How To Respect Yourself When You Have No Self-Respect

If you don’t know how to respect yourself, then all you have to do is search online and you will get a bunch of recommendations.

Don't settle for less than you deserve.
Read a positive affirmation in the mirror every morning.
Be honest with yourself.
Remind yourself of your value.
Surround yourself with positive people.
Discard negative thoughts.
Stay away physically (or if you can't, emotionally) from narcissistic people.
Take care of your body.
Do not compare yourself with others.
Work on building your self-confidence every day.

Although these are all great ideas if you already have some kind of foundation to go off of…

What happens when you come to the table not only looking for a better meal but completely malnourished?

What happens when you are in such a deficit that, although you want to, you can not eat any of the food on the table?

If you are very hungry and malnourished, eating a bunch of food right away can be dangerous. If you do not ease back into it, you will get sick.

Or even worse…

Since you literally can’t stand that food you’re starving for (and you know your body needs it), you’ve concluded that there must be something wrong with you for not being able to digest it.

No matter what I tried, I was screwed. Therefore, she becomes a victim who no longer believes that she is aimed at survival. How can you even try to be a survivor when you know that there is no way you can survive without food?

Related : Dating A Narcissist: Everything You Need To Know

When we are emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically malnourished, experiencing any of the above points will make us feel more flawed and unworthy – although they are healthy recommendations to follow. One of the root causes of emotional, spiritual, and physical suicide is the repeated attempts to try to eat this proverbial food and do what we know is good for us, but somehow, we end up in a place where we have added to our deficit instead of reducing it.

If you are trying to figure out how to respect yourself when you are already in a place with healthy boundaries, decent self-esteem, and the ability not to act on your emotional triggers, proverbial food at least, be digestible.

If you are trying to figure out how to respect yourself when you don’t have self-esteem to begin with…

All the food you desperately need will still make you sick and discourage you. At this stage, it is indigestible.

You need to start smaller.

How to respect yourself when you don’t have self-esteem

Self-esteem starts here…

Knowing how to respect yourself is nothing more than knowing how to follow through on the promises you make to yourself.

It’s that simple. Don’t let anyone (including the cynical public in your head) tell you otherwise.

Starting small does not mean that you are * small * psychologically. This means that emotionally you are * old * enough to know what is best for you. This means that you acknowledge and respect the process.

Promise yourself that you will do something anything anything. And follow through with it.

It does not have to be oriented towards spiritual and psychological realization. It may be a promise that you will drink eight glasses of water a day. It can be saving five percent of every salary, cutting a toxic person off, doing three pushups a day, having a maximum of two drinks regardless of the occasion, calling your grandmother twice a anything.

Whatever you start with, just make sure that you see through.

The root of self-esteem is follow-up and the root of follow-up is discipline.

As soon as you prove to yourself that you can fulfill this promise, you will begin to respect not only yourself but the process of it all and the progress you make along the way. Keep progressing and soon, you will become more protected for this progress from scratching the mosquito bite of your triggers. This is where real discipline begins to emerge organically (as opposed to feeling deprived every time you try to get that kind of discipline that can only come from the progress of kept promises).

Real discipline is 1) the desire to do the opposite of what you know you have to do. 2) understand exactly what makes you want to do it. 3) having the discipline to do what you know you need to do. Why?: Because you don’t need the alternative (you realize that your fears want you). What you need is the self-esteem that real discipline generates.

I used to describe myself as a very disciplined person, but I wasn’t. I have never taken the time to understand why I feel such attraction to unavailable people, toxic relationships, fake friends, and bad habits.

Because of this, my “discipline” has come to use my willpower to try to fight this pull. This always ended with my submission because I put myself in such a psychological hell and was emotionally exhausted trying to “fight desire”, I felt that I deserved to do what I wanted at that point. That is why physical and emotional diets do not work. As long as you feel deprived and ignore the psychology behind why you need to apply real discipline, you will fail every time.

This losing streak stops now.

Think about the people in your life for whom you have the most respect. I guarantee that these people keep their word to you and themselves. Even people you don’t know but admire from afar-athletes, businessmen, celebrities, musicians, professors, doctors, etc., respect them because of the discipline they had to get to where they are. And the discipline that they still have, to maintain a position that very few can reach.

To this day, I don’t know if I can look in the mirror and say:

“You are love. You’re light. You are beautiful ” and don’t feel like a liar. But what I can do is take a look at the emotional bottom from which I started and respect the fact that those small promises I started with turned into big promises that single-handedly changed my life.

Related : Am I A Bad Person? What To Do When You’re The One Who Messed Up

When I know that I can’t keep a promise to myself, I’ll call my mom or a close friend and make a promise to them. They will hold me accountable and I will work harder to keep this promise because of how much I care about them and the mutual respect it builds (that I actually kept the promise and that I trust them enough to share what I’m facing and hold me accountable).

This is how you turn your fears into a kind of self-respecting fuel that very few people get in this life. You are one of those few or you will not read these words now.

If there is a promise that you would like to make to yourself, feel free to write it down in the comments below. You can do it anonymously and we are here to support each other, always.