What sets our self-esteem?
How much of ourselves are we embarrassed to show?
How much do we hide?
This is our self-esteem!
If we hide a lot of our true nature, our honest feelings and thoughts, then we feel differently, and we call this low self-esteem.
If we feel good about everything that we are, and don’t hide anything, then we feel powerful, and we call it high self-esteem!
WE DON’T SET THIS
Our self-esteem is set up by others. We have no say in it.
We all start out proud of everything that we are.
We felt purpose. We didn’t even wonder about the enormous power we lived with.
We were supposed to get approval and support in our own learning to manage life.
If that’s how we got treated, then we got to keep our powerful self-esteem.
If instead though, we suffered constant criticism and correction, then we came to doubt our own qualities.
Whatever we became ashamed of, we concealed!
It’s others who convince us we should be ashamed.
This process sets our self-esteem lower!
Life comes from inside! We are all designed to manage through our own efforts.
As with all life, we are supposed to get support and encouragement in living through the efforts of our own self-drive.
That’s what should have happened to us.
That’s what happens with all other life.
When we humans learn to listen to our own instincts and once again provide support to our young instead of taking over, we can all have good self-esteem.
Life can not only work with us finding our own way, it works properly, as it was designed to do!
When we can allow that once more, we can join hands in joyful song again.
Until then, we will suffer the damage of partial disconnection of our inner lives!
That’s what happens with low self-esteem.
When we become ashamed of our own qualities, and then conceal them, we physically disconnect from those parts of our inner lives.
That’s why we can’t feel our feelings, instincts, or needs!
How much we conceal though, can be changed.
That changes our self-esteem!
It’s what we do in tharapy!
In that process of repair and therapy, we stop being ashamed and begin to be proud.
Revealing our secrets changes us.
We become unafraid.
We begin to live out loud!
We find it easy to stand up for ourselves.
Life becomes fun, and joy becomes a big part of our existence.
Why would we be ashamed of some of our qualities?
Well, we shouldn’t be!
Someone caused us to be ashamed. They didn’t understand the consequence. They meant no harm.
They actually believed they were helping!
Every life however, has a natural right to be itself!
Life comes from within! Everything good about people comes from inside.
Our needs, instincts, and feelings all work together, causing us to instinctively need others, and consequently to treat them well.
That’s how humans are supposed to be.
Throughout nature, all new life gets support in managing their growth and learning through the power and energy of their own efforts.
That is how life is designed to work.
But, mankind does less and less of that with every generation.
We take over! We don’t support. Not any more.
Our world is demonstrating the consequences. Conflict is everywhere! We isolate ourselves from each other.
Our young get no support in their own efforts.
The result is most of us doubt our own ability to exist on our own terms.
We come to view our own self-drive as stubbornness and being a bad person.
We weren’t allowed to have our own natural strength!
Our own chosen path and efforts got stopped cold. We got told off, and corrected.
That made us ashamed of many of our own wonderful and natural qualities.
Whatever we chose to hide, we became ashamed of.
RECOVERY
To get our power back it’s necessary to reveal the qualities we keep hidden.
That’s what happens in therapy.
But, we can also do the same thing on our own.
That’s what makes us stronger.
With every small step we reveal, we become less afraid!
As we reveal things we discover, they were normal and lovely qualities.
We were looking at them from the point of view of somebody else.
The more we reveal, the more power we get back.
And, the stronger we feel!
Thanks for listening.
This post is part of https://clarity-of-innocence.com
Good luck on your journey,
Take care,
Norm cormier
I welcome considering other thoughts.