difficulties are part and parcel of being alive.
If we are critical of ourselves, it’s harder for us to be honest about our needs and fears. When we receive criticism—even from ourselves—the natural reaction is defense. We defend ourselves against ourselves without even realizing it. What this means is that it’s very easy to be in denial about where we need to improve as people because we don’t feel safe enough to be honest with ourselves.
How can you feel sufficiently safe to be honest with yourself when you are always judging yourself?
This is why even when we genuinely want to improve ourselves, we can find it so difficult—we want to transform, yet part of us blocks it out. We are resisting change even while we are desiring change.
So criticizing ourselves only seems like a good tool for improvement, while it is in fact detrimental to being a better person. We can also think we are improving while in reality we are regressing, because our self-protective mechanism has kicked in to prevent us from seeing our own flaws.
Some of us think we are self-aware, but we are actually in denial.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, it is not self-criticism but self-acceptance that is key to self-improvement.
When we can accept ourselves, it means that we are not subconsciously judging ourselves or being resentful of who we are. This means we feel safe enough to be honest and acknowledge our shortcomings and weaknesses, and that we do not feel so guilty and ashamed that we have to block them out or make excuses for ourselves.
Self-criticism is one of the main reasons why even as we are working so hard on being happy, we still find ourselves unhappy. If we self-criticize and constantly beat ourselves up, it means we don’t accept ourselves. If we don’t accept ourselves, it means that we are constantly attributing blame for our unhappiness, which is as unhealthy as blaming others for our unhappiness.
Our lack of self-acceptance manifests in our reactions toward people—we’ll constantly feel that we are lacking, and this results in always comparing ourselves to others. It’s also why we can be so sensitive to what people think of us. Always subconsciously seeking acceptance from others makes it very hard for us to be at peace.
Until we stop criticizing ourselves for not being good enough, we won’t understand that our happiness has never been about being good enough or perfect enough, because we have always been enough. To be human is to already be imperfect, which means that we are bound to experience doubts, insecurities, needs, and fears.
My husband Yuri likes to say that we are like Swiss cheese—it has plenty of holes but is perfect the way it is. I laughed when he said it, but the image holds such truth! We have to work on filling up the holes and gaps in our lives (and therefore we seek self-improvement), yet we are simultaneously also perfect the way we are (hence the self-acceptance).
If we keep creating conditions listing what we must achieve to be happy, or how we must feel to be happy, or how our life has to be for us to be happy…then we will always be at the mercy of our own discontentment.
The other thing to understand is that if we use self-criticism as a way to motivate ourselves to be better, not only will it backfire, it also means that we will likely employ the same methods on the people around us—we will think that it is a good thing to criticize those we love because it will “motivate” them to be better. Then, the same cycle of unhappiness will plague the people closest to us.
We can only access our happiness when we can recognize what holds us back or weighs us down. This requires us to first accept and love ourselves so that we can freely identify the barriers to our happiness without guilt and shame making us resistant and defensive.
We Are Never THE Victim When We Value Ourselves
<Self-Love>
One of the essential foundations of self-love is seeing our own value and respecting ourselves.
“Love yourself” was the advice that my late grandma gave my mother when she left home at age seventeen to journey from her small hometown to the big city for a brighter future. My grandma wasn’t a person who nagged at or fretted about her kids. Instead, she had a way of making them understand the enormity of her message in just a few simple words. So love yourself were two words that stayed with my mom as she grew into adulthood.
When I left home for the first time and went abroad to study at a university, my mom said the same thing to me: “Love yourself.” I remember talking to her about what it meant. The concept of self-love was hard for me to grasp back then, but I could feel the significance of what she was trying to convey.
It wasn’t until I started dating and fell in love that it really hit home how valuable that advice was. It almost sounds too simple—love yourself, but it means so much. Loving yourself means that you never attach your self-worth to whether or not someone loves you.
When my dad told my mom that he was having an affair and wanted to be with someone else, my mom felt a torrent of emotions. But there one was thing she did not feel—she did not feel that my dad had fallen in love with someone else because she wasn’t good enough.
We often wonder: how do you love yourself? We understand the concept of self-love, yet when it comes down to it, what does it really mean?
My mom taught me self-love, and when I watched my mom’s reactions and decisions through her divorce process, I could see what the practice of self-love meant. I could see my mom’s sadness and pain, yet not once did she blame herself or beat herself up wondering if she had been a “good enough wife.” She knew that she had done her best for the relationship as a wife, as a best friend, and as a woman. My mom didn’t blame my dad because she didn’t attach her own value as a person to his decision to leave.
My mom respected herself enough to not see herself as a victim, so she simply wasn’t one. The truth is, people can only victimize us in this way when we give them responsibility for our happiness. It is easy to feel lost when we feel like the people we love don’t value us, but it is so important to know that the value of who we are as people does not diminish based on how other people see us. Don’t let your worthiness be determined by how someone treats you.
When we are in relationships, our happiness is still and will always be our own responsibility. And if your happiness is your own responsibility, then no one can ever make you feel diminished or unworthy. And that is self-love and self-respect.
Nobody Can Make Us Happy or Unhappy
<Perspective>
One of the main reasons why we unconsciously give our happiness away so easily to others is because we think that other people make us happy or unhappy.
When we go into a relationship or marry someone, it is because the person brings so much joy into our lives. When we fall in love, every other kind of happiness that we’ve ever felt can pale in comparison; so much so that it’s natural for us to settle on this one thought: this person makes me happy.
But that isn’t true.
It is you who made yourself happy—you made the choice to allow yourself to open up to someone incredible. You made the decision to commit to someone to whom you feel extremely connected. You made the choice to stick around and to hang in there through all the challenges and difficulties.
Nobody can make us happy, we have always been the ones who have brought happiness into our own lives.
If
