Feeling Unconditionally Good About Yourself Was Once Your Default State
If you’ve lost some of that self-love along the way, this may be the reason why
You were born to love yourself unconditionally. We all were — that’s how we’re wired.
For the first couple of years of our lives, the wiring remained firmly in place, undisturbed.
There was little we needed to do to keep our parents pleased with us. We only needed to eat, pee, defecate and be cute, and they were happy — all of which was effortless.
Our parents were smitten with us, and we soaked it all in.
That Was Until Expectations Entered the Picture
Expectations in and of themselves are natural and ok — they’re a part of the growing-up process.
Rather, our self-love issues came about because of the combination of:
- expectations that were not realistic or fair
- how our parents treated us when we didn’t meet them
Example of Early Unmet Expectations
Let’s take the example of a four-year-old who is gleefully running in the playground — happy as a lark, until he slips on a crack, falls, and scrapes his knee.
It hurts. So what does he do — he cries. He does so without any sense of self-consciousness, without any self-imposed limit of intensity.
His tears are nothing more than his instinctive reaction to pain. He doesn’t blame himself for falling, telling himself he should have seen the crack in the pavement and ran around it. Nor does he chastise himself for his tears, as if he’s making too big a deal out of the fall.
The tears will stop on their own accord, when they’re ready to, often hastened by hugs and kisses from a consoling mommy or daddy. There’s nothing like a big hug to make booboos feel better.
Unfortunately, all mommies and daddies are not quite as accepting of crying. Or falling, for that matter. Many mommies and daddies have issues, and they pass them on to their little ones — typically not intentionally but to the same effect.
So, rather than lovingly comforting their child when they fall and cry, they may say words like: That’s enough crying for now. What’s the big deal. It’s just a little scrape. And why are you always falling? You’re such a klutz.
With an accompanying “I’m-disappointed-in-you” facial expression to match.
One can only imagine what message the child takes away from that. I suspect it would be akin to: I shouldn’t be crying. Why didn’t I see that crack? What’s wrong with me! Next time I fall, there’s no way I’m crying. I don’t want to make daddy upset with me.
What Damage Has Been Done
If the above example is a one-shot deal or at worst an infrequent occurrence, then minimal damage, if any. Even the best of parents have their off days when they unfairly take things out on their kids. It’s not the end of the world.
Kids are resilient, and if overall they’re treated with love and sensitivity, they’re not going to hyperfocus on the handful of times they weren’t.
Unfortunately, there are many parents with whom it’s a pattern to mistreat their kids. Here are a few ways — they may:
- criticize them excessively
- compare them to others
- tell them what they should and shouldn’t feel
- praise them for their intelligence, rather than for working hard
- overly focus on their physical appearance
There Is No Expiration Date on Parental Mistreatment
Parents don’t only mistreat their children when they’re little kids. Unless they work on themselves to improve their parenting skills ( which I’m sorry to say is rarely the case), they’ll likely mistreat them through their entire childhoods and even beyond that.
For example, let’s say in 11th grade, you get a grade of C in French despite working very hard all semester. Your parent’s response may be: What happened there? There’s no excuse for such a poor grade. How are you going to make it into a good college with C grades!
Or you don’t make the chamber choir, despite all the hours you practiced singing. Their response may be: You should have practiced more, like your brother did. That’s why he made the choir and you didn’t so don’t go whining about it to me.
In both of the above situations, if your parents were considering your feelings and appreciating your efforts, they would have responded with supportive, encouraging words.
They wouldn’t have blamed you for your lack of success. They wouldn’t have shamed you for your whining.
Yes, the blame and shame game. It all began when you were that four-year-old and took the fall. Your parents blamed you for falling and shamed you for crying. And there goes the blame and shame game again, still rearing its ugly head so many years later.
How Parental Mistreatment Carries Into Our Adulthood
By the time we’re adults, we’ve long taken over the role of giving ourselves a hard time. We’ve developed our own inner critical voice, which conveys the same message our parent's voice did when we were growing up. Which is that:
- we’re not inherently lovable
- our self-love is contingent upon performance rather than effort
- our level of performance has to be perfect or at least very close to it
- what other people think of us is more important than our self-opinion
Our inner critical voice is as powerful and damaging to us as our parent’s critical voice was when we were growing up.
So, if we don’t get the job promotion despite our superb performance evaluations, we criticize ourselves, with self-talk akin to: I don’t know why the heck I was thinking I’d get the promotion. Obviously, I’m not good enough to do the job.
We’ve become our own worst enemy.
There Is Hope
Just because we’ve become our own worst enemy does not mean we can’t switch gears and become our own best friend.
We can learn to replace our pattern of self-criticism with unconditional self-love and acceptance.
I won’t say it’s easy to change decades-old ingrained ways of harshly viewing ourselves.
However, it's doable. I know that from my own experience.
Yes, I continue to have those days when I struggle with my sense of self-worth. That being said, I’ve made good progress. I’ve discovered that learning to unconditionally love oneself again is a two steps forward, one step back process.
We Don’t Need to Be Victims Anymore
When we were growing up, we were victims of our parent's lack of emotional sensitivity. They were our teachers and we were very attentive students, never daring to question the validity of their lessons.
As adults, we are no longer victims.
Rather, we may choose to play the victim role of our critical inner voice. Let’s not surrender to believing the lies it tells us about ourselves.
We can do better.
We deserve all the self-love in the world, just as we did when we were toddlers merrily hopping along in the playground.
There will be a follow-up article to this one that will detail how to replace your harsh inner critical voice with a self-loving one. It’s worked wonders for me. My wish is it will do the same for you.
A giant shoutout goes to my new Medium friend Ilana Rabinowitz on her must-read article about how it takes no more than a few words of recognition to make somebody else’s day.