4 reasons we don’t like ourselves…
It never fails to surprise me how incredibly horrible we can be about ourselves. How self critical & cruel. Often we’re not even aware of these self judgements, they’re so ingrained in our sense of identity.
But where do these feelings come from? I don’t think we’re born disliking ourselves. I think things can happen on our journey that turn us against who we are, and that make us doubt our worth and our value.
SHAME
Shame is that overwhelming feeling of ‘I am wrong’. Something about me is so bad, that I don’t want anyone to see it.
Shame shows up differently for each of us, sometimes it’s worse at night when we’re finally quiet and with ourselves, or in the morning when we’re connected to our unconscious. Some people, places or situations might really trigger that shameful feeling within us.
Shame keeps us stuck is self loathing because we think the shameful parts of ourselves are too ugly to share with anyone, but it is only in sharing our shame with someone safe, that I think we can ever be free from it.
The root of shame often lies in the past. People or situations that made us feel bad, wrong, different or unlovable. But when we find this root & look at it through a new, adult lens everything can change. We often realise it’s not that we were wrong, more that’s just how we were made feel at the time.
FEELING DIFFERENT
For women, from the moment we’re born, we’re told what a good girl is and what she should look like. If we don’t fit into that very specific, limiting and superficial mould, it can be incredibly damaging to our self worth.
We often don’t like ourselves because we think we’re not how a woman should be. One of my core missions is to help women love themselves for exactly who they are, right now. For you to see the worth and value that you possess deep inside, no matter what the world has told you, or how you’ve been made to feel otherwise.
INSECURE ATTACHMENT
Attachment theory is a very helpful way of understanding our personality and comfort levels in relationships with others, based on how ‘attached’ we felt to our caregivers in early childhood. If we’re insecurely attached, it means that we weren’t loved, seen, or held by our caregivers fully enough that we feel quite secure in ourselves.
If we’re insecurely attached, we often end up blaming ourselves for our struggles with other people. It can be so liberating, and so much easier to have self compassion, when we realise how our childhood attachment might have impacted these struggles. Then we can stop blaming ourselves.
COMPARISON
When we look at others and compare their lives and achievements with our own, it can leave us feeling pretty low. It helps to remember that life is subjective - we see only a tiny part of someone else's story.
In fact, we often project our own insecurities or unmet desires onto others and make presumptions about their lives. Let's say we look at another person online who we think is doing better than us, insert your own narrative here {parenting, career, relationships, finances} The comparison and shame spiral begins. We presume they're better than us because they have something we want, or feel we’re lacking in - they're doing it ALL right, and I'm doing it ALL wrong. Yet, we're subjecting our own narrative onto a situation we only have one small piece of information about and it can help to remember that before we start beating ourselves up. Nobody is doing it perfectly, even if it looks that way.
I don’t think we can really change anything in our lives for the better until we work on the relationship with ourselves. So if you don’t like yourself very much, there are probably some very important reasons why that you need to get curious about. By being brave enough to look, then we can start to change the self judgments.
