Positive thinking exercises # 5 - AUTOCRITICISM

When you are alone and you are subject to a series of negative thoughts, what are you doing? Are you going to eat everything you find in the fridge? Maybe you do, but tomorrow you will be mad at your own body telling you that you are fat. Most likely, this escape comes from childhood when, when you finished everything in your plate, you were congratulated.

• Bravo, you ate everything. That's what you supposed to do!
  It seemed to be the only approval from the close ones.

When you argue, you are denigrating yourself, who do you think you treat like that?
Almost all of our positive and negative programming has been accepted by ourselves before we are 3 years old.

If you had a child of three years in front of you who is afraid, what would you do to him? You would be angry with him, stretch his arms and stroke him until he is protected and relaxed?

The adults around you when you were little did not know how to comfort you. Now you are the adult of your life and if you still do not caress the child in you, it would be really sad.
What happened in the past has happened and is over. Now is the present and you now have the opportunity to treat yourself as you wish to be treated. A scared child needs comfort and encouragement, not quarrels and threats. If you quarrel with yourself, this only makes you It scares even harder and you have no one to escape. When the child in you feels threatened, this creates many problems. Do you remember how you felt when you were scoffing when you were little?

The child in you feels the same now. Be good with yourself. Begin to love and endorse yourself.
This is what the little child needs from you, so that he can express himself at his highest potential.

The messages that we send to ourselves are a powerful destruction of our self-worth or self-esteem source.

Look at this exemple:
The way in wich we define ourselves, in wich we present ourselves to others, can be understand with both connotation, one positive "I'm a hardworking person" and another negative "I'm a disaster that doesn't know how to change a light bulb".

Have you ever thought that you were being too harsh with yourself? You've stopped to think that you would understand and forgive others many errors that you aren't able to forgive yourself? Do you feel that you are worth less than the rest? Do you recriminate constantly the errors you've had? Do you speak bad about yourself?

If you have answered YES to any of these questions, then the autocriticism can be a problem in your life.

This autocriticism will not serve to improve, since, if the criticism is continuous and too hard, rather than encourage, it demoralizes and paralyzes. In addition, these criticisms are causing untold damage to your self-esteem and your emotional well-being. The damage that this self-criticism may be having you include the lack of security in yourself, the fear of rejection of others or to not deserve their respect or affection, sense of frustration by not be able to be as you think you should be or not get the achievement you need to achieve to be considered "good enough".

How to the disarm autocriticism?

• The need to do good: criticism strategy is to force us to follow the right path, so we could re-evaluate our list of duties and standards personal to see what are really fit for us and our situation;
• The need to feel good: feel good temporarily usually buy us with others or setting us perfectionist standards, instead we could learn how to conceive of ourselves in more realistic terms;
• The need to pay: the criticism serves as motivation to perform better, but we can feel bad and frustrated by not reaching a goal or whenever we make an error, and above all because we believe that our self-worth depends on only our behavior (and not the strengths that we could also go inside such as patience, temperance, organization...) therefore challenge the criticism by removing this belief that we value in what we do.

PS: Be aware that mentally retarded people manifest a lack of autocriticism!

Hebro