Being Nice to You

The easiest way to quit judging objects is just practice, practice, practice. When you catch yourself, take a deep breath, recognize it, and move on. After a while, you will start catching yourself and might even begin to call yourself out on judgements.

There is an additional piece to the non-judgemental stance. While we work on observing and describing things outwardly of ourselves, you will begin to do the same inwardly. You will start to observe and describe feelings and thoughts you are having, memories that have or may come up, and more. As you become healthier, you will begin to spend a lot of time with the side of you that you may have turned your back on for a long time.

The other side of the judgemental coin? The judgements that we place on ourselves. The non-judgmental stance lesson? Learning to be nice to yourself. If this scares you, that is perfectly ok, and you are safe. I, myself, had a panic attack when this was mentioned. Matter of fact, I believe there were several. For me, it is a skill I am still working on. Somedays I have it, and some days it is quite the struggle. I guess what I am telling you is, you will never be alone with this.

My therapist calls it “miseducation” – along with our life’s journey we were taught wrong ideas about ourselves and then those ideas were wrongly validated. Somewhere it all became the norm and when others quit feeding the negativity to us, we just picked up where they left off and kept doing it. It’s what we know. We are not bad, it is just what we know.

So, back to that last sentence:

WE ARE NOT BAD.
YOU ARE NOT BAD.
YOU ARE NOT (FILL IN THE BLANK WITH THAT BAD THOUGHT YOU ARE HAVING). 

I’m not going to lie, this may be the skill you work on for the rest of your life. As I said, I work on it daily, sometimes many times a day. The thing is, it starts getting better. The “wins” here are not so much “don’t do that anymore” (although with some things, those are great goals) as much as a longer duration between incidents.

So why this be nice to me stuff?

Everyone who is on a journey is at a different place. Some people are already at a place where this battle is not an issue, some are like me and were once at a place where they could not even look at themselves in a mirror without a lot of raging hate.

I’m not telling you to love yourself. I’m not telling you to like yourself. I am asking you to give yourself a break. As a first step, just give yourself a free pass.

We are human. We are going to screw up. We are going to make mistakes. Can you make a mistake and not beat yourself up over it? Can you beat yourself up less than you did before? If you normally choose self-destructive behaviour, can you reach out to someone first? Can you take a breath first?

As you learn mindfulness and coping, you are going to struggle – I still do and I have a lot of years under my belt.  You are not stupid, or dumb, or “never going to get it”, or “a waste of time”, or anything else. As you progress on your journey, you are going to have so many successes, a matter of fact, just reading through this is a success! Coming to peace with yourself and beyond that only allows you to celebrate those successes even more.

You are of worth, of infinite worth. One breath at a time. One moment at a time. At this moment you are amazing, and in the next, you shall be as well. Can you say it? “I am of worth!”