– What a stupid idiot! —exclaims the woman, forgetting to turn off the lights and draining the battery.
“I’m an unbridled fool,” says another woman, upset by problems at work.
“I’m dominated,” the man summarizes after a fight with his wife, unable to defend his position.
“I’m a lazy person,” you diagnose yourself, upon discovering that the extra kilos don’t disappear…
This is how you can destroy your self-esteem with a single sentence. What happens on a mental level? Something happened that didn’t meet their standards of perfection. And in an instant you make your multifaceted personality flat and one-dimensional. You reduce it to one characteristic, which becomes the main one. What happens after you label yourself? You start to feel shame and guilt for not being okay. And this is reflected in self-knowledge and relationships.
How to get rid of this harmful automatism? Using a delicious metaphor: “I am a kaleidoscope! It turns out that one piece of glass says “I am a lazy person”, and the others: “I am an excellent specialist”, “a reliable partner”, “a loving mother and a great cook.” And the most interesting thing is that there are always more pieces of glass than the one I don’t like at the moment. This is great!
Yes, a mistake, a failure, a bad action: this is just a small glass of a kaleidoscope. And the whole person is an amazing and unique pattern. And in some circumstances it is like that, and then (they shook it, time passed or the people around were different) – once, the same pieces of glass formed in a different pattern. But the kaleidoscope remains the same! This metaphor perfectly describes the human personality and helps resolve internal conflicts, reconciling with oneself.
What to do when you are not satisfied with yourself? Tell yourself: this is just a part of me. I am much more. I have many other good and strong qualities, I also do good deeds. In this way we get out of the tunnel in which we find ourselves, destroying the personality with a negative evaluation.
