Mirror Mirror on the Wall! (Dr J's head-cleaners)

Struggle with self-esteem issues? Feel loathing when you look in a mirror? Does this not waste an enormous amount of time and energy?

Self Esteem is the esteem one feels toward one's self. It is a fundamental attitude that one has toward one's self. It's a tough world, it's a tough life and it's tough to know how to handle things sometimes.. It's also a world of choices, feelings, thoughts and free will. Everybody gets to decide for him or herself how much esteem they are due! It's a big problem when one's self-esteem is poor, when we don't like ourselves, we don't make good choices.

Life can mess with you sometimes to the extent that you can simply have a problem of excesive harshness in how you see yourself and how you decide to react to your weaknesses. This is something like the "body distortion" that individuals with anorexia or obesity experience. People with very poor self-esteems sometimes simply have to understand that, when it comes to self, they don't have good judgement about what is appropriate in terms of expectations and goals, cause for rewards, cause for punishments, and what would be appropriate levels of displayed anger and rage. The proof of this and the fix of this is in asking a simple question to measure one's judgements: Do you treat yourself in the same way you would a colleague? Do you encourage yourself like you would a colleague? Do you coach yourself after failures and successes the way you would a colleague? If the answer is no to any of these, then the next question should be WHY? Identifying the presence of such a mental 'soft-spot' is not the same as avoiding it. It's very hard to adjust one's attitude toward self. Catching yourself and correcting yourself should apply with one rule........"Do unto self what you would do unto others!"

Another common glitch in life is that we tend to see what we expect to see and disregard the rest. It may be that many people underestimate their numbers of successes versus their numbers of mistakes. It seems that our brains are structured to pay more attention to things that go wrong than things that go right. But for individuals with very poor self-esteem this can mean routinely discounting succeses as no big deal or nothing to get cocky about while carefully remembering every mistake and emotionally abusing one's self for each and every one, and generally feeling like a major idiot loser all the time.

so "Mirror Mirror on the wall, how can I make friends with Y'all" You work for yourself, you are your own boss. When there is hard feelings at work between colleagues, there is always recourse to make peace. A face to face is helpful, reassuring each other that both are really working on this. In self esteem, this translates to work in the mirror - eyeball to eyeball - mono to mono with yourself. Start with being civil and apologising to the person you are looking at for being such a crappy person to work with and pledge to try to do much better. Ask yourself this quesiton: how many mistakes do I make versus how many failures. Conside the last week as an example. Whatever numbers you come up with, ask yourself if you credited yourself for every step, every correction in planning, every forkful of food, every time you moved. If your reaction to this last question is to suggest that these are silly things to count, then ask yourself if you would have counted any of these things if you had made an error. Probably you would have. It would have been on your "I'm so stupid" list if yu had tripped and broke your wrist, if you had driven off the road or driven over a pedestrian, if you had stuck a forkful of food into your eye, if you had lost your paycheque on the way to the bank, or if you poisoned yourself or gave yourself food poisoning. Right? Proud is allowed.

What to do: Work on being smarter on rewards, punishments and ignoring. When something goes a little well, it should be rewarded, reward any step towards a goal and you're more likely to get to that goal. Ignore partial successes and reduce the possible of full success. Avoid severe self-directed anger, derisive statemetns ("you stupid fat @#$%)! and self sabotage as a "behaviour mod" strategy unless you are trying to drive yourself to self-mutlitation or suicide. When you make a mistake, kick yourself in the butt once and then pat yourself on the back for noticing that you had made a mistack. Work on being able to tolerate the yuckiness of guilt feelings without saying negative things to yourself, the yuck feelings are pretty much all the kick in the butt anyone ever needs.

So what brought this about you all ask. Well after the fantastic weekend, I got a bit down on myself after seeing the photos that were hanging around - thinking "wow you are massive Doris compared to others" "Look at how disgusting you are"..........and consequently sort of self-sabotaged myself on sunday. Then went into a bout of depression, to bed early and woke up feeling very self pitiful and self loathing on Monday morning. Had a little cry, had a little talk with "coach", but still feeling a little shitty, because on top of waking up feeling that way, my metal monster showed a massive spike. I wasn't worried about the spike because knowing the way my body goes, there will follow a massive drop (which I might add did happen and I am back to my new low). But being in the headspace that I was in, it didn't get received too well. Now I was given some positive feedback but on Monday it didn't sink in too well. so I have been doing some reading, looking back at some books I have and started reading a book given to me by the beautiful Elsbe, who is a true christian women. this lady does anything and everything her power to help others less fortunate than herself, both here in Brisbane and also worldwide. Now after reading the above article and some of Elsbe's book, I started to acknowledge some of the feedback given to me, and have started eyeballing myself in the mirror. My next hurdle is to accept my photos and deal with them in a positive way rather than seeing the negative of it all. A hard and long process. A friend once said to me, that maybe my self-negativity stems back to my childhood and the favouritism shown to my sister at all times. I would like to take that as an excuse but I can not, because that means I am looking for the excuse the feel the way that I do. So moving on, patting myself on the back for accepting one of my problems today, posting about it, I will move on and try and be so much more positive about my journey.

I thank you for listening and looking forward to talking to you all gain.

ciao!