How To Stop Hating Yourself

no matter who you are and what your life looks like the voice you're going to hear most often in life is your own and that's why the nature of your relationship with yourself which is a real thing you have a relationship with yourself will have a greater impact on your quality of life and on your mental health than any relationships you have with any other human being on this planet and that's why I think it's so sad and so unfortunate that most of us don't know how to do this we don't know how to have

a healthy relationship with ourselves and we end up in these Vicious Cycles of beating ourselves up judging ourselves shaming ourselves and accidentally creating frustration negativity resentment and sometimes even hatred towards ourselves today I'm going to review with you four mental habits that you can change to stop hating yourself and work on maintaining a healthy inner dialogue so that when you are talking to you it's not always a vicious knockdown drag out fight the first way you can do that is to stop Prosecuting yourself for Thought crimes now I said that kind of funny on purpose

but what I mean by that is you only judge other people on the things that they say or do or otherwise outwardly manifest into their lives and put out into the world because that's all you can see about who they are and what's going on for them but you judge yourself for things you even think about doing you judge yourself for thoughts that you would never speak because you think they're wrong or hateful or messed up you judge yourself for impulses behavioral ideas or impulses that you don't engage in because you know they would be

harmful to you or other people or both so you are basically comparing your inner world to other people's outer world and it and it's like to mix metaphors I know it's like putting your rough draft of life up against someone else's final draft because the things that other people let out for the most part are the screened and refined versions of the things that are happening inside of them so when you look at other people and then you look inwardly you look to the stuff you don't share with anybody else and you judge yourself for

that you are doing something completely unfair in fact I would even go so far as to argue that if you identify a messed up thought you have that you choose not to say because you know it would hurt someone's feelings or be wrong or inappropriate or you have an urge to engage in a certain behavior and you inhibit that urge and you don't engage in the behavior because you realize it would be damaging not only should you not shame or judge yourself for that impulse I actually think you should celebrate that that's a victory that

is a win for you to keep that inside and choose to challenge it instead of indulging it in the process of behavior change whether you're trying to stop using a substance spend less money be nicer to people anything you're trying to change about yourself the actual impulses the thoughts the the the behind the-scenes stuff that is the very last thing that will change it takes a very very long time time to change how your subconscious mind functions in some cases it will never fully change there are many people in recovery from various types of things

who do not ever actually get to the point where they never think about it anymore or never want to do it anymore your agency your ability to choose lies in the space between internal and external the space between impulse and behavior so when you experience an Impulse inhibit the impulse and then don't engage in the behavior you won you had a you had a battle you had a challenge put in front of you and you were victorious that is not something to beat yourself up about because you wish you had never thought about it in

the first place and to be real we all have pretty messed up thoughts you just only know what yours are you don't know what other people's are because they don't usually talk about them because they're embarrassing or disturbing or scary or whatever people don't let this stuff out very often which means when you have them it's easy for you to think I'm must be the only one cuz I don't ever hear anyone else talking about that stuff trust me when you're their therapist like me you realize everybody's a little messed up maybe I'm a pessimist

I don't know but that's my take on things so rather than Prosecuting yourself for Thought crimes try to appreciate every instance of successfully challenging the thought or challenging the inhibition that's the best you can do that's literally a win take it and be happy about it the second thing I want you to consider not doing anymore if you want to heal your relationship with yourself and not hate yourself anymore is to stop making special rules for yourself that only you are expected to follow one way that your relationship with yourself is fairly unique compared to

the relationships that you have with other people is that you serve two roles in your relationship with yourself you're sort of like the manager and the employee at the same time because in your own internal dialogue you're the one telling yourself what to do giving yourself commands setting expectations but then you're also the person who has to follow those orders and then go and do the thing so you're the manager and the employee simultaneously most of us set expectations for ourselves that we would never have for other people we hold ourselves up to ridiculous perfectionistic

often unattainable standards and on some level we know we can't live up to it but we have some misguided belief that holding ourselves to a higher standard than other people will help us somehow it doesn't and this makes no sense if you think about it it because if it helped you to be held to these higher standards wouldn't you hold them for everybody because that would help them too there's a reason you don't hold others to the same standards as you hold yourself to and that's because on some level you know it's unrealistic and dysfunctional

you know it can't be done all it does is create a constant sense of inner frustration it ruins your relationship with yourself in both directions because not that you have multiple personalities but like the manager part of you that's trying to get you to do more things and be more functional and be more productive starts to resent the so-called employee side of you because you're telling yourself to do all these things and then you're not doing a lot of them or maybe you're not doing them as well as you wish you would and so it's

it's like having an employee and saying do this do this do this and and they're not getting it done and it's very frustrating and it creates a sense of resentment towards that person but then you're also the employee dealing with this manager who is telling you to do an unreal real istic amount of things to an unrealistically high degree of quality and then the resentment builds from that direction as well because you've got this person constantly yelling at you and shouting at you and saying that's not good enough and letting you know every single time

you fall short but not recognizing when you do a good job at something and your entire inner dialogue just becomes a fight every conversation every task becomes a battle instead of just hey we should do this yes let's do it the only way you can resolve this inner conflict is by expecting the same things from yourself for the most part the same level of quality anyway that you expect from other people and not setting and holding all of these special rules and special expectations for yourself if you would not expect it of somebody you love

then it's probably not a good rule the third thing you can do to stop hating yourself is to quit acting like you don't know your own story this is so pervasive in my therapy sessions with I I'm tempted to say every single therapy client I work with we have this habit I do it too we judge ourselves in complete isolation of everything that's happened in our lives we act like we have no idea what we've been through when we look at how we functioned and try to figure out if we're doing a good job or

not so let's say I haven't been able to hold down a job in the last 10 years I've had very unsteady short employment stins for a decade that doesn't sound great right that's not anyone's dream or anyone's goal and if that was the only thing you knew about me you might you might look on me unfavorably which could be fair but that's not the only thing you know about you and if in if for example you know that during this decade where you struggled with employment that you were trapped actively trapped in an abusive relationship

well suddenly that changes things a bit doesn't it now knowing that it is absolutely ridiculous to think you should have been able to hold down a job how is a person supposed to perform well at a job when they don't feel safe in their own home and they don't know what they're coming back to On Any Given night when they leave work your mind is not going to be on work you're not going to do well it's going to be hard to get and keep jobs judging yourself without proper context is one of the most

callous things that you can do because it will absolutely ruin your relationship with yourself because when you do this you are taking the one person who truly has the ability to really understand everything you've been through and basically removing that person from your life you don't act like you don't know how you got here don't pretend that you don't understand all of the challenges and all of the circumstances that you have faced you understand them better than any other human being on the planet people ask me sometimes how I've been able to overcome what I've

been through to get to the place where I'm at in life and there's no one answer to that question but place my past as far as things like academic history work history relationship history um these are not great for me for large chunks of my life they're not great but I've been able to place them in the proper context because I remember who I was and what I was going through and what my life was like back then and to be frank with you guys I think it's amazing that I even survived My Darkest decade

I am not about to Guilt Trip myself for not being in the top half of my high school class or failing intros my freshman year or getting rejected from a volunteer position at a crisis line just to name a few things and yes those are all real examples those are all things that have happened to me but I know where I was at when they was when they were happening I had a lot going on work and school and relationships were not my top priority at that time in my life my top priority was getting

through the day without hating everything around me that's what I spent my time energy and attention on not these other things once I got to a point in life where I didn't didn't have to worry about that as much anymore suddenly I got a lot better at everything else crazy how that works right you probably have a similar story don't act like you don't know it cuz you do better than anyone and the fourth thing I think you should consider doing to stop hating yourself is to quit making ridiculous comparisons to other people and this

is the one that gets me the most because I have a lot of roles in my life and I want to do really really well at everything as a person who doesn't have a huge social network doesn't consume a lot on social media and L doesn't get out of the house much I tend to compare myself in various domains of life to like really well-known people in that area so I'm a business owner so when I think business owner I think Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Bill Gates because these are the only people I know that

are business owners I'm an author and I I'm a self-help author so I think of people like brenee brown Bessel Vander famous self-help authors I'm a fitness Enthusiast so the fitness enthusiasts I see I have a home gym I don't actually go to the G I don't have like real normal people to compare myself to so I look at bodybuilders and ridiculously jacked guys and these are all my basis for comparisons in all these various things that matter to me and the net result of all these maladaptive comparisons is that I feel massively behind on

everything which quickly transforms into insecurity and self-loathing the reason these are all such dysfunctional comparisons is anyone who's at the top of their game in some certain domain of their life has probably sacrificed their performance in other areas to get to that incredibly high level so the idea that I should be able to perform at a level that comparable to someone who only does that thing in that area of my life when I'm also trying to do other things like I'm also trying to be a parent a lot of these people who do these amazing

things either aren't parents or I don't know them personally but don't seem to have great relationships with their family for example I wouldn't give that up to be them I wouldn't it's a terrible trade so I end up basically thinking that I'm supposed to be the best version of every possible human being in every domain of my life it's absurd it it's absolutely impossible I would have to live for a thousand years to get to that level in everything that matters to me I'm probably not even going going to get to that level and even

one of them and I have to be okay with that I have to stop making these ridiculous comparisons they have made sacrifices to achieve that progress that I would not be willing to make so I have to be okay with being sort of a jack of all trades master of none cuz there's more than one thing in my life that matters to me and I suspect that is the case for you as well because there are very few people who can really just do one thing and ignore everything else in their life and be happy

if you are one of those people you are probably in the top of that particular thing whatever it happens to be if you're not don't compare yourself to people that are those are different realities as always I hope this content was helpful and I will see you next time take care