The Loser’s Guide to Happiness and Loving Yourself Part 5
Loving Yourself: Self-Honesty and Self-Image
Before you can love yourself you need to be honest with yourself; and before you can be honest with yourself you need to know yourself. I talked about getting to know yourself in Part 3, and I talked about the dangers of being dishonest with yourself and falling in love with yourself in Part 4. If you don’t want to read those blogs before you read this one, fine… just don’t blame me if you end up with narcisstic personality disorder, like Donald Trump.
You can work on knowing yourself and loving yourself at the same time (and you need to, because both take years to master), but if you try to do one without the other, you’ll end up seriously unbalanced. This blog series is intended to be a comprehensive manual on how to re-build your whole personality from scratch (as I did); but if you only read it piecemeal, it’ll be like trying to build a car from a manual, only with half (or more) of the pages missing. If that’s what you want to do, don’t blame me if the car won’t start, or the brakes fail.
Assuming I have at least sold you on the importance of being honest with yourself, the question then becomes: how do you know when you’re doing that?
Most of us have something called positive self-bias: we’re biased towards seeing ourselves in a positive light. Which means if we’re being at all dishonest with ourselves, it’s likely in the direction of thinking we’re better than we really are.
This is actually healthy, because in moderation, it’s good for our self esteem. But positive self-bias, when taken to the extreme, can turn us into a narcissitic egomaniac like Donald Trump.
Thinking you’re slightly better than you are is harmless, if not good. Thinking you’re a lot better than you are, can get you into a lot of trouble. You’ll make lots of enemies, and no real friends, because no one really likes someone who’s constantly blowing their own trumpet. Not getting praise from other people (and the more you praise yourself, the less likely other people are to) will make you feel empty and hurt; and every time someone criticises you, it will feel like a knife through the heart. You are in love with a false image of yourself, and this false image is vulnerable because it is false.
The goal is to love yourself for who you are; not fall in love with who you would like to think you are. Thinking you’re slightly better than you really are, does no harm, as long as the image you have of yourself is reasonably close to the real thing. In Donald Trump’s case, his image of himself isn’t even remotely close to what he’s really like, which is one of the reasons he’s such an obnoxious asshole.
One way to be absolutely sure you’re being honest with yourself is if you hate yourself, when you have good reason to. Hating yourself not only totally contradicts our positive self-bias — it’s fucking painful, and only the most honest people can go there. We don’t go there because we choose to, we go there because we have to, we’re compelled to — because we can’t lie to ourselves.
When I was 17, I killed an innocent woman, whose only “crime” was being in the way when the 5 years of rage I’d been bottling up exploded like a volcano. This woman had a husband, and two children. Both the children were adults when I took their mother from them, and I thank God for that. I thank God I didn’t force those children to grow up without their mother. But I’m not trying to minimise what I did: having your mother murdered is the most horrific and devastating thing that can happen to you at any age. For most of us, our mother is the most important person in our lives… and I’m no exception. I can imagine how I would feel if my mother had been murdered when I was in my thirties (as the victim’s children were). I put two completely innocent people I’d never met through all that grief and suffering. And I took a man’s wife — the love of his life — from him. This man wasn’t a stranger, he’d been a good friend to me… and this was how I repaid him for it.
So, yeah, I hated myself, and I had good reason to. Jail is full of murderers who find ways to rationalise, excuse, and justify crimes as horrific as this… and even worse. I don’t know how they do it. I suppose I would have done it, if I could… anything would’ve been better than the guilt, the shame, the self-loathing. But I had to burn in the fire of that for four years, because I couldn’t lie to myself. There was no excuse or justification for what I had done: it was just plain evil, and I deserved to suffer for it.
After four years of hating myself, I couldn’t take it any more, and attempted to take my own life… resulting in the obs. cell ordeal I described in Part 2. So for me, the road to loving myself, started with hating myself. Even hating yourself can be a good thing: if it proves you’re being honest with yourself.
But hating yourself is only self-honesty if it is for a good reason. If you hate yourself for no good reason, it is a form of self-deception. If you hate yourself, then ask yourself: Why? Have you ever done anything truly evil? Anything that compares with what I did when I was 17?
If the answer is no, and you still hate yourself, you probably suffer from negative self-image. Negative self-image is the opposite of positive self-image, and is much more damaging for those afflicted with it. Where positive self-image can be a good thing — in moderation — negative self image is always bad. Fortunately, negative self-image is far rarer than positive self image… though this will be cold comfort to you if you’re one of the millions who suffer from it.
Negative self-image is that “empty bucket” feeling I described in Part 4. It usually comes from having parents that didn’t love you, or did a piss-poor job of raising you. As I said in Part 4, not everyone is cut out to be a parent. So, if you suffer from feelings of worthlessness; of “not being good enough”; and not liking yourself or hating yourself; and there really is no good reason why you should feel this way — chances are, your parents botched the job of raising you. Maybe they were religious fanatics who taught you “we’re all sinners”, and made you feel guilty and worthless simply for living. Or maybe they taught you “winning isn’t the important thing; it’s the only thing”. Maybe they taught you that anything less than an A+ was as bad as a Fail, and only showed you affection when you brought home an A+, or came first in a race. This results in negative self-image, because your parents are teaching you you are only worthwhile if you live up to a standard that no human being can possibly live up to.
So, if that’s you, it‘s time you stopped beating yourself up for it, and realised you’re only doing that because your parents programmed you to do it. That programming is in your subconscious, so it will be hard to get rid of. But you can change the programming in your subconscious by becoming conscious of it. It’s a long process, and the only short cut is to see a qualified psychologist… if your parents did a really good job of programming you to believe you’re not good enough, you need more help than you can get from just reading blogs.
Just being aware of the problem is a good start. If you suffer from low self-esteem because of your parents, you can now start thinking about all the things they did to you that made you feel “not good enough”. You need to understand that that was bad parenting on their part, and stop beating yourself up for being unable to live up to their unrealistic expectations of you.
You need to start developing your own, realistic expectations of yourself. Expectations you can actually live up to… that any human being should be able to live up to.
What you’re aiming for is a realistic self-image: one that is neither positive, nor negative. But if a little positive self-image creeps in, that’s OK, as long as you’re not lying to yourself to maintain it. Some people have to maintain a positive self image at all costs, and will tell themselves monstrous lies, to maintain it. You don’t want to go down that road… unless you want to end up like Donald Trump.
The reality is, no-one’s self-image is completely neutral. If you’re loving yourself in a healthy way, your self-image will mostly be either slightly positive, or slightly negative, depending on what kind of day you’re having. The diagram below represents this.
If you have mostly realistic self-image, you don’t stress out if your self-image dips slightly into the negative, because you know this is only a temporary condition: your self-image will soon return to the centre line, or above it. But it’s important to realise that no-one will have a self-image graph as well-balanced as the one above. If you’re doing a reasonably good job of loving yourself, most of your “bumps” will be on the positive side of the graph. If you’re loving yourself poorly, or not at all, most of your bumps will be negative side of the graph.
If you hate yourself, all of your bumps will be deep in the negative side, with none of them even coming close to a realistic self-image… unless you’ve done something truly evil (like murder), in which case, hating yourself is completely realistic. I’m guessing most readers of this blog won’t have done anything truly evil, in which case, if you still hate yourself, you need to be more realistic and stop beating yourself up for the everyday flaws, failings and shortcomings all of us have.
My personal “graph” stays mostly between the positive side and the realistic line. In my next blog, I’ll tell you how I keep it that way.
You can find the other blogs in this series on the Loser’s Guide Homepage.
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