If You Don’t Love Yourself, It’s Because You Don’t Know Yourself

Self-esteem is a trendy concept, which sometimes feels like a magical intellectual bias to understand everything that happens to us.

It is as if all of our problems can be explained with one ready-made phrase: lack of self-esteem.

It is a kind of epidemic that can be summed up by saying that it is more and more difficult for us to love ourselves.

Maybe this is happening for a good reason: if you don’t love yourself, you don’t know yourself.

The key to this problem lies in the inner voice that comments on all of our actions, feelings, and thoughts. It is this voice that qualifies us, approves us or disapproves of us.

We often forget this inner voice that we ourselves have built and we no longer manage to direct, or redirect it, when it ceases to be constructive.

We learn to see ourselves through others. If our parents saw us as incompetent people, we certainly easily incorporated the idea behind this qualifier, and this is what echoes the voice that speaks to us and judges us inside.

If our teachers thought that everyone else was smarter than us, that’s how our inner dialogue will be built.

The problem is that we often forget that this problem goes well beyond our own inner voice: the one who judges us and speaks about us does not necessarily hold the truth.

Those who express or who have expressed their opinion on who we are have probably projected what they had deep down.

We all wear distorting glasses and we all believe we see the truth in its purest form.

If you don’t love yourself, admit it

Lack of self-esteem is not expressed only as a feeling of depreciation or incompetence in different everyday situations.

It is often thought that the one who speaks loudly and has an imposing physical presence is someone who is self-confident. However, it is often the opposite.

Lack of self-esteem manifests itself as fear of taking risks.

The one who does not trust himself keeps within the limits of what he knows, because he thinks deep down that he is not up to the demands of all that is new. .

This fear is felt in his words and in his thoughts. He is not able to express what is really deep inside him, for fear of the reaction of others.

And, at the same time, his internal voice disqualifies him: “ these are nonsense, ” he said to himself. And he is silent.

Lack of self-esteem can also be expressed in another way.

For example, if you suffer from it, you quickly become subservient to an authority figure or in a situation where the spotlight is on you.

What your bosses, teachers or experts say or think is very important to you.

You then try to adapt what you say and what you do to appeal to a particular person or group.

You have an overwhelming need for others to recognize you. That’s why you talk loudly and do propaganda, just to get a little something from other people.

Only the one who knows himself loves himself

There is an obvious question that few people ask: do we really know each other?

Self-knowledge is not just knowing that you love the color green and hate apples. Or that you want a divorce and you love football. It goes way beyond your tastes and preferences.

It is of course important to know the way you like to eat, the way you like to dress, the way you like to go out, etc. It’s a good start.

It might sound a bit over the top to you, but there are some people who don’t even know what they like to eat.

They either follow a diet or they never think about it, without knowing why. The same is found in various aspects of everyday life such as clothing, means of transport, etc.

However, beyond learning to recognize what we like or that sort of thing, we need to have a better sense of ourselves.

How do you feel about your body and why do you feel like this? How do you take care of your body?

How do you feel about the way you relate to others? Do you know what your reaction will be to different types of situations and why?

You might discover a truth that you wanted to ignore until now: you judge yourself by the eyes of others and by parameters that are unreasonable.

The gaze of others is present in your internal voice, which only instills negative ideas into your mind. Which is stronger: a hen or a duck?

The duck, the ducks will say. The hen, the hens will say. This is what you have to tell yourself. The duck must learn to be a duck to get the best out of its condition.

The hen must do the same. And the two should especially not listen to the opinion of the fox, who sees them only as a meal.