Learn to like yourself
Do you know that our actions and who we are as a person are not the same thing? The thing is, even though I don’t always do the right thing, it doesn’t affect who I am. I know that I am loved and that I continue to be a good person. I made mistakes in my life, I know that I will make a lot of them in the future, but I still continue to love myself.
If you like yourself, you’ll be fine, even if no one else likes you. When you start liking yourself, other people will start liking you too. Loving yourself doesn’t mean being proud. Loving yourself means accepting yourself as the Lord created you. We all need behavioral changes, but accepting yourself as God’s creation is essential to becoming an emotionally healthy person.
If we only learn to like ourselves, we will see miracles that will allow us to get rid of the feeling of shame. Let me explain what I mean.
Many people live under the yoke of constant failure, I call it the loser’s curse. They never succeed. Everything is always wrong with them, something always breaks down, something doesn’t work out; they are always sad, upset and disappointed. They do not like themselves, they are constantly oppressed by a sense of shame.
For a long time, I did not like myself as a person, I did not like my character, temperament, behavior. I didn’t want to be as direct and defiant as I was. I didn’t want to be rude and harsh.
I wanted to be like one of my friends – sweet, kind and gentle. I did not understand that God gave her such a character, but He gave me completely different character traits, a different temperament. Because of this, I did not like myself and tried to change myself. I wanted to be more like my friend, I wanted to be an ideal woman, an ideal wife and mother who grows her own tomatoes and preserves them herself, cooks jam, mends the clothes of the household, etc.
Of course, I couldn’t do anything. After all, I could not become a completely different person. And in the end, I had to accept myself as I am. I began to understand that even though I change in some areas of my life, my temperament will never change.
A person who is ashamed of himself has many complex internal problems, such as depression, loneliness, alienation. Shame is the root of various manic disorders, for example, drug addiction, alcoholism and other forms of chemical dependence, eating disorders – bulimia, anorexia, obesity; cravings for gambling and extravagance; various sexual perversions and so on. This list can go on and on.
For example, people who work excessively, so-called workaholics, suffer from a destructive manic disorder, which is very common in modern society. They work so much that they never enjoy life. They consider themselves irresponsible if they do not work day and night. And there are people (and I was like that too) – as soon as they start to like life, they immediately start to feel a sense of shame.
Another example of a destructive disorder is perfectionism. This is an unhealthy desire to achieve perfect results in every little thing, and if a person fails to do something “completely”, he falls into depression. Some people suffer from perfectionism because they have suffered a lot in the past. They try to be perfect in order to attract people’s attention and sympathy – something they were deprived of in the past. People with this disorder are doomed to failure. They set impossible goals for themselves and make their lives and the lives of others miserable.
Workaholics and perfectionists are just two types of people who don’t like themselves the way they are. Shame about what happened once, in the past, led to the fact that they stopped liking themselves. Remember that your business and your personality are not the same thing. You are a unique, special person, you have talents and abilities that God gave you, so despite all the mistakes made in the past, enjoy life and love yourself.
Author: Joyce Mayer
