Personal Criticism In The Age Of Radical Self Love
An interesting habit that the Radical Self Love journey has started in me is that I really spend time thinking about the roots of my negative perceptions of myself. The obvious “starter” pushback was about my interpretation of “beauty”. When I would look at my body which has gotten fat and say, Ew. I have gained so much weight. It is gross. I need to start a diet NOW, I would push back on that negative response to myself and ask, Why do you think fatness is gross? Would you talk to anyone you loved with that attitude or voice?
The answers are: Because society told me fatness was ugly and I would never ever talk to anyone I love like that.
With just that little bit of space to dig into the negative reaction to myself, I shattered the foundation of it and could begin to build something more positive and more stable instead. Something built on truths. You are deserving of love and respect because you are human and imagine the beauty of a world where we all loved ourselves radically. It starts with YOU.
Once I started that habit in response to my negative tone towards my body and my appearance, I found it grew into every area of my life where I start to critique habits or behavior. For example, I was sending a “professional” email recently and I was using a lot of exclamation points to demonstrate enthusiasm. Then I started criticizing myself for that because we often hear that women do this kind of thing and men don’t and so I thought, Uggg…I need to tone that down a bit.
But then I pushed back on that. Why do I need to tone it down again? Because some random article or tweet or Facebook post pointed out that it’s something women do and men don’t. But…why does that mean I have to change it? Doesn’t the excess exclamation points feel more sincere? Don’t I want to be sincere? Why dampen that instinct just because someone pointed out that men don’t do it?
And I left the exclamation points because…what is the downside? Someone gets annoyed by my enthusiasm? I mean…I AM ENTHUSIASTIC. Why don’t I not try to damped my positive traits just because there’s some sort of societal response that tells me that positive trait is bad. LET US CELEBRATE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORKFORCE!
I just like that there’s now this instinct to push back on the voices in my head that try to get me to correct or change things about myself. Other times that new instinct helps me reframe something away from the point of view of a negative criticism. Like when I’ve dropped a ball or forgotten something I’ll always beat myself up about it by saying things like, You are so scatterbrained. You really need to fix that because no one feels like they can depend on you. But maybe the right framework is to come from a place of support and love instead of criticism. You tend to be thinking about 100 different things at any given moment, are there any rituals you can set up or habits you can nurture that will help you keep track of all of those things? Can you work on recognizing when you might need to say, “No,” to something in order to keep yourself from feeling so overwhelmed in the future?
Because obviously no one is perfect, but framing everything around the idea of “improvement” or “correction” does not foster the foundation of radical self love. Instead I need to love who I am and therefore sometimes find better ways to approach things that honor who I am. And on the surface it may just seem like semantics, but if you are someone prone to negative self-talk then you know that semantics are important. For me…negative self-talk builds negative self-perception. I beat up on myself all the time which means I spend a lot of time wallowing in self-disgust and and self-hatred this is not something I want to honor. I don’t want to continue to feel unworthy of love. I want to change that about myself.
(Do you see what I did there?)
Radical self love teaches us to honor everything about ourselves, except for our tendency to hate ourselves.
That one has to go.