Are You Mad At Yourself? Reconcile!

Looking at yourself with the best eyes and being benevolent with your own limitations or with your particular way of being in the world is essential to maintain good mental health.

When a person believes that he should (or should) be otherwise, when he is angry with himself for being the way he is, he suffers a lot. The profile of the “angry with himself” is classic and well-known:

• He lives unsatisfied with himself.
• You are constantly forcing yourself to try to be as you should.
• He sets impossible goals to be able to despise himself when he does not achieve them.
• Pays excessive attention to detail.
• Plan everything so as not to lose control and live pending the next failure, which you anticipate and produce.

In general, “the angry with himself” comes from families in which it was taught that normal or average returns are negligible, that mistakes cannot exist because they are the expression of little attention. And that only an outstanding result is satisfactory. The mandate received from the parents has been something like: “You will only have our love if you succeed and stand out.”

The consequences of not accepting ourselves as we are

The person who lives fleeing from the fear of being rejected – and enduring his own rejection – is afraid to reveal or admit his vulnerability. And so:

• It closes in the face of criticism.
• Block their creative ability.
• Stop trusting others.
• Loses overview.
• You are reluctant to take risks.
• She becomes more and more stubborn.
• You work excessively as an escape route or search for recognition.
• He obsessively hides his mistakes and his imperfections.
• Act more and more demanding with others.

The consequence, both in the workplace and in the social, is foreseeable: he obtains less success or worse results than others of the same capacity, but he continues to rigorously maintain that his way of doing things is the correct one.

All this causes him to be perceived as a perpetrator and not as a victim ; like a tyrant who, by attending to details, loses sight of important things and earns the indifference and antipathy of many, if not the fear and estrangement of all.

There is nothing wrong with the way we are

Pablo Busse Grawitz, creator of a famous health recovery center in the Argentine province of Córdoba, writes: “People have to spend time taking care of themselves, exercising, resting, cultivating the soul, enjoying a small portion of healthy food. In short, get organized by establishing priorities and taking care that they are not overwhelmed. That the urgent does not end taking our lives little by little. We must try to generate that daily space that strengthens the spirit and helps us to go out with another vision to the street ”.

For me, that other vision that Busse Grawitz talks about is only possible if one manages to reconcile with oneself. According to the dictionary, reconciliation is the reestablishment of a friendship, the recomposition of a damaged bond, or the concrete act of reconcile a lost or disagreeable relationship.

Understood in this way, reconciling with others or with oneself cannot be a mechanical act but rather a responsible decision, which only has value when it is taken with absolute awareness of what it means. More than forgiving, reconciling is rediscovering harmony.

An exercise to reconcile with yourself

I propose an exercise. To carry it out, find, in your daily schedule, a moment that allows you to get away from all things and dedicate an exclusive hour of your time:

• Write yourself a letter. Take a nice piece of paper and a pencil (better pencil than pen) and write a letter, a letter addressed to yourself, to yourself.
• Be honest with yourself. This letter is a love letter. Take it seriously. I would like you to tell yourself how much you love yourself and why, to tell you in detail about your best virtues, to forgive yourself in writing for the mistakes you have made, accepting that you are not the emblem of perfection and that perhaps that is not all bad.

• Wish yourself the best. Specifically in that only you know what you want or expect. I suggest you end the letter with a phrase along the lines of “always count on me” or something similar.
• Sign it and put it in an envelope. Now, get over your old judgments of yourself regarding the ridiculousness of certain things, close the envelope and send that letter home. Forget about her, so she will surprise you when she arrives.
• Keep it well. Save it as you would a letter from a very dear friend, as a symbol of your final reconciliation with yourself.