Building Your Self Esteem and Learning to Love Yourself
Low self esteem isn’t a rare thing among the human population. A surprisingly high number of people suffer from low self esteem. Often a person who has a low self esteem doesn’t love themselves, making the feelings even worse.
Low self esteem stems from a variety of issues. A person might have been ridiculed often as a child by their parents. Perhaps the person has felt that no one really understands them. Maybe the person was made fun of by other children over something like a speech problem. Whatever the cause, low self esteem can cause the person suffering from it to not only not love themselves but to feel like they aren’t good enough, that they don’t count, or that no one really loves them.
Sometimes, though not always, the person with low self esteem will lash out at others in a vain attempt to try to make themselves feel better or to raise themselves up. They feel the need to try to make another person feel as bad or as low as they feel in order to try and make themselves feel better. This attempt seldom works however, because they have failed to address the issue or issues that have them feeling so low to begin with. Attempting to bring another person down not only fails in bringing the other person down, it only makes the one suffering from the low self esteem feel worse and want to lash out even more.. They continue to seek a way to make someone else feel bad so that they don’t feel bad.
And the cycle continues because they are still suffering from low self esteem and they still don’t love themselves. There is an alarming number of people that even resort to cutting themselves in an attempt to feel better about themselves, seeking some measure of control over something they cannot control. But the cutting doesn’t make anything better, because again, the issues causing the low self esteem have not been faced or addressed.
Building your self esteem and learning to love yourself isn’t all that difficult, but it does take effort on your part. Start by realizing that no amount of downing another person will resolve whatever issues are plaguing you. To try and berate others doesn’t hurt anyone but you. It only keeps you in the cycle of low self esteem and prevents you from healing and loving yourself.
There will always be negative people with negative behaviors, and chances are they will project that negative energy onto you. A person with low self esteem will often take to heart anything negative thrown at them, and sink even lower. Rather than allow someone to make you feel bad over their bad behavior, consider the source that the bad behavior is coming from. Are their negative actions towards you really about you at all? Or are the negative actions simply a projection of their own feelings of low self worth? When you determine that it’s not even about you, but rather about them, then you can easily deflect the issue and not allow it to bring you down.
Begin each day by thinking of one thing that you really like about yourself. This can be your hair, your compassion for others, your ability to make others smile, or that you make a great pot of chicken and dumplings. As you do this each day and discover things about yourself that you like, you will begin to feel better about yourself, and your self esteem level will rise. And before you know it, you will find that you actually not only like yourself, but you love yourself too.
Enlist the help of those that love you to help build your self confidence. Those that know you best and care for you are the ones that can help you see how special you truly are. Remember that someone who really knows you has most likely seen you at your worst and they didn’t leave. These are the ones that can help you to build your self esteem.
When your mind has been conditioned to believe that you are no good, that you have no value, that you are worthless, then you will believe these things about yourself. A child who is told enough times that they are stupid will eventually believe that they are indeed stupid. Their low self esteem will carry into adulthood.
You can rebuild your self esteem by reversing the effect. If you tell yourself long enough that you are of value, that you do matter, that you do count, that you are indeed a beautiful person, that you are important, then eventually you will believe this to be true. Your self esteem level will rise, you will find yourself loving you.
Replacing the negative and bad thoughts with good and positive thoughts will soon leave no place for the negativity. Some people might need to constantly work at keeping their self esteem level at a high level. For others, once the issues are worked through that brought your self esteem down, you have it made.
Building your self esteem up will not only make you a happier person and give you peace, it will improve your relationships with others. It will also allow you to better see people who seek to only to bring you down by trying to berate you so that you can eschew from those types of people.
Whatever the issues that causes a person to feel so low, there is a way out. Facing whatever caused you to feel this way opens the door to healing. Knowing that words do not make you who you are, that another’s opinion of you doesn’t make you who you are, and that those who care are right there with you can help you to have high self esteem. Love yourself, you’re unique!
