest.
1. As long as you have a premonition that something will be messed up, you will first claim to be non-recyclable garbage, national first-class waste, and the world’s No. 1 crotch.
Regardless of messing up one thing, or presuming that one will mess up one thing, I’m used to finding the cause from my own body. One of the common operations is to arrogantly post to Moments about one’s own food, even if it is sometimes internally rolled, I don’t feel that I’ve been rolled, but I’m dissatisfied with myself and feel that I haven’t done enough, and the overtime is not long enough. This kind of high degree of self-doubt and self-criticism is equivalent to “destroying people’s mind, and chronic suicide is invisible.”
2. Even if you have a small achievement, you will doubt “Is it true”, “Am I worthy”, and “I feel false.”
People who are accustomed to PUA tend to have a strong sense of shame about themselves. American clinical psychotherapist Efron believes that everyone may humiliate themselves, and some appropriate shame can help us reflect on and adjust our behavior. However, if you allow shame to overly devalue your true self, you may suffer from the “impersonator syndrome” proposed by psychologist Pauline Clancy. Even if you achieve some results, you will doubt in your heart that you are not worthy of it. Of counterfeit goods.
3. Not necessarily social phobia, but most of them have phobia of being exaggerated.
Resist reasonable and positive feedback and hope that you are a good person, but in fact it is difficult to accept others saying that you are great. Leaders say that they are great, that may be perfunctory work in the workplace; colleagues say that they are great, that should be workplace acting; strangers say that they are great, it is because they have entered into mutual praise and praise. In short, most of the compliments of others are just polite and can’t be taken seriously.
4. I am sorry to be born as a female: females are better at self-PUA than males.
It is difficult for women to accept compliments comfortably, while men are more confident in the work they have done. Pauline Clancy found that many women who have achieved academic achievements, even if they are recognized by colleagues and authority figures, do not feel a sense of accomplishment in their hearts. This is similar to the discovery of the social psychologist Deos: Women always have lower expectations of their ability to successfully complete various tasks than men, and tend to attribute success to luck, while men are more likely to attribute it to themselves Own ability. If they fail, women will attribute the failure to their inability, and men will think that they are not lucky enough.
Why are people stuck in self-PUA and unable to extricate themselves?
Obviously, social networks have expanded the scope of “comparison” between themselves and others. Every day I wake up and open my eyes and brush my mobile phone. The target people are first all kinds of handsome men and beauties, fashion big Vs, and knowledgeable jokes, and then the self in the mirror. And if a person is too keen to compare with the outside world, and wants to judge whether he meets the standards of others and the outside world as a judgment of whether he is worthy, he will easily lose his mentality and belittle himself. But as Han Bingzhe mentioned in “The Burnout Society”, the current society of merit is a society of self-exploitation. People want to pursue freedom, but freedom becomes the strongest tool to exploit themselves. In order to improve efficiency and pursue performance, people must not only compare with others, but also with themselves.
On the other hand, personal atomization allows modern people to focus more on themselves. They pay more attention to themselves than in the past, hope that they can control everything, and have unreasonable expectations for perfection-as a result, people have only two kinds of value judgments about themselves, either perfection or failure. There is no intermediate zone for transitional buffers. . Under “the best investment is to invest in yourself”, people constantly check themselves to make up for their vacancies. In order to make yourself “better”, enlarge every wrinkle and every defect of yourself.
Thus, a never-ending self-PUA began. People constantly want to make progress while constantly questioning themselves; while they want to pursue perfection, they question their own abilities. In the end, when the development of the situation got out of control, he furiously and powerlessly took all the problems on himself.
In addition, family education and childhood trauma are also causes of self-PUA. We have to admit that East Asian society is not good at praise. Many children live under pressure from their parents and relatives when they are young, and they rarely receive recognition and praise.
The clinical social worker Stacey’s research pointed out that because children depend on their parents, if parents accuse the child of nothing or doing nothing well, then this will become the truth in the child’s heart. If things go on like this, people will no longer think about “where do they have problems”, but completely deny themselves, think they can’t, and enter a new round of self-PUA vicious circle.
How do we escape self PUA?
If you want to get out of the self-PUA trap, you must first allow yourself to be an ordinary person instead of a superman. Don’t be too demanding of yourself, don’t be so tight, allow yourself to do things you can’t do, and allow yourself to ask for help from others. In addition, we have also summarized the following five suggestions to stop self-PUA based on the research and suggestions of some clinical psychology and sociologists. Welcome to refer to.
1. Don’t take excessive self-criticism as a motivation to encourage yourself, such as “Be more cruel to yourself” and “Don’t let yourself go easily.” Research has found that people who are too demanding of themselves tend to perform worse because their time is spent on self-criticism. You can set up more reward mechanisms and give yourself more positive feedback to better face setbacks and failures.
2. Face your own strengths and weaknesses correctly (you can make a list yourself, or ask your friends what you think of yourself), don’t say you are stupid because a plan needs to be revised, and don’t want to be automatic because of a small mistake in work Resignation (this is unreasonable and cost-effective).
3. Completion is more important than perfection. If you want to improve the status quo, you can ask more “what to do” and less “why”. Because if you ask yourself “Why don’t you want to do it”, you may come up with ideas such as “because today is Monday” and “because I can’t do it” that are not helpful to the current situation; but if you ask yourself “what you can do” and “how you should do it”, say Uncertainty can find practical ways to cope.
4. Treat yourself like a good friend. Imagine that when your good friend loses confidence in himself and keeps degrading himself, you will comfort him instead of agreeing to him; so the next time you call yourself a trash, ask yourself if a good friend faces the same Situation, what would you do.
5. Staying away from self-PUA is not easy to do overnight, we need to constantly and consciously correct it. Realizing that I am self-PUA has already completed a very important step. So the next time you feel that you are worthless, you can first say to yourself (or let your friends say to you): “Stop self-PUA, stop self-PUA, stop self-PUA.”
