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The Role of Self Esteem in Overcoming Depression
Having high self esteem is the most critical ingredient to our being fully human. Welcome to our website. Thank you for visiting us. We hope that you find the answers that you are seeking here. The most important element of our mental and spiritual health is a strong ego. Religions argue strongly against it, and in general, all religions argue that strong egos leads directly to greed, not caring about others, and the tendency to steal from others. We disagree. Strong ego and self-worship are never wrong, unhealthy, or immoral in any way. People with no sense of who they are do not have strong boundaries, and consequently, they do not know where they begin and where the intruding outside world ends. They either meddle in other’s lives, or allow others to meddle in theirs, in the form of abuse and control. In addition, those without a positive sense of who we are we do not feel permission to feel their dreams and talents and pursue them. it takes this positive own image to fully feel our passions and our dreams. Our own worship is the axle that keeps the wheel of our individuality turning on its true spiritual center. That is what the Bible means when it speaks of putting Christ first in your life, it actually means putting us first in our world. Without this awareness of me, and my own worship, no one has a sense of their own individuality, and they never get to present their talents to the world as they live out miserable, failed lives. In How to have high self esteem, we talk about why we may not have high this love of Me to begin with. Those reasons may include bad parenting, or lack of a parent figure, for which we blame ourselves because we believe incorrectly that we did not deserve loving parents in the first place. With a secure, nurturing home, our strong me-centered, me-empowered identity will come naturally. Strong ego is a byproduct of a wholesome childhood and an emotionally complete environment. We believe we all deserve to feel excited about who and what we are, in our own special uniqueness. That is our spiritual right to ‘feel good about us.’ We believe that anything that brings us shame, embarrassment, challenges our natural pride is wrong, and a lie. If we learn the truth of our highest identity, we will feel excited about who and what we are! Our life has a purpose and a plan. If we can see that purpose again, and the unfolding plans to present it to the world, we will indeed become excited, as we once were as children! If we have a strong ego with high value, we will again feel in tune with the world around us, and our intuitions will lead us to our opportunities in life for personal success and prosperity. We even learn the very tragic events that stripped away our original high sense of value are part of a planned training scenario that God is putting us through to learn soul lessons. We discover that life has a purpose, and our hardship and pain as children were not an accident, for God is trying to tell us something! In addition, the ‘something’ He is trying to tell us is not bad news it is good news! The road back to our high ego value and our spiritual center begins here. To find out the wonderful message God is trying to tell us about our uniqueness, we need to begin again to do the four things we gave up doing when we lost our personhood to our pain. Those things are, to see things through our own eyes, feel our own feelings, think our own thoughts, and lastly make our own choices. These are the four functions of our personhood as we manifest our Original strong ego. You might say they are the four pillars of our personhood, as we sit on the throne of our lives. When we begin to do those four things, we start being human again, and being as little children, as the Bible instructs us to be. What we start to discover is that the powers that held us down have passed away, because we are adults now and not helpless children. The ‘Old order is gone, and a welcoming, loving audience of a ‘New Order’ has taken its place. Thus ends our explanation of the ‘Lost Child in Exile Theory.’ Thus begins your new life, as you learn more about reclaiming the feeling of virtue that you so rightly deserve! We talk about this in great depth in Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind, in our Books and Articles Section. In Self esteem for abused women, we talk about The Achilles Heel for abused women, and that is their low self image and damaged ego. They bind themselves emotionally to the abuser for two reasons. The first is their seeing the abuser as a source figure for approval, which the abuser wisely withholds to keep the victim in need for even more approval, making the bond even stronger. The second reason is ‘to borrow virtue,’ by being an innocent and loyal victim. Everyone knows helpless victims are innocent and pure. However, in the case of any adult victim abused in a relationship they are neither helpless nor innocent, because they seek out and choose an abuser with which to bond. Their low self love is the strong bond that ties them to their shaming abuser. Proof of this is most abuse victims seek out abusers repeatedly over relationships with nurturing, good men who would treat them right. Their shame guides them to poisoning losers every time, because they feel that is all they deserve as they try to ‘fix Daddy,’ who then will love her and be proud of her, making her feel okay. The key to this dilemma is the incorrect assumption that as adults, you get your positive ego value from another person. While this may be true with a child and their loving parent in care giving mode, this is not true with an adult seeking a sense of his or her own value from another adult later on in life. What the person seeking their value does is find a ‘dry well of nurturement’ to duplicate the missing nurturement from their own childhood. Again this is the low ego image taking over and doing what the real high ego image is supposed to do, and doing it badly. They seek an abuser every time, because it matches their shame-based identity to a tee! The victim must realize that it is not the abuser’s responsibility to provide her sense of strong ego. It is her responsibility to realize her own personal value and embellish it with good nurturing relationships. To assume our responsibilities, we must take them away from our abuser. If you are an abuse victim, you are already doing that, because your abuser certainly did not send you here! You are already looking to positive sources for your own pride that you deserve, and are beginning to make positive life-changing choices, which is very good. What you are starting to do is look for the real source of personal worth and identity and a nurturing relationship outside of an abusive, controlling one. Your personal image will respond to good choices you make for yourself every time! We learn in Self esteem for abused women the value of ‘pretending’ as we seek healing relationships instead of poisoning ones. At some point we had to envision the abuser we were looking for, in order to find him, now we must learn to envision a nurturing personality in order to find them. What does seeing a loving personality do to help our lagging self value? We learn that it shows our responsibility, and it helps us to see ourselves as lovable, and we talk about that as well. By starting back down the road we traveled, it will lead us to where we started originally. That is where we belong, back home with our childhood birthright, our high sense of self. You deserve a life based on your high personal esteem and feeling excited about who and what you are. You are lovable and somewhere out there a life awaits you that is rich and full. However, you will need a high self esteem to find it, it will not come to you on its own, you must make it happen. For more on this subject please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch. This is the ultimate book on your type of situation. It shares how we can resolve all our self-esteem issues as we find our highest definition of our Original Self. In the book, we talk about God's real intent behind our lost self-esteem. There was a reason for us to experience shame and guilt, and that was to teach us a good thing. We would love to hear from you. Please tell us how you are doing in your search for answers, and to share your trials and victories with us! We promise to answer personally every Email that we receive. God Bless you, and thanks for being here. Shayne and Lori North
Symptoms of Low Self Esteem
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