The Damaging Danger of your Denigrating Self Belief.
Are you a good person? If you hesitated to answer that don’t worry, because when I ask people this question, a quick answer is rarely a good sign. The people who answer yes rapidly are either incredibly far along in their personal journey, or completely full of themselves (hint – it’s very rarely the first).
Most of us take a moment before answering this question, and then try to express our opinion of ourselves in a way that’s nuanced, and kind of jumps around the issue without giving a definitive answer.
Because having an opinion of whether we are good or bad is a very difficult thing.
In the last week I’ve talked to two people who have pretty terrible views of themselves. One is older, one is younger, and yet they both labor under the opinion that they are somehow flawed as a person, and beyond hope.
When you ask them to explain why they are such a bad person, both of them parade a litany of events and actions that are supposed to define their character as the worst version of themselves they can be.
And both of them are hopelessly and completely wrong.
The examples they held up to me, one speaking with eyes full of tears and the other in a voice choked up and breaking, were not examples of evil, cruel and heartless people who had done terrible things. They were symptoms of a much wider problem, one that affects just about every person I’ve ever met, listened to, talked with or helped.
They were simply, truly, and honestly…human.
The things they judged themselves for were things that occur every single day. Their actions were precipitated by the four horsemen of bad choices: pain, loss, heartache and fear. Their supposed horrible deeds were the result of trying to make themselves feel whole, in a world that lies to us that such a thing truly exists.
We are all, in one way or another, flawed and broken. That’s what it means to be human.
But it’s easier to have a solid black and white opinion, than to try to find a balanced view of ourselves. Balance takes a constant emotional energy; balance requires thought; and balance requires that we accept our flaws along with our better qualities.
So to preserve our mental energy in a universe full of grays, we opt to make our decisions in black and white.
So they both choose to believe the worst of themselves, and try to live with a negative self image, all the time hating themselves for their supposed evil.
And it’s all built on lies. Lies that they listen to, believing them to be truth. Lies that sound like the truth because they see through filters of their own believing. Lies that they could throw off at any time if only they were willing to face a painful truth, and walk through that fire to a different tomorrow. Instead, then restrict themselves to the dark, and are afraid to step out into the light.
All the while slowly destroying themselves day after day.
Because if you live with lies long enough, you wrap yourself in a shroud of self loathing. You’ll deny yourself good things out of the belief that it shouldn’t happen to you.
You’ll carry such a load that eventually you’ll fall and crack under the weight of so much worthlessness that you can’t carry on. And eventually, you’ll end up broken, beaten and believing that you had it coming all along.
Which is never how it was meant to be.
So if you are stumbling under the weight of so much self-negativity, I plead with you today to lay it down. That which you have done, or that which you believe you have done, is more than likely a result of unresolved pain and emotional pressure that pushed you beyond what you were able to bear.
We’ve all been there, we’ve all suffered, and we’ve all had our moments where we were broken.
That doesn’t make you bad. It simply makes you human.
And being human is the greatest value in the world.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings