Instead of expressing disappointment, frustration, and anger outwards, you turn it inwards and punish yourself for your mistakes.
The simplest possible translation for this is “being hard on yourself.” You are the first to criticise yourself, and often stop yourself from doing things because you're worried you'll make a mistake, or that you'll be judged/ridiculed by others.
The closest non-psychodynamic phrase I can think of is self-flagellation. People who self-flagellate see every personal imperfection as a failure, and then beat themselves up for letting themselves make mistakes. They believe they are bad or defective people, and therefore deserve to be punished for their mistakes, no matter how trivial the mistake might be.
They will often call themselves stupid, weak, or not good enough. If they also tend to humourisation, they will often make harsh or cruel jokes about themselves, instead of expressing their self-punishment more directly.
You often see this in adults who grew up under domineering parents or teachers with high standards. Reasoning and logical thinking are the last parts of the brain to develop, and this means that many children don’t yet understand why it’s important not to make mistakes, except that adults get angry with them all the time. Because they also haven’t yet developed mature methods of self-control and self-regulation, they mimic their parents’ punishing tone and use it against themselves to control their own behaviour.
In psychodynamics, this process is called internalisation, and in non-psychodynamics it’s called mimicry, learning-by-example, or monkey-see, monkey-do.
The fact that turning-against-the-self is “irrational” and doesn’t achieve its goals doesn’t also mean there is no logic to how turning-against-the-self develops and plays out.
The logic sometimes goes like this:
When my mother wants me to stop doing something, she makes me feel bad. So if I want to stop myself from doing something bad again, I have to make myself feel bad.
For people who have been bullied by either adults or other children, the logic often goes like this:
People make fun of me, but I don’t understand why. But if I make fun of myself whenever I do something stupid, maybe I’ll stop, and then people won’t make fun of my any more.
Adults will often express this as:
The sad part of turning against the self is that it doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to stop yourself from ever making a mistake, and the more vigilant you are, the more mistakes you find. Because, of course, the human mind always finds what it’s looking for.
But the person doesn’t know how else to deal with mistakes, and so the more mistakes they make, the more brutally they punish themselves. This will often continue until the person is ruthlessly vicious with themselves and spend nearly every waking moment criticising or actively punishing themselves.
My training is in psychodynamic therapy, but I don’t see any reason not to borrow good ideas from other modalities. So for people who rely on turning-against-the-self and self-flagellate all the time I recommend a form of exposure therapy I call Fucking-Up Practice.
The basic idea is to teach yourself that it’s okay to make mistakes or do “bad” things, by doing them intentionally. Obviously, this doesn’t mean doing things that are harmful to others, but to pick actions you punish yourself for, but that you rationally know are unimportant.
There are a few points to this exercise:
1. To observe how much resistance you feel to doing a supposedly “bad” thing.
2. To observe how disproportionate your reaction is once you've done it.
3. To observe how nobody else notices your mistake, or cares that you made it.
4. Notice that no thunderbolts are hurled to smite you.