On Being Bold, Confident, and Kind to Myself
Why might we be so mean to ourselves? I like to think that I am accepting and forgiving of others , and that I make an effort to understand the challenges others face, yet my own inner critic is quite harsh. It seems to be a common experience, but why do we engage in such self-sabotage? My hypothesis is that my inner critic is driven by how I feel about how society judges me. I see people be mean to each other on social media. I recall my parents’ harsh reprimandings in their attempts to make me a better person. I hear gossip. I falsely believed that the unkind statements, perhaps made by the person while they were in a bad mood, were how society was judging me. I was afraid of being “a bad person,” “lazy,” or the countless negative things others said. I believed that what others said about me was the scale that I would be weighed on. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted by society. Having been socially awkward and lonely for a large chunk of my life, the inner critic perhaps