posted April 19, 2022 06:57 AM            

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Originally posted by aquaguy91:
Another thing I have noticed is there is a lot of conflicting rhetoric out there about loving yourself versus changing yourself to measure up. People will tell you to just pull self love out of your arse and love yourself, but then in the next breath they will tell you to change everything about yourself in order to be more appealing to others.

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I agree that things can be unfair in life, but everyone is struggling somewhere. Even people that seem to have a perfect life.

I'm struggling with self love too. My mother is a depressed alcoholic and my father was a very angry man. In a lot of ways I was a target for their frustrations because I got good grades while they struggled when they were in school. I really triggered their insecurities. Now as an adult, I still struggle with feeling worthy of succes and good things in life because my parents always played down my achievements. And there is a deep feeling of shame attached to it.

posted April 19, 2022 05:41 PM            

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Originally posted by aquaguy91:
Why do people lie about and misrepresent the way self esteem works? As someone who grew up in an environment that didn't support my sense of self, I know how it works. So why do others lie to me and give me all this crap about how it comes from within? It's always been very clear to me just by watching others that people develop self image by seeing how others react to them. By that, I mean that confident people are confident because they have been getting the message that they are valuable and matter from a very early age. There's none of this bologna about the emotionally abused blacksheep of the family being as confident as the good looking frat boy who is popular and didn't come from a hopelessly effed up family.

To put it more simply, why does everyone tell me that I shouldn't be insecure about all the rejection I have dealt with in life? I know for a fact that the average person couldn't handle the level of isolation I have somehow coped with for years and years. Everyone is always in a relationship for the most part, but yet everyone insists that their relationships don't benefit their self esteem at all and all their good feelings about themselves just come from within. Sorry, I don't buy it.

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I totally agree with you on this. It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to develop self esteem if it was not mirrored and validated for you as a child. The rest of us feel like we have to earn the right to exist on this planet. But it's important to separate the rejection and sh** that happened to us from who we actually are. None of it was really about us, especially if we were kids at the time. Rejection is just other people projecting their own sh** onto you, or else it's just that you didn't fit into whatever plan they already had in their mind. For a long time I felt like rejection was just the theme of my life that I encountered over and over again and that I am fundamentally unlovable. I can't say I'm totally over it but I do see now that most if not all of the rejection wasn't even about me. It was just the people around me doing what they wanted to do and trying to get what they wanted in life (and discarding me when it turned out I wasn't the answer), and I was either a pawn in that plan or just not part of the plan.

I will say also that my romantic relationships have not been helpful to my self esteem. People always think they will be, I always think they will be, but they don't help much. That's just a lie society sells us. Maybe they help numb some things or help me repress some things. But those things don't go away. IME when you have a problem with self esteem nothing external really helps, and that's the kicker. It's like you get it from your family when you're young or you just have to struggle with trying to heal it. The problem is that when you have low self esteem you're going to attract/be attracted to people who are just the same and so you end up stuck in the same place with them instead of growing beyond it.

Also I read the part about your hamsters before and honestly anyone who tells you that is a f***ing d*bag and I would cut them out of my life if they had that attitude. What it says to me is that you're gentle and caring and sweet - more important qualities than so-called "masculinity". I remember a time I put up with a really critical and judgmental friend who said things like that and I naively internalized it. So stupid. I wish I had cut him out of my life sooner. It sounds like you're surrounded by sh**** people. I hope you can get somewhere with more open and accepting types. It's important to spend time with people who actually have integrity and good values that you share, and if there's no one around like that, it's better to be alone than to deal with crap people. I think when you are struggling with self esteem it's absolutely crucial to be extremely judicious about who you let into your life, because people can easily make it so much worse.

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Originally posted by PlutoWasHere:
I agree that things can be unfair in life, but everyone is struggling somewhere. Even people that seem to have a perfect life.

I'm struggling with self love too. My mother is a depressed alcoholic and my father was a very angry man. In a lot of ways I was a target for their frustrations because I got good grades while they struggled when they were in school. I really triggered their insecurities. Now as an adult, I still struggle with feeling worthy of succes and good things in life because my parents always played down my achievements. And there is a deep feeling of shame attached to it.

However, if I hang on to this pain and refuse to release myself from this burden that my parents have put on my shoulders, I'll be miserable for the rest of my life. It's something I need to work on if I want to be a happier person. I feel I owe that to myself. It's not easy, but nothing is going to change if I'm not going to try either. And the objective is not to change your personality, but it's getting rid of all the bagage that is holding you back. That's not your core personality, that's what the interaction with other people has given to you. It's something you can let go off because it's not you. And even if you can't let go of all the bagage, just being aware that it's there and that you're the one holding on to it is also important. For me, it all starts with self compassion.

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I completely agree with you Pluto. I also had a parent who envied my accomplishments and sabotaged them and wouldn't acknowledge or allow me to have achievements. There is a deep feeling of shame attached as a result. I'm just beginning to start to share those things again, at almost age thirty. And it's scary as sh** because I constantly think I'm going to be attacked if I do anything well.

It is totally about shedding the baggage. Zora Neale Hurston in her book Their Eyes Were Watching God likens it to peeling an onion: you have to peel away all the layers that aren't you. Get to the core of you. Of course, the core is a spiritual being that isn't just loveable, you ARE love itself. The mind/ego will stay stuck in its neurotic little obsessions with its pain, with its pain body as Eckhart Tolle puts it, but eventually you'll be able to observe those thoughts without getting attached to them. You'll recognize them as not really belonging to you.

A lot of time we are looking for confirmation bias and so we only see the rejection and ignore the acceptance. So there's a lot of cognitive reframing to do. Unfortunately if you don't do this then through LOA you'll keep encountering the same pattern.