Ever tell yourself you’re ugly? How about tell yourself you’re stupid? Not good enough? Maybe you tell yourself you’re a screw up?

It’s not uncommon for us, at different times in our lives, to talk to ourselves like this. We often complain about how others talk to us but sometimes we’re our worst critic. Even worse than being critical about ourselves, we outright lie. The truth of the matter is we’re not ugly, we’re not stupid, and we’re not screw ups.

We all live according to paradigms or maps. These paradigms are the lenses with which we view the world around us. Everything we say, feel, and do is filtered through these lenses. Somewhere along the line, from when we were babies, we decided it was appropriate to change the maps we were born with. We convinced ourselves it was okay to lie and so we changed our paradigms.

This can be a very hard subject to digest so let’s start at the beginning. If you’ve ever held a baby close in your arms, gazing deep into his or her eyes you see so much beauty. You see a baby that’s precious, beautiful, innocent, joyful, good enough, worthy, intelligent, and many other qualities. We don’t even think twice that these things are true about babies. It’s not something we need to try and prove or convince ourselves of, it’s just the way it is. These qualities we see in these babies are their inherent nature. They’re born with these qualities. Every child is born with these qualities, including you. These qualities never go away, they’re always there.

Somewhere down the road from baby to toddler, to child, to pre-teen, to teen, to adult that inherent nature gets covered over. It becomes too foggy to see and we put on new glasses. Only the new lenses are filled with lies we tell ourselves. Usually we come up with these new maps/beliefs as a way to protect us from childhood trauma. It doesn’t have to be trauma in the sense of physical or sexual abuse. Remember, what’s important to reflect on is not “what” happened to us as children but rather “how” it impacted us. No two people are alike and what causes you trauma and distress can be totally different than someone else. It’s not important to focus on the what but more so the how. We easily get caught up in the, “Well I wasn’t beaten half to death as a child so I didn’t have any trauma.” The reality is shame plays a huge role in most of our lives and how we are shaped as young adults. Parents shame children every day and in fact it’s so common that many of us don’t even notice we’re doing it to our children or that it’s being done to other children around us. This shame and childhood trauma, however brought about, shapes these new maps that we carry with us today.

These maps are the basis for our beliefs. Our actions are tied so close to our beliefs. They can cause us to pull away or overcompensate. Take for example the person who doesn’t think they’re attractive. Most of us who think we’re unattractive will give up on obtaining what we consider being attractive. We may not work out, we may eat poorly, we may not get annual physicals. We don’t take care of ourselves because we don’t think we’re attractive. On the flip side, some of us might overcompensate for our beliefs. We don’t think we’re attractive and because we feel so much shame around that we go out of our ways to make others think we are. We may spend and exorbitant amount of money, time, and energy on trying to look (in our eyes) attractive. This is an example of the extremes that we face when we carry these false beliefs. We’re much more moderate when we’re living in our adult realities and aware of our inherent nature. It’s these false beliefs we carry that swing us back and forth in these extremes and ultimately become the basis for how we respond to everything in our life.

Imagine what your life would be like if you believed you were intelligent, attractive, good enough, loveable, precious, innocent, committed…

 You already are all of these things, you just need to believe it.