Self Worth & Confirmation Bias

Do you ever wonder why you put up with people treating you badly? I certainly do, and I’ve given it quite a bit of thought. I’ve spent hours and weeks and months and honestly years sifting through both my recent and distant past, wondering how I could have possibly put up with the things I did, for the amount of time that I put up with them. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but good lord is it hard not to think about somehow traveling back in time, grabbing myself by the shoulders and shaking all the past versions of myself until she realizes how much she deserves better, until she realizes that the way that she’s being treated isn’t fair or right or okay in the slightest. So why didn’t these past versions of me say enough is enough, and get herself out of these situations?

It’s (mostly) thanks to a little something called confirmation bias. 

If you don’t know what confirmation bias is, the general idea is that when you have a preconceived notion or idea or thought about something, you’ll subconsciously seek out evidence that confirms whatever you already thought and ignore information that might suggest otherwise. I learned about the concept in school and found it interesting enough, but it wasn’t until I realized how applicable this was to my own life that I really started thinking deeply about it. 

Up until somewhat recently, my brain was not a very fun place to be (and you can see how that might be problematic, considering I can’t exactly leave my mind behind). The overall gist is that I really did not like myself for a bunch of different reasons, reasons that I lived in fear would be discovered by the people around me and prove to everyone (really myself) once and for all that I was a bad person and that people should not want to be around me. 

Of course, these fears were absurd and completely unfounded, but I was convinced that I was inherently unlovable, incapable, stupid and ugly, and I felt horrible guilt because I felt I had “tricked” other people into thinking I was not those things. I had a completely negative (and false) sense of self, absolutely zero self-worth, and because of it I put up with bad, occasionally downright horrendous, behavior.

Remember when I said confirmation bias was all about subconsciously seeking out evidence to support something you already believe? That’s exactly what I did with people.

Now, this is not to say that every person in my life at this point in time was awful and treating me poorly. I had and still have a wonderful support system full of people who really, truly love and care about me, and I’m so grateful for that. But at the time, I thought these people were the outliers, that being treated with kindness and being met with friendship and love was a stroke of luck that I did not deserve, and one that could be wrenched away at any moment. Their behavior did not match up with what I thought I deserved, what I believed to be true about myself, and so I would twist the story until it did.

I told myself that eventually they would see me as I saw myself, that they would realize I had tricked them into believing I was better than I was and be angry, or that they already secretly knew I was awful, and were thus only nice out of pity. Sounds depressing, right? But that’s what confirmation bias will do when you really don’t like yourself - it will convince you that you can’t believe the evidence you see right in front of your eyes (that people care about you, like you, and that you aren’t some horrible, disgusting goblin that people are nice to out of pity) all because it does not match up with what you already believed.

So not only did I twist any sort of evidence that contradicted what I thought to fit my own perspective, I also subconsciously sought out people who would confirm these fears.

I sought out people who would treat me badly, so my brain could tell me “see, I told you so! You deserve it, and everyone knows it.” 

I couldn’t hold a grudge to save my life, because even if what they did was awful, they only did it because they knew I deserved it, and at least they were still willing to be my friend, even knowing that, right? Wrong. Very, very, very wrong. 

That’s how deep the confirmation bias runs - I literally would gaslight myself into being the one that apologized for being upset, because of course we both knew I deserved whatever they had done, so how dare I be upset about this horrible thing? 

When friends growing up would actively go after or date the person I had a crush on knowingly, but I couldn’t be mad because of course, they would never have been interested in me anyway and my friends know that, so why should I be upset? 

When guys would flirt with me in private, but wouldn’t talk to me in public and/or would act shocked (or flat out deny it) if anyone else called them on it, but I couldn’t be upset because at least he was giving me attention, at least he thought I was hot, even if he wouldn’t admit that to anyone else. And how could I blame him, when we both knew I was clearly not the kind of woman you want to show off?

When my roommate would constantly put me down and tell me over and over how lucky I was to have her in my life, how lucky I was that as such a mess of a person I had her constant guidance and criticism, and of course I couldn’t be mad because we both knew how incapable I was, and wasn’t I glad someone cared enough about me to point it out and to “help” me?

The list could go on and on and on and on, but I think we get the point. It wasn’t until the ripe age of 23 that I even started considering that maybe I was not quite the horrible monster I had made myself out to be. Which quickly led to a bigger question -

If I was no monster, how could I have deserved the things that were said and done to me? How could I continue to put up with the behavior I had long ago accepted, when I could no longer spin it in my brain to feel deserved? When I realized that it was, in fact, never deserved, not even a little bit? 

Now, the shift in mindset did not happen overnight. There was a major epiphany, sure, but that was followed by months and years of smaller epiphanies, moments of clarity about past behaviors, moments of anger at the way that I had allowed myself to be taken advantage of when I didn't know any better, moments of rage at the people who took advantage of me, despite and because they did in fact know better. 

It has been a long road, getting to a point where my confirmation bias is the opposite of what it once was. Getting to a point where I love and am obsessed with myself, and thus seek out people who are going to treat me well, who are going to love me and see me as I now know myself to be.

It may be impossible to know exactly how and why other people, too, put up with treatment that is unfair, but the one thing I know for sure is that the more love I pour into myself, the more love the world seems to reflect back to me. So while it may not be an exact science, if the world continues to confirm my bias, to confirm what I know to be true, which is that I am a good person who is deserving of good things, I’d say it’s at least worth thinking about.