Do You Love YOU?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Tracy Seekins

For days now I have been thinking about writing an article on self-esteem and self-acceptance, but I have been struggling with where to start. I did my normal post on Facebook and the Monastery to ask for ideas and opinions but got very few, which surprised me. One post however did spark up my ideas. That post reminded me about my own struggles with size and weight, so I’ll try to start there.

I am a very small person, I always have been. Even now I only weigh about 82 pounds and I’m only 5’2” tall. Now I love who I am, I get irritated with the struggle I have with gaining weight but I don’t hate my body like I used to.

I guess the worst of my own self loathing started in around the seventh grade. I was so small and I wasn’t as developed as most of the other girls my age. I was teased and ridiculed and because of it I learned to hate my own body and therefore hate myself. Of course back then I didn’t understand the separation of body and self. I did not understand the concept of “I am not my body”. If I had maybe I could have joked about my own body or maybe I wouldn’t have been so offended by the teasing because I would have understood that who I am was the part of me I had control over and could develop.

Eventually my own self hatred had grown to a point where I never heard the good anymore because I was so focused on the negative. So if I was paid a compliment I either wouldn’t hear it or would become so embarrassed about it that I would retreat or even cry. My mother became a monster in my mind because she couldn’t see or understand my pain and she only seemed to add to it by reminding me how many things I couldn’t do or was so bad at. I don’t think that she really was this awful but at the time all I could hear out of her was more insults just like everyone else was doing.

I became increasingly depressed and withdrawn. I would spend time locked in my room by myself writing and even then find no happiness because I didn’t like myself at all so my own company was of no comfort to me.

I imagine this was also around the age where I stopped being able to hear my guides anymore and so I felt lost and disconnected. I suspect I stopped hearing them because of my own self worth issues.

As I got older things did not improve. I still wasn’t as developed as other girls my age. I still wasn’t gaining weight which was a constant source of teasing. Of course what I didn’t realize is that much of the cruelty was because other people felt just as insecure about their own bodies. The teasing was in part because if they were teasing me then nobody, including them, was focused on them.

After high school my self esteem was basically non-existent. I just wanted some place to feel connected, some place to fit in. I just wanted someone to love me. What I wanted most was a child and to me that meant marriage. So I married the first man who asked me and of course wound up in an extremely abusive situation.

I became suicidal. I believed it was my fault that he treated me the way he did. I KNOW I would not have left that relationship alive, either by my hand or his, if not for one friend who helped me in ways she might not even realize. If it hadn’t been for my friend Jill, I know I never would have survived that.

That was the worst of it. You know they say an alcoholic or a drug addict has to hit rock bottom before they start to change? Well that was my rock bottom. My drug was self loathing. And I had finally had enough.

I wasn’t cured but this was where I would begin my long climb from this timid little girl who had become afraid of everything, from this meek little person who believed that nobody loved her and that she didn’t deserve their love anyway, to the person I am today. Today I love myself. I accept my body for what it is. I KNOW I deserve love and am capable of both giving and receiving it. But it would take me a long time to get there.

Not everybody has such a dramatically difficult time with self esteem as I did. Not everybody ends up in such life or death situations because of it. I believe that my life was as dramatic as it was so that the lessons I learned would stick out in my mind in such a way that I could later realize their importance and share them with others. And the lesson of learning to love yourself, of learning how important YOU are, of realizing that you are special and perfect just as you are, is so insanely important that I had to spend a very long part of my journey dealing with it. I had to go through some truly scary times to remember it.

I don’t have the fix-it-all answer to how to get from where I was to where I am. There is no pill that is going to just cure it overnight. What I can tell you is that it takes wanting it and being willing to work at it. Some of you might say “well of course I want to not hate myself” but others will stop reading this story right here. I know many of you don’t understand that but it’s true. Some people are not ready to believe even the idea that they are worthwhile. For some it is physically painful to think about changing the way they feel about themselves. And you know what? That’s perfectly ok.

For the rest of you, the ones who are ready to make a change, let’s continue.

Let’s start with the very real concept that some of you may not even realize. Every one of us has a secret voice in the back of our minds that tells us things. It’s this little voice that lives in our subconscious and it feeds us information based on what IT knows. The problem is often where it got it’s information. This little secret voice was taught and trained by our past experiences and the ones that stick out in our subconscious mind most readily are often those difficult experiences that we tuck away so not to have to deal with them and to defend against them. Often this is what our little voice learns from.

So if as a child you often heard things like, “are you crazy?” “Are you just stupid?” “OMG you are so Lazy!” or other such phrases spoken in the heat of the moment by a frustrated parent your little voice might have held on to those. If you often heard from other children that you were stupid, ugly, fat, an idiot, or other such biting words your little voice might have held on to those.

This is called “Negative self talk” and a lot more people do it than most of us realize. Very few people defeat this negative self talk because to defeat it one must recognize it and then retrain it. Yes we must retrain our little voice.

Personally, I have worked on this for years. I saw results from it pretty quickly once I realized what it was and began consciously working with it, but I still have to work with it often. Why? Because we are human and being so means that sometimes we say things we do not mean to each other. Sometimes we say things in the heat of the moment that we should have worded differently or not said at all. Sometimes we take things wrong when they are spoken. In each of those types of situations my little voice will latch on to a key phrase, usually the very worst it can find, and start repeating it in my head. The difference is that I recognize it much faster now, I hear it much clearer now, and I know the signs to watch for in myself if one sneaks by me but begins to work away at me.

So how do we retrain this little voice. First you have to recognize it. You have to acknowledge that it exists and learn to hear it. Because even though I call this a little voice, at first it is simply unconscious thought that we may not even realize we are having.

How do you recognize it? Well let’s say you have decided to go to an exercise class that you recently saw advertised. You wrote down the information. You might have even called to make sure there was enough room for you to join it, get prices and whatever else. You begin to get excited about this idea and then……. you begin to worry. You simply come up with some legitimate reason why you can’t attend this particular class right now. Then you simply toss the idea out all together.

Stop! Ask yourself why you just gave up on an idea that you were so excited about. Ask yourself if your reason was legitimate enough to not even bother to reschedule and try again. Nine times out of ten you will realize that something inside you began to fear what other people at the class would think of you, or how you’d look in a workout outfit, or you thought about how you never could actually get fit anyway. THOSE are that little voice. THAT was negative self talk at work.

Write down a list of reasons that you think you ACTUALLY gave the idea because of. (whatever the idea was, it doesn’t have to actually be the gym)Once you have your list of reasons, take each one and break it down and turn it around.  For example let’s say one reason was that you thought you could never really lose weight anyway. Below is how we break it down and turn it around.

“Initial thought – I’m just fat. I’ll never lose weight anyway. – Where did I hear that? Why do I think that? My father always called me fat even when I dieted. My mother called me lazy all the time and never recognized how hard I tried. – Is it true? Well, yes I am currently overweight but I’m not lazy. I want to change my weight. – If I don’t try will it be true? If I don’t try than I’m never going to lose weight and I will make it true. – Change the statement. I am not fat but I am overweight. I can change that. I can diet and I can exercise and if I do that I can lose weight. I can do this.”

Every time your little voice starts to work away at you, every time you begin to give up on your idea, find your ‘changed’ statement and repeat it or at least part of it. In the example above you might simply try saying to yourself ‘I can lose weight’ or ‘I can do this’.

Another tactic for retraining your little voice is to pick one of the negative statements you have recognized, turn it around and turn your ‘changed’ statement into a morning and evening affirmation. Basically a statement that you tell yourself when you wake and before you sleep. You do this every day for 21 days. This is creating a habit of thought.

There are lots of other things you can do to work with your own self esteem issues and learn to change the way you think about yourself but I could not cover them all in one article. What I will do is tell you what got me thinking about writing an article like this and leave you with a brand new 20 day challenge.

I was listening to the Healing with the Masters teleseminar that I had signed up for. Honestly I don’t even remember the context of the next statement I’m going to share with you from the particular speaker of that day but the statement itself was so important to my mind that I wrote it down and it has been rumbling around in my head for days. The statement was this “tell yourself every day something you LOVE about your spirit”. The speaker and the host then went on to talk about things they loved about their own spirits such as their sense of humor, or their ability to create something, and so on. It really got me thinking and I believe that this is the PERFECT idea for a 20 day challenge.

My other challenge was very public on Facebook  and if you know me you are very aware that I share my 3 – 5 happy thoughts or things I’m thankful for every day on my Facebook. This challenge might be a bit more personal so I will let you have a choice of whether you share it or keep it private.

The challenge is this. For the next 20 days, starting from whenever it is you  read this article, every single day I challenge you to tell yourself just one thing every evening that you like or appreciate about yourself.  There are a few small rules to this.

1. You must tell this to yourself in the evening
2. Once you start you must do this every day for 20 consecutive days.
3. Your one thing every day must be different from the previous days
4. You must journal your positive statements – meaning get a piece of paper so that after you tell yourself what it is you like or appreciate about yourself you can then put it on the paper.
5. On day 21 you are to read your journal/paper list out loud to yourself.

You can choose to share your daily statement on your Facebook if you wish or you can keep it to yourself but I dare you to take up this challenge and go for it.

*** Addendum ***

Before I published this article I read it to my husband for feedback. His reaction was “No WAY! I can’t even think of 5 things I like about myself, much less 20.”

So we got out a notebook and sat down at the table together. We decided, for his own comfort level, we would work on 20 things about me. And he was partially correct, in that this was not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but within 30 minutes we had a list of 20 things that I do in fact like about myself and if I thought about it further I think I could have come up with a few more.

So I have to say two things here. One, this is not easy. It is going to take commitment, effort, and thought but it’s actually a lot of fun to see the completed list and surprising what you’ll come up with. AND Two, YES this CAN be accomplished. Believe it or not there are 20 things somewhere in your mind that you WILL be able to find that you like or appreciate about yourself. And remember that you have 20 days to do this where we sat down and I did it in about 30 minutes. So you have an advantage.

Don’t dismiss this as impossible and please please don’t give up when it gets a little difficult to think of something because I promise you that you CAN do this.

My last statement will be thus. If you really find that you simply cannot get more than 5 or 10 things right now don’t quit. Reword them if you have to to use them again. Such as if one of your days was you like your honesty you might reword that on another day as your love of the truth. Please only do this is you absolutely must to get through the whole 20 days but get through the whole 20 days.