If You Don’t Like Yourself

Do you think that people do not welcome you because of your physical beauty, in terms of your grade, weight, sense of fashion, etc and because you may be less outgoing. We know people are not shallow, in the sense that, they don’t stop and tell, “you’re not pretty”, as a result, we will not be friends with him or her, but rather they are just not compelled by you or may not want to be your friend.

A few of people have the misfortune to have been born to abusive parents who belittled them and prevented them from developing a healthy self-esteem. Other people are born predisposed to view themselves in a bad light because of their physical appearance, a disability, or for no reason anyone, including themselves, knows. Investigate has consistently supported the idea that it’s hard to be glad without liking oneself. But how can one learn to like oneself while one doesn’t?

People filled with self-loathing typically imagine they dislike every part of themselves, but this is rarely, if ever, true. More commonly, if asked what specific parts of themselves they dislike, they’re able to provide specific answers: their physical appearance, their inability to excel academically or at a job, or maybe their inability to achieve their dreams. Yet when presented, for instance, a scenario in which they come upon a child trapped under a car at the scene of an accident, that they recoil in horror and would want urgently to do something to help rarely causes them to credit themselves for the humanity such a reaction indicates.

Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The reply in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.

Before such a change will happen, however, the essential cause of one’s self-loathing needs to be apprehended. By this I don’t mean the historical cause. The situation that initially lead people to dislike themselves do so by triggering a thought process of self-loathing that continues long after the circumstances that set it in motion have resolved, a thought process that continues to gain momentum the longer it remains unchallenged, much like a boulder picks up speed rolling down a mountain as long as nothing gets in its way. It’s this last idea, not the memory of your parents ignoring you, which gathers the power within your life to make you loathe yourself if not checked by adult reasoning early on. Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one’s mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially while one can find evidence that it represents a true account.

But a narrative is just that: a story we tell ourselves. It may very well contain elements of facts that we are unattractive, that we do fail a lot of the time, or that our parents didn’t find us all that lovable, but to proceed from facts such as these to the conclusion that we’re deserving only of our own derision constitutes a significant thought error.

But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.

I’m not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our good qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on optimistic qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of other people for us to value them. We must awaken to the necessary goodness to what in Nichiren Buddhism is termed our “larger self” that lies within us all. If we want to fall in love with our lives and by this I don’t mean the “we”of our small-minded egos we must work diligently to manifest our larger selves in our daily lives. We must generate the wisdom and compassion to care for others until we’ve turned ourselves, piece by piece, into the people we most want to be.

In other words, if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn’t require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character-something anyone can do.

An easy thought test supports this notion: think right at the moment of your favorite people and ask yourself, what is it about them that attracts you the most? Chances are it isn’t their physical appearance or their accomplishments but rather their generous spirit; the way they treat other people. This is the main quality that makes people friendly, even to themselves.

Treating other people well, it turns out, is the fastest trail to a healthy self-esteem. If you hate yourself, stop focusing on your bad qualities. We all have bad qualities. There’s nothing special about your negativity, I promise you. Focus instead on caring for other people. Because the more you care about other people, I pledge the more in turn you’ll be able to care about yourself.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with cheap coach purses and fashion things.