There is no gene for a self-esteem, your sense of worthiness is largely based on how you were treated when you were very young. If you had been given primarily loving, supportive messages you would have internalized those messages and that would be your self-talk now. If your self talk is negative then you may have been overtly criticized, or ignored or your opinions were diminished or you had a lot of trauma in your life. Your lack of self-esteem, your self- critical behavior is due to your conditioning and doesn’t reflect who you are at your core and how you want to be.
Our unsophisticated culture didn’t understand what we need to feel truly empowered and inadvertently conditioned you to use critical and judgmental behavior. You are not fundamentally mean-spirited or self-destructive but are only emulating what I call the “faulty learning,” you received from our culture as a whole. I know that you always have a positive intent in this behavior. Perhaps when you are self-critical you are trying to mobilize yourself to do better. You may criticize others because you are trying to feel more worthy by proving that you are better than someone else. Again, these are all conditioned responses and don’t reflect who you are your core. The problem is that every time you exercise the judgmental muscle you strengthen that muscle and are more likely to turn it on yourself and increase your own fearfulness that others will be judging you.
Although all of your behaviors have a positive intent if you haven’t been taught how to actualize this positive intent your behavior may boomerang. Judgmental behavior, whether you actually voice it or it’s a program that runs silently in your own head has separated you from your own humanity and the humanity of those you judge. All of this behavior comes from a fear that we are not good enough and an understandable longing to feel our own worthiness. Your negative self-talk may be so automatic you haven’t really experienced how painful it is. You might try imagining saying one of the critical things you say to yourself to a child, a good friend or a pet you love. Imagining saying it to another being that you love will probably demonstrate to you how this behavior robs you of your dignity and keeps you from connecting to the dignity of others.
I want to help you replace judgmental behavior with compassionate responses. I know that it is only with compassion that you can become the truly empowered person you deserve to be. Fundamental to everything I do in my work in my life is the knowledge that you are most powerful when you are loving and compassionate. We live in a culture that didn’t teach us this and as a result you weren’t treated how you needed to be to have the self-esteem you deserve.
There are two basic reasons that your reactions and behaviors do not bring about the result you desire. You weren’t taught that the human brain hadn’t evolved to be able to tell the difference between stress and danger. For most of our time in the planet we lived in mortal danger and having a hair-trigger response to mortal danger allowed our species to survive. You probably rarely if ever experience life-threatening situations but your brain misreads stresses danger and hijacks distress signals to this fight/flight/freeze part of your brain. This is the part of your brain were all here early years and traumas are stored. When this part of your brain gets triggered react with brainpower a vulnerable, helpless child. I called this “emotional dyslexia,” because it is a physiological response that leads to reactions that are the opposite of what we need, just as the learning disability dyslexia is physiological and causes people to write letters backwards. The second reason that your behavior isn’t always effective is the result of what I call “faulty learning,” the things that we were taught from the adults in our lives that also suffered from emotional dyslexia and therefore were vulnerable to fearful, childlike reactions. You can’t blame yourself for these responses because you didn’t have control about how your brain evolved nor did you have control about the conditioning you received as an infant and child.
There is a new term in contemporary neuroscience and that is “neuro plasticity,” which as its name implies, means that the brain is plastic it can change in form and function throughout our lives. I would like to teach you how to receive and then internalize more compassionate responses, so that you can replace your negative self- talk with responses that create the feelings of worthiness you have always deserved to feel.
Imagine what your life would have been like if every time you experienced difficulty the important adults in your life had been able to love you unconditionally and always hold you as good and worthy. If this is the case they would have responded to you saying something like “you probably made a mistake because you didn’t know how to do things differently” or “You must have been stressed and weren’t thinking clearly…” or ” You might have gotten anxious and didn’t make the best choice…”
I want to be able to be that voice for you. All of my videos and blogs express that underlying voice of compassion. It would probably be helpful if you could listen to the video I made on unconditional love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdS-hND7ZZU
Take a breath and just close your eyes and remember a time when you got a compassionate response or imagine that I am responding to you with compassion. There is nothing you have to do but receive. The more you do this the more worthy you will feel. This is what you needed as a child but because your parents didn’t get it they didn’t know how to give it to you. Developing more self-esteem is basically a two-pronged approach. It’s important to know that the brain is a reflexive organ and will repeat old patterns forever. If you were conditioned to feel that you were not smart enough or not attractive enough or lazy etc. your brain will reflexively repeat these messages. It’s important to know that it’s just a reflex and has no more wisdom than when the doctor hits you under your knee with a rubber hammer and your leg flies up. You are not generating the thoughts they are reflexes that are being triggered. Don’t be angry at yourself if they keep coming up, the trick is to understand that they are reflexes and not give them any power. If you start to believe that these reflexive messages have some real wisdom and you follow them then you go down the rabbit hole and end up feeling diminished. The second prong consists of replacing the negative self-talk with compassionate responses. Keep resurrecting memories of times when someone was compassionate to you or listen to my video on unconditional love so that you replace your conditioned critical responses with more compassionate ones.
I am so grateful to have been given this profound gift of transformation and watched countless numbers of people develop lives that are joyful, loving and creative. It would be my pleasure to help you in any way that I can. Feel free to contact me here and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
Every time your behavior is more effective you have an opportunity to enhance your self-esteem. I suggest that you check out the following blogs and the YouTube videos that go with them.
How to Attract and Sustain Loving Relationships
Taking the Stress Out of Stress
The Power of Compassion - The Most Important Tool for Empowerment
How to Heal the Hidden Cause of Emotional Suffering
Helen Kramer talks about Neuroplasticity and the Adult Within
How to Deal with Anxiety in New Way
Helen Kramer talks about How to Become More Spiritual
How to Achieve Wisdom and Overcome Faulty Learning
http://www.helenkramer.com/faulty-learning/
How to Transform Emotional Dyslexia and Become Empowered