Dumping the Garbage!

It is important that we take a step back from ourselves and be critical about our attitude towards ourselves.  Not about our appearance or whatever faults we perceive that we have, but our attitude!

To help yourself do this, I suggest you write out a list of ten of your ‘faults’ and then a list of ten good points.  There is something about writing things down that helps us put things into perspective!  You may battle with the good points at first, not because you don’t have any but because it is so foreign to say something nice about yourself.  Once you have done that, assess the “bad” points and then look at their importance.  For example, being pigeon-toed really doesn’t matter so long as your legs are strong, you can walk, jog, run. Being overweight is not incurable, being short is not a disaster, etc., etc.

If there are problems that are incurable, learn to accept them as being part of what makes you unique and special. We in South Africa are blessed with outstanding athletes who are handicapped. Natalie Du Toit is one fine example of someone who, despite losing her leg in an accident, has gone on to become a top international, olympic swimmer. She didn’t let her handicap cripple her!

Everytime you find yourself being critical about yourself stop!  Just stop immediately and replace that thought with something positive.  Just for fun, ask a friend or family member to write out ten good points about you. In fact – ask as many people as you can! I’m certain that you are thinking that you could write a whole book of bad points, but that would defeat our objective. We are focusing on the good points and I know, that once you have spent enough time focused in a positive way, you will find that most of your bad points are in your head or are not so bad after all.

If you think that the above exercise is vain and will lead to sinful pride, you are wrong. God does not want us to think badly of ourselves and to be crippled by self-hatred and low self-esteem.  In fact, we are told to love others as we love ourselves! We cannot truly love others if we are filled with self loathing. A good self-esteem is not pride, or vanity, rather it is an honest evaluation of who we are – child of God, uniquely designed to fulfill His unique purpose for our lives, a masterpiece of God’s creation. 

Facing The Pain of a low Self-Esteem

Hiding behind a Camera!

Our self-esteem is so vitally important to how we live our lives that we cannot afford to trifle with it. Yet for some reason, we consider it vain and silly to worry about how we feel about ourselves.  Jesus commanded us to “love our neighbours as ourselves”. Well, its pretty obvious that there are very few of us who love ourselves if the wars, racism, crime, violence and general all round selfishness are any mirror of our hearts.  We cannot love others if we don’t love ourselves. 

Getting to the point of self acceptance can, for many, be an uphill battle.  I know, I fought my own battle.  Severe acne for 10 years started my self-loathing talks.  My teen years were horrible for that reason only.  My only problem was my skin and this spilled into everything else in my life. At the age of sixteen I was voted as having the best legs in my high school class. Did it make me feel better? A little, but then the negative thoughts started again. This time these negative thoughts said that the other girls only said that about my legs because my face was so awful and they were just being nice! 

By the time I was 21, I had fallen pregnant (un-married) by a man who was nine years older than I. We married before the baby was born and just two weeks before my 26^th birthday I gave birth to my third son. My marriage was a travesty. Ten months after my youngest son was born, I left home after my husband beat me up and I began divorce proceedings. After the divorce came many years as a single mom, without a cent of child support ever being received.

Why did I marry a man like that? Quite honestly there are multiple answers but I think the main one is that I didn’t like myself and so chose someone who had as little respect for me as I had for myself.  I spent five years in a daze, trying not to see the truth of what was happening in my life because I did not think I deserved any differently.  It was only when the safety of my children was threatened that I had the courage to accept that this was not the way to live and even if I didn’t deserve better, the children certainly did.

After my divorce, with my skin having cleared up during my first pregnancy, I was suddenly 27 and looking great.  My figure was fantastic, I looked amazing! One suitor even compared me favourably to Olivia Newton John!! Did this fact change the negative thoughts about myself? Not at all.  All my energy went into caring for my sons and within ten years I had started gaining weight.  Yet another reason to dislike myself.  The vicious cycle of self hatred had another notch to its belt. Incredibly, even though my skin had completely healed, I still hated it and would not leave the house without make-up on to hide the defects.

It is amazing how we find it so difficult to let go of the things that we hate the most about ourselves and yet the compliments and the good points are totally ignored. Our view of ourselves is so distorted and so often, hidden behind a sunny mask, that even our nearest and dearest would be horrified to learn what we really think about ourselves.

Not all of us go through really bad episodes that cause us to dislike ourselves. In fact, the reason that I mentioned mine is because they indicate how crippling such “small” things can be. For many it is a number of minor events that add up and slowly erode at our self esteem.

The criteria by which western society measures our “value” as a person are, wealth, physical beauty, power, education and youthfulness.  Our advertisements on television, whatever the product, will ultimately appeal in some way to one or more of these so-called “values”.  We judge ourselves relative to the “worth” of others and constantly strive to look like / be like someone else to the point that we lose our own identity.

We need to take a serious look at ourselves, not through our tainted glasses, but with open eyes and an honest heart  but mainly with the realisation that God loves us, He created us exactly as we are, and He did this because He created what PLEASED Him!