Do you struggle with self-hatred? Do you feel less-than? Do you sometimes wish that you were someone who you perceive as being perfect? It’s time to start liking yourself. For the past 20 years as a therapist, I have guided people toward self-acceptance. There are a few key concepts that go into liking yourself, and I’m going to share them with you in this article. There is hope for anyone who can be honest with himself and is willing to change.
What I’ve seen in clinical practice is that people who don’t like themselves usually have a restlessness and a complacency in them. What I mean by complacency is a resistance to bettering themselves. Now why they have this resistance is usually rooted in past traumas that have made them feel like victims. When you feel like a victim, you can’t take responsibility for yourself. You’re being held hostage by the person who harmed you, and the power remains in their hands. You’ve got to take that power back for yourself.
Victimhood is a reverberation of being emotionally put down in your formative years. Children put other people on a pedestal and only as adults realize how dysfunctional those people were. The people we put on a pedestal are often the ones who made us feel insignificant or flawed. You have to work through facing those memories of being made to feel less-than and put those people who hurt you in their proper place.
Overcoming victimhood means maturing – growing up emotionally. Some people never mature and keep hating themselves. It’s a waste of a potentially good life – everyone has it in himself to overcome this stuff if they are willing to look at themselves honestly and work on their resistances. Complacency is a resistance to bettering yourself. This is why simply telling yourself you are good and worthy isn’t enough to move the meter – you have to get down to causes and conditions and then find ways to overcome them. This is where a good therapist can help.
However, I am not dismissing the value of speaking to yourself respectfully. One of the tools that every person who likes himself has is an internal voice that’s respectful to himself. Learning to speak nicely to yourself is an important skill to learn that should be done in conjunction with deeper work.
In order to see good in yourself, your ego structure has to be intact. People build up defenses around their egos to protect themselves, which is necessary for living through trauma, but you have to identify the parts of yourself that are now limiting your growth instead of serving a constructive purpose. You needed those defense mechanisms to survive; now those defense mechanisms are preventing you from being a person you can like.
For instance, people learn to use anger to survive being put down, but then they see the reverberations and repercussions of expressing anger and feel ashamed of themselves. To get to the root of that anger, you need to look at what anger did for you that was beneficial and then learn new ways of coping without anger. Learning those new ways of coping builds up a healthy ego.
Another thing you need to do to support a sound ego is to develop domains within your life where you feel confident and emboldened in a healthy way. If you have areas in which you are thriving and succeeding, you can take those healthy domains and spread that confidence around. It’s similar to having money in one investment and using some of that money to fund other investments.
You have to find something in life that you can be good at, feel confident in, and thrive on. However, it must reflect priorities that you believe in. You can’t aspire to the world’s priorities because you’re not always going to be good at what the world prioritizes – we can’t all succeed at earning huge sums of money, staying young-looking, athleticism, and fame. You have to honestly look at your values, what’s genuinely important for you, and choose to develop skills in something that supports living by them.
When you’re firm in your values and you’re living by them, you can be confident. I see it all the time in my clinical work and personal life: People who are confident always know their values and live by them.
People who like themselves don’t compare, contrast, and compete. They’re too busy living their own lives according to their values. They might be inspired by others, but they’re not looking down upon themselves because they are not achieving the same things others are. Inspiration, not competition, is the key.
When you compare yourself to others, you are living vicariously through them. You’re not busy living your own life as fully as possible; you’re imagining how nice it would be to be someone else and comparing that experience to your own lived experience. It’s crucial to focus on embodying your own life and focusing on what you are good at.
During childhood and teenage years, many people compare themselves to others. As people grow up, they mature, and they see the multifaceted nature of their goodness and their wholesomeness. When you come to like yourself, you’re done putting other people on a pedestal. You can see your strengths and weaknesses clearly – using your strengths to maintain a healthy ego and proactively trying to improve around your weaknesses.
People who like themselves are able to proverbially look in the mirror and face what they see. You have to have a strong ability to introspect. The dysfunctional ways of facing criticism are responding with self-pity and self-hatred; offloading; or blaming others. Offloading the responsibility of their wrongdoing means saying, “I’m sorry,” just to get off the hook. It’s relinquishing the wrongdoing, as if you’ve deleted it. You have to be able to apologize but not offload it. If you don’t soak it up and absorb your wrongdoing, you’re not going to ever fix that wrongdoing. Estimable people do estimable acts. You’ll like yourself if you look honestly at your wrongdoing and make proper amends, while not hating yourself for having erred.
Deflecting blame and just blaming others – factually most of the time it could be correct. Any issue that happens usually involves circumstances and other people. Yet you still need to look at your part in it honestly. Don’t put blinders on to your own responsibility. You can respect yourself when you own your part in a wrongdoing, make meaningful amends, and change your behavior in the future.
Perfectionism is a deep unconscious resistance to good – you don’t want to be good; you want to be perfect. Perfect is impossible so you want to stay basically in a state of limbo. I can tell you that there is nowhere in Torah where G-d asks us to be perfect. Aiming for perfection is a dead end. Aiming for progress, not perfection, will help you to like yourself.
The fundamental bottom line is when you work on yourself and take apart the protective defense mechanisms that no longer serve you, you become a person you can love. You let go of the parts of yourself that cause problems in your relationships and you embrace your genuine self. That’s the true key to liking yourself: Find your genuine self and let it direct your actions.
Yerachmiel Stern, LCSW is the Executive Director of Pesach Tikvah in Brooklyn, NY. Pesach Tikvah is the first and largest mental health service for the observant Jewish community. Founded 40 years ago with heart and courage, Pesach Tikvah continues to lead the way in community mental healthcare.