The Opinion Jump
[#4 in an ongoing series, because who knows how many of these I will write :) ]
When did you surrender your right to own your opinion of yourself? I ask this seriously, because it’s one of the most devastating, destructive and divisive problems I have to deal with when I’m coaching clients, or just helping a friend navigate one of our human problems.
When you give up your right to your own opinion of yourself, you essentially give EVERYONE around you a say in who you are.
And that is the shortest road to madness you can ever take.
I’m not saying that you can’t take the opinions of others into account when you are deciding if you are a good person or not. People who don’t listen to anyone else’s opinions are narcissists, incapable of factoring someone else’s views or humanity above their own. A narcissist is a danger to everyone around them, so I’m not telling you to become one of them.
But I don’t want you to be at the other end of the spectrum either.
Because your self opinion is one of the essential foundations upon which your ability to function in this world is built upon.
If you have a terrible opinion of yourself, you are then subject to the whims, thoughts and ideas of everyone around you, and you’ll never find peace living that way. Instead you’ll obsess over every decision, question every action, and find yourself in a prison of suffering where you experience pain because of everyone around you.
And you’ll never grow into the person you could become.
Instead you’ll wither and fade, hiding yourself away from everyone and everything that can cause you to feel pain. You’ll become bitter, angry, judgmental and spiteful. You’ll seek to avoid anything that causes you to question your own worth, until you shrink into a prison of your own nightmares, unable to step into who you really are.
It’s a terrible thing to see.
I have a client who has a difficult relationship with a parent because he has not yet learned to own his own self opinion. His parent is a well meaning older man who unfortunately has parented through guilt and focusing on his own emotional needs at the cost of his son’s needs.
Now my client rarely calls his father, because the slightest disapproval from his father is still so painful to him. His father feels lonely and abandoned by his son, and the son wishes he could have a better relationship with his father, one that was not so painful.
In truth, both of them need to make a jump, but only one of them sees it.
So how do you make this jump? It’s a tough one, but first you have to go through the honesty jump, and the discomfort jump, because this jump requires you to be completely honest with yourself about who you are, and that can be really uncomfortable.
Once you start getting real with yourself, you can begin to act in ways that support your opinion of you, and lessen the opinion of others.
It’s a hard jump to make, but you’ll never find peace without this leap.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings