This is the road to hell, to exhaustion (physically and mentally), and to unhappiness and suffering. It doesn't work for what we truly want in life, so I recommend stopping (duh!) doing any of the doing or ruminating on any of the thinking (permitting yourself only to write down what is going on in order to engage in completing the learning and thinking necessary to what is healthy and beneficial - but not allowing it at all otherwise).
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A LEARNED WAY TO "MOTIVATE"
Most of us learned that criticism and punishment were the way to get others and ourselves to do a correction and/or something we wanted them to do. (We are not bad for following what we learned, we need only choose to learn what is right and workable so that we can drop this fruitless strategy.) We saw that we corrected ourselves when the big people punished us, so we started doing things to avoid that punishment and to regain their love, which we desperately needed.
We learned that this worked so well that we started doing it to ourselves. Of course, part of that was to stop and correct ourselves before we got to the point where we would be punished by the adults. We certainly didn't want to incur the loss of their love and support anymore at all, ever - it was too painful to a child who could not survive without their support.
THE GREAT CONTRADICTION
It is interesting that some people who advocate compassion and understanding use the strategy of inflicting pain to get what they want, from themselves. They haven't reconciled the pieces of their life and beliefs so that they are a consistent whole.
A paraphrase of the classic blaming rebuke: "You heartless a-hole, you didn't give me compassion and reassurance. I don't want to be around you anymore!" [Classic punishment and certainly the opposite of giving the other person, who simply hadn't done what the person wanted, the compassion that she was demanding!!!]
BEING PUNITIVE: THE STRATEGY THAT "KEEPS ON GIVING"
This is the strategy that keeps on giving, but what it gives, besides pain to others, is pain to ourselves. If we engage in this, we will constantly be shooting ourselves with pain and unhappiness. It is the opposite of compassion, which is the road to kindness.
THE MECHANISMS
We use various means to inflicting pain, suffering on ourselves. Most of the emotions involved here are variations of suffering to cause one to do "the right thing".
The correction through pain/suffering mechanisms:
Shame,
Blame/faulting,
Guilt,
Regret,
Remorse,
Revenge/getting even/retribution (an illusion)
BLIND TO IT
We play the punishment game on ourselves and others, but we don't see it. We are down inside the game, not seeing that it is a poor, less workable game. So we try to win at the wrong game, which is actually unwinnable overall. In this case, it is best to get above this game and to just play "god games" rather than right/wrong/good/bad/fault/blame games.
INFLICTING HARM
We inflict all sorts of pain on ourselves, not realizing it, in order to inflict pain on others in a vain effort to change a piece of the world out there.
And, like many poor games, we sometimes get what we think we want, so we have reinforced the idea that the game works, not realizing that the cost is greater than than the benefits of the occasional wins.
We rant and rave (a version of a child's temper tantrum) as a way of escalating the punishment up to the level where we think we'll force someone to do what we want (or at least to give us the attention and artificial sense of importance we seek). And we think it will save us from some threat that we have totally made up that is not real, and certainly not getting upset about enough to go into the fight/flight response that ruins our body if overused.
We seek to avoid the imaginary threat of "being taken advantage of", of course, but we don't have to be paranoid about it or assume that it means something other than 'we simply didn't implement the right strategy or we simply could not control the outcome' and that it doesn't mean a fig newton about our personal worth.
THE SOLUTION
Learn the key lessons (you cannot get to peace and happiness without implementing these)
Stop it
Commit to never doing it again and declare it a 100% non-workable game.
yourself a pass or a 'this time I can handle it', because you have a routine that
is stuck in there until you remove it and replace it.
