A very famous psychologist, the developer of REBT therapy, Albert Ellis, had some thoughts about the word “should.” Ellis had the salty mouth of a sailor and thought nothing of dropping F bombs back in the day when this wasn’t done. He would say to clients, “stop shoulding on yourself.” Say it to yourself and you’ll notice that it sounds like you are saying “stop shitting on yourself.” It gets your attention!
Why would Ellis focus on this one tiny thing, saying “should?” Because when we “should” on ourselves, we often
- bury ourselves under condemnation and shame
- feel like something has life-or-death importance
- give the thing we’re “shoulding” a moral weight
The same is true, by the way, of Should’s cousins “ought to” and “must.”
“Shoulding” can lead to shame
For trauma survivors, shoulding on ourselves can lead to shame which can be a trigger to
- self-destructive acts
- and to emotional dysregulation
Think about someone who thinks, “I shouldn’t have eaten those cookies. That broke my diet.” Then they feel so ashamed and bad that they decide they might as well eat a quart of ice cream, too. Those are some serious side effects of such a small word!
“Shoulding” can trap us
Specifically, thinking in terms of should prevents us from seeing all our options and may keep us from seeing the reality of our present circumstances.
Let me give an example. If someone has the thought, “My abuser should apologize to me” or “My abuser must apologize to me before I can move past the abuse,” that person is now locked into a limited outlook. In this thinking, there is only one acceptable way of moving forward. It rules out other potential ways of addressing the situation. If a person has this belief and their abuser dies without ever giving that apology, what is the trauma survivor to do? They now have no way to move forward and heal, according to this mindset.
“Shoulding” hijacks our energy
Additionally, a lot of our energy gets hijacked when we are in “should” thinking. We can protest all we want that something “should” be different, but that protest doesn’t actually change anything.
So “shoulding” on ourselves has at least 3 negative outcomes:
- it can lead to shame, which can lead to emotional dysregulation and self-destructive acts
- it can deplete our energy in unproductive ways
- it traps us by limiting the possible options to only one acceptable option. Another way to say this is
- it can keep us focused on only way to see an issue
The fixes for shoulding on yourself are pretty simple, although remember that simple doesn’t always mean easy.
Fix #1: Change your language
Ellis recommended using different language. Instead of saying “should,” Ellis would suggest you re-phrase this to something like, “It would be nice if.” Another option would be to say something like, “I would like” instead of “should.”
Let’s take a moment to apply this to a personal statement. If I think to myself, “I should work out,” but I don’t actually exercise, then I have this feeling of moral failure. It’s a yucky, heavy feeling that might cause me to get really down on myself and then I’m so depressed I don’t have the energy to work out the next day.
Now let’s try re-wording it like Ellis suggested. “It would be nice if I worked out.” Yes, it really would! I would benefit from exercising. But if I don’t follow through with exercising, the stakes feel a lot lower. I don’t have a sense of moral failure that then spirals into a deep depression. Do you see how this one small trick can help you be more emotionally regulated in your life?
So feeling a moral component to something that isn’t inherently a moral issue is one trap of shoulding on yourself. Another is that shoulds can narrow your possibilities and lock you into suboptimal outcomes. Let’s go back to the example that an abuser must apologize before I can move on and heal and live a full life.
Fix #2: Question yourself
With that belief, there are no other options. In order to discover if there are other options, we might ask ourselves a “what if” question such as “what if this thought or belief isn’t true?” or “what if he never does apologize?” This can help us step back and begin to notice other options.
This is actually something that I experienced many years ago. A therapist asked me, “What if he doesn’t apologize?” And my immediate reaction was denial and anger. He had to! Didn’t he? As I sat there with this very uncomfortable question, it became clear to me that he didn’t have to apologize and might not. That hadn’t even been a possibility in my thinking. Now it was a possibility, so I had to figure out an answer to that question, “What if he doesn’t apologize?”
What the question did was allow me to take some control back that I had unintentionally allowed the abuser to have. Again, I was angry. It was so unjust! But also, I couldn’t just stop living to wait for something that I might never get. And, incidentally, I never did get that apology before he died.
Because of that question, I was able to reclaim my life and live it on my terms where before my energy was focused on protesting that he “should” do something. I want for you to be able to reclaim your power and your life, too.