Being a person who is hard on himself or herself is very challenging. Some people think that we create our own problems by being hard on ourselves. The thing is it’s not natural for us to be kind to ourselves. We didn’t learn how to be compassionate to ourselves when we were young.
Here are 15 struggles that we people who are hard on ourselves would understand.
1. We seek perfection because of our past experiences.
We have zero tolerance for our own faults. Perfection is important to us. Remember the time when we are in school and our classmates laughed at us for making a mistake. It was an horrible experience. We don’t want to relive that again. So we work hard and plan excessively to avoid making any mistakes.
2. We are only hard on ourselves.
When other people make mistakes, we forgive them readily. We are kind to other people and set low standards for them. But when it comes to ourselves, we set impossible high standards that can never be reached. We believe that other people deserved to be treated kindly, but not us.
3. No matter how talented we are, we still think it’s not enough.
We focus on achieving success, but no matter how much we achieved, we still feel that it’s not good enough. We don’t recognize our own talents because we think that everyone can do what we do.
4. We find it difficult to accept criticisms, even the constructive ones.
It’s not because that we aren’t open to suggestions. It’s because people are telling us things that we already know about ourselves. We are good at finding faults with ourselves. Their criticisms just reaffirm how bad we know we are.
5. But we keep asking for feedback to seek reassurance.
Even though we seek perfection in everything we do, we don’t know what perfection is. Our parents never praise us when we did something good or when we get good grades in school. They don’t want to us get too big-headed. But that also made us feel that we didn’t do well enough all the time.
6. Yet, we can’t receive compliments.
We never hear enough positive things about us growing up. When people compliment us, it’s hard for us to believe what they said is true. We think that they are just being nice to us. So every time someone gives us a compliment, we would give the credit to something else.
7. We hate to open up and be vulnerable.
We are afraid to let others know that we are less than perfect. We know we aren’t the perfect child, the perfect parent, the perfect student, the perfect employee, the perfect boss etc. But other people cannot know about this. We feel insecure when other people know that we aren’t as strong as we looked.
8. We don’t ask others for help even when we need them.
Asking others for help makes us look weak. It also make us feel incompetent. We don’t want others to know that we can’t accomplished what we set out to do. No matter how hard it is, we want to do everything by ourselves. We want to be perceived as capable. So we help others and not let them return the favor.
9. We care very much of what others think of us.
We have difficulties saying no to others because we are afraid others might reject us too and think negative about us. Our self-worth is tied to what others think of us, so we try our best to please others.
10. We don’t want to disappoint others, especially our parents.
We try to get everything right the first time. It is painful to let other people see us fail. Failure not only affects our self-image, it affects our parents’ image too. Remember how disappointed they were with us when we got bad grades in school or messed things up. We want our parents and others to be proud of us. We don’t want to let them down.
11. We feel responsible for other people’s happiness.
We are quick to blame ourselves even when things don’t work out for others. For example, when our children didn’t turn out the way we expect them to be, we blame ourselves for not being good enough parents or not loving enough. If other people’s needs aren’t satisfied, we always see us as the problem.
12. We always ask for forgiveness.
We always feel guilty about our mistakes and apologize to others frequently. “Sorry” is our mantra. We don’t know how to forgive ourselves for our mistakes. If others can forgive us, at least that would make us feel much better.
13. We keep thinking about the things that we did and the things we didn’t do.
We are full of regrets. We are always haunted by our past. We always reprimand ourselves for not doing it better, so that we would learn and not to make the same mistakes again. However, we still make the same mistakes over and over again.
14. We punish ourselves to make us feel better.
Other people think that we create our own problems by being hard on ourselves. That’s not the case. We punish ourselves so that we feel less guilty for the things we have done. We don’t know how to be compassionate towards ourselves. Being hard on ourselves makes us the victim and we can sympathize with that.
15. Deep down inside, we don’t love who we are.
We don’t love ourselves. We think that we are worthless and don’t deserve a good life. However, we don’t share it with other people. Instead, we portray a perfect image for ourselves because we are too ashamed to show our real self.
Featured photo credit: I Died So I Could Haunt You / Helga Weber via flickr.com
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