Transcriber: Rami Nicola Srour Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, I invite you to close your eyes.
Have you ever had the thought
"I am not good enough"?
With your eyes closed,
if you've ever had that thought, I invite you to raise your hand.
So, keeping your hands in the air,
just open your eyes and look around the room
so you see what I see,
which is a room full of self-stigma experts.
So, can you get in touch with how it makes you feel?
What's the experience when you're believing the thought
"I am not good enough"?
Notice how it limits you, how it makes you small,
how in your mind, you compare yourself to other people who are better than you.
Notice all the things you believe you can't do or you can't be
when you're believing that thought "I am not good enough."
This is the impact of self-stigma.
Quite simply, self-stigma is negative self-judgments,
and it results in guilt, in shame, in self-rejection and self-loathing.
Self-stigma, it's universal.
It's a human condition.
I have worked in over 30 countries
in Africa, in Asia, Latin America and Europe,
and in every community in which I've worked,
I've found self-stigma.
Whether it's young people or older people,
whether it's men or women,
people living with HIV,
people who have experienced violence,
TEDx speakers,
people ...
It's universal.
Even healthcare professionals.
Now I'd like to share
a little bit of my own experience with self-stigma with you.
So I had returned home, just returned home to Ireland,
with my two children both born here in Chiang Mai,
where I had lived and worked for 12 years,
and I was going through a painful divorce from my husband of 15 years at the time.
And just a bit of context,
Ireland is a country - quite a predominantly Catholic country,
and divorce is relatively new,
so my number one priority
was settling my two children into their new environment.
So, I was walking home from school one day,
it was early in the year,
and I was walking home
and this really nice friendly mom came up beside me,
and she asked me a really simple question.
She asked me, "What does your husband do?"
(Sighs)
It was like time stood still.
I was filled with this feeling;
it was like an alien feeling of shame all over my body,
and my thoughts were filled with "If I tell her I'm divorcing,
she won't let her child play with my child."
"She will think my children are a bad influence on her."
"She'll think there is something wrong with me."
"She'll think I am a failure."
"There is something wrong with me."
"I am a failure."
So, I answered the question,
and I said, "Well, he is a scientist."
And it was true, he was a scientist,
but what I didn't tell her was that I was divorcing.
I couldn't get away from her quick enough.
I spent the next few days questioning all of those beliefs,
looking at what I was thinking and believing,
and I realized a few really important things.
The first one: I wasn't a failure.
I also realized that I had no idea
what she had been thinking or believing about me.
I had no idea what she thought of me.
So those thoughts that I was thinking
were my thoughts.
It was self-stigma.
Now, stigma and self-stigma
affects some groups and some people more than it affects others,
and having worked in HIV/AIDS for over 20 years,
I realized that we had a big gap in our thinking about stigma.
So I spent the last decade
doing research and designing programs
to better understand self-stigma
and to work with vulnerable groups of people
to try and deal with self-stigma.
So, looking at HIV and self-stigma,
the research is so clear:
Self-stigma negatively affects our health and our well-being.
It leads in increases in depression.
It lowers our quality of life.
It lowers our self-esteem.
It stops us taking job opportunities and education opportunities.
And it can even mean not taking life-saving medication,
especially when I believe I don't deserve it or I am not worthy.
From my own research on HIV,
I started looking at the patterns and the thinking and the beliefs
of people living with HIV,
and I started to see some common thoughts,
thoughts like, "I'm inferior,"
"I don't deserve it" - or "I do deserve it" -
"I am not good enough,"
"They think I'm dirty."
So in its worst form,
it's like this is what we're living with
day after day,
in the secret world of our thoughts.
It's like one thing on the inside,
and then we present a totally different face to the world outside.
From the research, something really surprised me.
For people living with HIV,
I found that they stigmatized themselves three times more
than society actually stigmatizes people living with HIV.
So what that means is what I think you think about me
is often - not always - but is often not true.
So what can help?
So I started using an approach called "The Work of Byron Katie" in my own life
and then in the groups of people I was working with.
It's simply an approach of self-enquiry,
a way of identifying and questioning
the thoughts that underpin self-stigma and stress.
It's four questions and a way of turning thoughts around
so you can see things from a different perspective.
From our work in Zimbabwe and in Vietnam,
we started working with people under beliefs around guilt,
around shame,
around sexuality,
around body,
around my fears of disclosing to others,
and around what other people think.
We were able to see -
With research supporting us,
we were able to see improvements in depression,
we were able to see improvements in quality of life,
we watched people be able to engage in daily activities
where they hadn't before.
As the self-stigma faded, people started to pursue their dreams,
take opportunities,
and life circumstances for them remained the same.
So last year,
I worked with a beautiful, young, Vietnamese woman,
a former sex worker,
and she was carrying a lot of self-stigma and shame.
She had a 10-year-old son,
and her biggest fear was that her son would find out
that she had been a sex worker.
She believed that if he knew, if he found that out about her,
he wouldn't love her anymore.
I sat with her and asked her the questions of the work.
I asked her, "Is it true?
If he finds out, he won't love you anymore."
She said, "Yes."
I asked her, "Can you absolutely know it's true
that if he founds out he won't love you anymore?"
She said, "No."
So I asked her,
"How do you react, what happens when you believe the thought
that if he finds out, he won't love you anymore?"
She described her inner world.
She described nights of crying.
She described a life full of shame,
full of fear that somebody somewhere would recognize her and tell her son.
She was playing tapes of images in her mind of her son finding out
and not living with her and not speaking to her again.
She had thoughts of taking her own life.
She was living a life
not being able to accept the kindness that was there
and not able to receive love even when it was being offered.
I asked her, "Who would you be without the thought
that if he found out, he wouldn't love you?"
She said she found peace,
connection with herself
and connection with her son.
So turning the the thought around,
looking at it from a different perspective:
If he found out, he would love you.
So I watched as she considered this possibility,
and I watched as she had tears rolling down her face
and she started -
for the first time, she could see herself as this young, vulnerable woman
who turned to sex work to support her family back in the province
who without that support wouldn't have had food.
She could see herself as brave, as kind, as loving towards her family,
and she felt self-compassion and self-love.
Without the self-stigma and the shame,
she was able to consider the possibility
that he would love her, he could love her,
if he knew this about her.
Now, I am a practical person,
and I believe that change starts within.
It starts with me and it starts with you.
And today, I would like to invite you all
to have an experience of this for yourself.
So, I invite you to again close your eyes
and to think of a situation
when you ever had the thought
somebody thinks you are not good enough.
It might have been someone whose approval you really, really seek.
It could be a parent or a boss or a friend.
It could be something that happened 20 years ago,
it could be something that happened yesterday.
A time in your life
when you felt that somebody thought you weren't good enough.
Just notice what that person is saying or doing
at the time that you have that thought.
So just sharing, I want to share my situation with you.
So, recently I had a meeting with someone whose approval means a lot to me,
someone I really, really love,
and I was sharing some work with her
that is work I've been doing for years that was really close to my heart.
And in this moment we were together, she raised her voice and she said,
"I just don't understand it."
So that is my moment.
So as I walk through the enquiry,
I invite you to track along with your own situation in your mind
and answer the questions for yourself.
So, is it true she thinks you are not good enough?
In my case, it's a she.
So, just looking for a yes or a no.
For me, that's a yes.
So she thinks you are not good enough.
Can you absolutely know that it's true?
Again, looking for a yes or no.
That's a no for me. I can't absolutely know.
So, how do you react, what happens
when you believe the thought that she thinks you are not good enough?
So, just notice what happens for you.
And for me, I notice I feel sadness.
I can't really hear what she is saying.
I start to defend and justify and explain,
and my words are all coming out jumbled up.
And then I feel really frustrated -
I'm frustrated with myself; I'm frustrated with her.
I notice I put her up here, on a pedestal,
like she is superior, and put me down here,
like I am inferior and weak and not intelligent.
And I feel like giving up.
And actually in that moment, I do give up,
and it feels really painful.
So who would you be without the thought,
just for a second,
without the thought that she thinks you're not good enough?
It's like we're wearing that thought like a hat,
and we're just taking that hat off and just placing it gently down
just to notice,
Who would you be without the thought she thinks you are not good enough?
And I notice for me, it's I would feel calmer,
I could start to hear the words that she is saying,
and I would feel connected to myself and more connected to her.
So turning that thought around,
looking at it from a different perspective:
So she thinks I am good enough.
So, just consider that for yourselves.
So now I am just looking for some examples of that.
So for me, I noticed in that meeting,
she never said I wasn't good enough.
I noticed she was giving me some feedback.
It was feedback I didn't want to hear,
but even now I noticed that it was actually very good feedback.
I see that in that same situation,
she said to me, "Your work is amazing,
and I will continue to support it."
So turning that thought around again,
again looking at different perspective,
this time to myself:
So I think I am not good enough.
(Sighs)
So is it me or is it her?
That would be me.
And I notice when I'm thinking that,
that I discount my work totally;
I devalue my work and discount my work.
So I invite you
the next time you have the thought that somebody is judging you,
ask yourself,
Can you absolutely know for sure that they are judging you?
Could it be that you are judging you?
Could it be?
You know,
questioning your thinking like this,
it's a powerful way to move from self-stigma
to self-worth.
It's like a retraining of the brain,
like a development of new neural pathways,
and the result is freedom and self-love and compassion.
Now, I am not the same person I was 10 years ago,
when I returned home from Thailand to Ireland.
I now recognize self-stigma.
When it appears,
the difference is I now know what to do,
how to question what I am thinking and believing.
And that woman who asked me that question 10 years ago in Ireland,
she is now one of my really good friends.
I have come to see that no one and nothing
can change what I am thinking and believing about me,
except me.
You can say, "Nadine you are amazing!"
"Nadine you are brilliant!"
"Nadine you are inspirational!"
But if I don't believe that about me,
then I can't hear you.
And even worse,
I may even think that you are lying.
So it's back to me.
And the power, the beauty of it being back to me
is that as I become aware of my self-judgments,
that means that power is 100% back to me
in terms of the possibility to change.
I don't need to wait for you to love me or like me or appreciate me or value me.
I do that for myself.
I don't need to wait for the stigma around me to stop.
I am the one who stops the stigma.
Do you believe everything you think?
(Thai) Thank You.
(Applause)