When should’s not good
In psychology, the “real self” and the “ideal self” are terms used to describe parts of your personality. The real self is who you actually are and incorporates how you think, feel, look and behave day to day, while your ideal self represents who you want to be. Your ideal self is an idealised image coming from the expectations of others, including family, community, culture and your own desires for yourself. While this is all normal and natural, issues can arise when the difference between who you are and who you want to be is too great.
As a result, the path to becoming the self you would like to be can be fraught with the conflict between who you are now and who you would like to become. At the heart of this conflict is what Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, calls the “tyranny of should”.
To achieve the goal of becoming your ideal self, she suggests, you erect a system of “should”, a range of things that you should do to become that person. While these shoulds might include what you eat, what you wear, where
