So’s going from hating yourself, to not hating yourself
From disrespecting your body, to respecting your body
From disparaging yourself, to appreciating yourself
From focusing on what you’re not, to focusing on what you are.
From assuming you can’t, to allowing yourself to find out
Changing the way you think and how you see yourself is a profound lifestyle change.
#the question however remains#how does one do this?
Honestly? You just keep working at it. Every day. But there are techniques. There are behaviors you have, and behaviors you can replace them with. You can actually develop your skills at fighting for self-esteem.
You fight back against the voices in your head.
You make a dedicated choice to not believe them, and while at first that’s hard, it slowly gets easier. The day that I decided I’d had enough and refused to feel like crap about myself anymore, the very first thing I did was change the words I used in my own head about myself. I had done something embarrassing at work that day (I think, I don’t remember the details anymore) and was walking home and berating myself, “Stupid! Idiot!” And then I said to myself, “No, that’s not fair. It’s not true, and I know it’s not. From now on, I will tell myself, ‘I feel humiliated.’ Because that is objectively true, and it only speaks to how I feel about the situation, not what I am.”
And weirdly, it helped immensely. Whenever I caught myself insulting myself, I corrected myself, and after a bit I found the new word was becoming a habit over the old ones, and I was feeling less defensive about my mistakes and flaws. I felt less like it was a reflection on me, and more like it was a reflection of how I thought the world saw me—and I became increasingly aware that those are two vastly different things.
You surround yourself with positive role models and images.
The images the media throws at us are such a deformed, impossible vision. When we look at them every day, they truly do shape our conception of reality and our sense of proportion. So you seek out different images and visions of beauty and goodness, and reshape your perception of reality.
You give yourself permission to think things and feel things.
Forgive yourself for thinking and feeling things. We’re afraid to do this because we think that if we think or feel it, that makes it true. But it doesn’t. It only makes it something we’re thinking or feeling. We preserve the power to choose whether to believe it or not. So when something hits you—feelings of shame or guilt, desires that you believe are wrong—you don’t need to hate yourself for it. We all have them. The only thing that matters is what you decide to do about it.
You sit down, and you think about the things you’re good at.
It takes brutal, savage honesty. We’re trained not to see them or admit to them. But even the littlest things. You’re nice to people online. You’re good at typing without making mistakes. You always have a smile and a polite word for customer service people because you know their jobs are crap. Job skills: you’re a fast typist. You’re a fucking ace at Microsoft Excel formulas. You’re the person who always remembers to send out the communication email to the team to notify them about updates.
At first this is bizarrely painful. It feels like somehow you are doing something wrong by so much as recognizing that you have good qualities. But you keep at it, and you look at the guilt it makes you feel and recognize that other people are allowed to say nice things about themselves and that this is something someone TAUGHT you, to feel guilty about being good. You dig them out with a pick and shovel, and catch them like bugs flying past your head, and then every time you spot one, you hold it up ruthlessly in front of your face and say, “Yes, this is a good thing I did.” And slowly, you discover that you contribute positive things to the world.
You face down your shame.
This is a weirdly counter-intuitive one, but: all those feelings of shame and hate and everything that you spend so much energy fighting off? You have to let them hit you. Not all at once. You can take them as they come, or pick out specific things you’ve been holding off for ages to confront.
As long as you fend them off and hold them away from you, they have power. They keep fighting. Once you’ve let them hit you, wash over and through you, and then said, “This feeling I’m feeling right now? I am indeed feeling it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s TRUE,” they lose power (not always all their power; some preserve more ability to hurt you than others, but it weakens them significantly and you recover that mental energy for other purposes).
This feels wildly counter-intuitive, and the first few times you do it, it feels devastatingly miserable. But. Once you’ve done it, maybe 10 or 15 minutes later? The feelings have passed, and you’re still standing, and suddenly it weighs on you less than it ever did before. And you’ve done it a few times, you discover that shame and guilt and self-hate—they’re just emotions. They lose the concentrated power to hurt you, because you know you can survive them. And then when things rear up in your head to torment you, you find yourself turning to meet them with your arms wide and a laugh, because you’re the strong one.
I’m sure there are other techniques. One of the things that going to a therapist can do is, they can help you discover the behaviors you’ve been sabotaging yourself with and help you replace them with different techniques. But you can also do research, and talk to other people who are working through the same thing, and trade tips and support each other.
That said, even when you’ve been putting the work in on your self-esteem for years, it still takes daily tending. New things will always come up that you have to face, and old habits will try to return. ’Humiliating’ tries to turn back into ‘stupid,’ and you have to fight it back. But it gets easier. After weeks, some of the initial pain and pressure lightens. After months, you begin to notice systemic improvements in your own self-image. After years, you discover that it has become second nature.