For people who suffer with low self-esteem, the daily battle is a desolate and destructive one. Consumed with negative thoughts, sufferers yearn for some or all of the following:
• To be comfortable with who I am • To like myself • To be able to give love unconditionally and without fear • To understand what I need – and how to get my needs met • To choose my emotions and be able to manage them • To live for today because I am not waiting for a better tomorrow • To not rely on external validation to make me feel good • To express my needs and wants objectively and honestly • To not always comply with others because I don’t feel worthy of saying what I want
airbrushing driving our aspirations higher and deepening our insecurities, our partner's negative reactions, or simply ourselves? Most low self-esteem comes from our upbringing or our exposure to toxic infl uences i.e. the relationships we enter into later in life. If we have been raised from an early
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age to think that we are useless, clumsy, fat, ugly, not as good as a sibling, or given other negative labels, we adopt these for life, and until we experience something really different over a prolonged period we subconsciously seek evidence to reinforce these labels. Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission” – we often don’t realise
here does low self esteem come from? - Is it our childhood, our teenage conditioning, peer pressure, magazine
that we are giving ourselves and others this permission. The answer is to develop Emotional
Independence; understanding your own needs and how to meet them without relying on external validation – learning to live every day feeling at peace with yourself. Loving life because you think you are an “OK” person. It is about understanding that you will
never be perfectly confident and always feel great about yourself - there will be regular ups and downs, but knowing that you can choose behaviours that are productive and that energise you means that you will always be in control of how you feel. It is freedom from the experience of low self-esteem and the high of experiencing that everything you are is “wonderfully you” and worth celebrating. b www.emotionalindependence.co.uk
Tips for developing emotional independence
• Understand who you are and why you are the way you are, but more importantly identify who you want to be
• Recognise that you do not have to be inhibited by past conditioning – if it was simply your brain program- ming itself in that way then you are in charge of reprogramming
• Analyse and refl ect on incidents positively to learn how to deal with them next time
• Spend time each evening noting every positive thing you did today – where you succeeded, where you took control, what you did well
• Identify your positive resources – those people who buoy you up and make you feel good and work to eliminate exposure to negative resources
• Only give yourself permission to feel great about yourself - be your own best supporter