This self of ours, an ad hoc identity that we’ve thrown together on the fly, has been built up to handle many different tasks. It’s sort of like the statues you see of Buddhist gods who have a thousand arms.
One of your identity’s arms was built to keep you socially acceptable. Another was created to make sure you could earn enough money to keep eating. There are also arms for family relations, work relations, and other attitudes toward a million different issues in daily life. Some arms are more competent at doing their job than others.
Often, the arm assigned to preserving self esteem has grown quite weak over the years, due to lack of exercise.
Among these many arms is one that may have been causing you a great deal of discomfort. It’s a set of censoring voices. Your identity includes a composite of every criticizing voice you ever heard in your life. To keep you from unsafe actions, you have borrowed reproach from your mother and father when they criticized you, teachers and classmates who ridiculed you, policemen who stopped you for speeding, fierce bosses, and multitudes of others. If the original voices were harsh and unforgiving, your self esteem have suffered and shrunk.
These criticizing voices were adopted because we all depend on others to tell us whether we’re coloring inside the lines or have strayed outside the limits of what’s allowed.
Now, this is a reasonably effective system. And it works pretty well. Except…
Some of us have gone a bit overboard and adopted too many different criticisms into this part of ourselves. In a word, you may simply be too hard on yourself. We have so many rules, so many “don’ts” and “can’ts” that we have not left ourselves enough room to move.
For some of us, there is almost nothing that’s okay to do, so we keep ourselves tied up in knots. All those rules laid down by the voices we’ve adopted constantly pull us this way and that, with no safe middle ground. Meanwhile your self esteem sits huddled in the cellar of your mind, hiding from all those censors.
by Charles Burke
Charles BurkeLevel: PlatinumCharles Burke, retired and living in Thailand, is the author of “inside the Minds of Winners” and “Command More Luck. His blog is located at …
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