Summary
- Not all of us are born with high self-esteem. Sometimes we just feel we are undeserving of goodness, success, or pleasure. It doesn’t even make sense, but we don’t like ourselves. We are the very person we don’t like and even hate. Of course we can’t run away from ourselves, so we live with this “person” for years and years. We want things to change, but we don’t know how.
- Childhood experiences affect our emotional wiring.
- Our emotional connection with the world is greatly influenced by how our parents taught us to feel about it. - When we are little, we are in a stage of learning. Especially in the early stages, we learned the emotions of shame and embarrassment first. This means when there are conflicts or harmful events occurring around us, we would actually tend to attribute it to ourselves. If our parents are fighting all the time, we might think it’s our fault that they are fighting. So…we are bad people because of it. I know this doesn’t make any sense, but this is how we emotionally learn at a young age.
- The experience doesn’t limit to just parental conflict, but parents’ attitude towards the child or child’s exclusion from his/her peers. The child understands the situation as “I did something bad to cause the problem, so I am a bad person.” If not explained to the child, the child grows up into thinking he/she does not deserve good things because he/she is a bad person.
- Understanding our emotional learning process helps us to go back and relearn the previous bad experiences we were in. We can’t choose our past, but we can choose our future.
- Show compassion to yourself isn’t weakness. It’s part of learning how to take care of yourself.
- Only the strong can afford to show compassion, vulnerability, and grace. Compassion on yourself is to let yourself understand that you are suffering, and you need time to heal your wounds. Wounds, if not treated, might become infected and cause you to lose a limb. Compassion is taking the proper measures to tend to the emotional wounds before it reaches an irreversible stage.
- Take care of yourself emotionally, so you don’t pass on your emotional scars. - Your scars are not only your baggage it’s also baggage for the people closest to you. If you don’t work through your emotional health, it will hurt everyone that is close to you.
- Write the Top 3 reasons why you don’t think you deserve a good life. Pretend that you are your best friend going through the same Top 3 issues, and give grace and love him/her with all you have.
- It’s the hardest thing to do to show compassion to yourself when you hate yourself. Be patient and gentle with yourself.
