Taking control: Self-condemnation is a hurdle you must overcome!

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Self-condemnation is unconscious pointing of own flaws. It is declaration of lack of love to self through negative thoughts, feelings, words and actions. The latter is often verbalized as bad luck; the manifestation of defense mechanism wherein a person exudes such a negative energy that he or she attracts strife and stir conflict in others.

The possible contributors of self-condemnation!

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A person is born with biological traits from both parents and ancestors. Most of the overt behavior is the result of the informal learning process and accumulation of information through all sensual ports from zero years throughout developmental stages. These become values and beliefs which influence how individuals interpret their personal world. Self-condemnation is explained as accumulative inputting of negative energy as follows:

1.   Critical parenting: Inherently every infant thrives on parental love and care. All children are fast active learners. In other words, a child repeats every word he or she hears and emulate all behaviors. This means whenever the critical parent verbalize disapproval with a negative words instead of positive ones, those words will eventually be understood to mean something and will be acted out.

2.   Childhood labels: All actions start from the thought and transformed into feelings before they are acted out. The function of the brain is to process information – good and bad- and file it accordingly. Because parents are important source of livelihood and accumulation of information and skills, their words and actions are regarded as important and therefore stored carefully.

3.   Shame: A child is a full person with little experience. This means a child is happy when praised and discern disapproval accordingly. Because of little experience, a child is unable to accurately interpret negative approach to correction of unpleasant behavior. The accumulation of negative approach from the beloved parent becomes a shame and is likely to manifest throughout life in various negative self-talk otherwise termed self-condemnation.

4.   Gilt: According to Dr. Jeanette, the renowned Holistic Psychologist, “guilt is the worst experience known to human.” Why? Because it is toxic and transforms a person’s regard of self-worth; thus significantly contributing to self-condemnation.

5.   Low self-esteem: It is the ultimate result of poor parenting wherein a child carried wrong message about self and concentrate on weaknesses rather than inborn strengths and acquired skills. Self-condemnation is expressed through negative pointing of own flaws and of others. It is inability to see the white wall but the small spot on the white wall.

How to cut the anchor of self-condemnation!

Anything that you focus your attention on will respond favorably. Cutting negative self-talk and

Loving self will heal emotional wounds! 

condemnation should be regarded as a number one task to achieve in order to experience optimal life. Here is how you can reconfigure your mind to embrace yourself as worthy of your love and of others:

1.    Become conscious of how you feel about yourself.  Ask; do I love myself? What ten things can I identify and list as evidence that I love myself?

2.    Make decision to grow the list daily: As you focus on your strengths you will discover a new-you. Also list your weaknesses. The reason for identifying your weaknesses is not to feel hurt if someone chose to hurl them at you.

3.    Write your own affirmation: Repeat these affirmations just before you sleep and chose your favorite statement which you will utter aloud to yourself the first moment when you wake up and throughout the day. Mine is; “the grace of the Lord is enough to overcome any challenge!”

4.    Prohibit self-condemning thoughts: Consciously declare that negative self-talk is not allowed in your thoughts, heart and mouth. The key is; anything that you allow to stay in your conscious mind several minutes is regarded as important and will be filed carefully. So discard any negative thought as soon as it emerges.

5.    Be sensitive to your feelings: You can immediately tell when you have offended yourself or others. Apologize and do not allow guilt to dwell in your mind. Remember your mind is inherently the devil’s playground. So, do not entertain self-condemnation in any form!

6.    Use time profitably: If for some reason you are not able to sleep and find yourself indulging in those unfruitful thoughts, sit up and search for things you have not discovered about yourself.  Alternatively find a game to constructively spend wakeful hours for your gain! Games build your mind and delay forgetfulness as you age!

7.    Negative experiences are stepping stones: Regard those negative moments in your life as stepping stones that helped you to cross the rivers of challenges; thus enabling you to give yourself a pat on the shoulder for rising above the storms of life.

You take control of your life when you do not dwell in the negative box and entertain self-condemning thoughts. You take charge of your life when you systematically embrace yourself and sincerely learn to be grateful for the hard work of reconfiguring your mind to be transformed from being a worm and becoming a butterfly; free from self-condemnation and beautiful, exploring life unreservedly!

Taking control: Learn how to overcome anger and other negative emotions!

Negative emotion is a mental response to environment which does not tally with your beliefs and values systems instilled through the socialization process. All people have accumulated a varying degree of unpleasant experiences from words and actions used to teach or correct behavior.

Anger defined!

Anger is a learned physical and mental emotion accumulated throughout life, displaying a biological stimulation of the body to fight or run in preservation of self.  In its degree of severity, it could be subtle resentment, it could lead a person to raise the voice, pound the hand/fist on objects and physically attack the source or victim.

Contributing factors to anger and other negative emotions!

Anger is a common emotional baggage which could begin before conception, be experienced at conception, during pregnancy and throughout the foundational years of childhood and adult life. The following depicts the contributing factors to anger and other negative emotions:

1.    Before conception: Parenting occurs before conception. If the mother did not fully agree on starting a family because she was working towards a promotion to executive position, compliance would not rule out subtle resentment and anger for compromised personal goal; and that would affect a baby. It is said that the sperm would experience resistance when trying to penetrate the egg.

2.    Pregnancy and childhood: Anger and other negative emotion such as fear due to financial lack do affect the mother and the baby. Repressed anger is common and do find outlets later in adult life. In most cases it manifest through continual attempt to numb the pain through alcohol and other substances.

3.    Poor socialization: As indicated above, socialization starts before conception and requires continual empowerment of social, economic and spiritual knowledge and skills. The ideal approach of empowerment is allowing learning through self experiences with guidelines and not coercion or compliance by fear. Most parents transfer their own experiences of childhood and add some or any logic that may resemble purposeful impartation of knowledge and skills.  A child learns by watching parents and others; this implies that exposure to undesirable environment is harmful. Emotional abuse is common when parents lack knowledge on what it is, and its impact on the child’s self esteem. Most of us had to learn to regain our self-worth to be able to access job market, pursue career, engage in and manage relationships.

How to overcome anger and other emotions!

When you are aware of your anger triggers, you have the first key that will unlock the inner you and face the challenge through various anger management techniques.  You are on your way to reclaiming control of your life because you can only change what you have identified as undesirable.  The following techniques will assist you to not be controlled by your emotions:

1.    Abort negative thoughts: Anger is a manifestation of negative thoughts. The key is watching the quality of your thoughts. The Creators advise us to meditate on His Word – fix your thoughts on what is noble, pure, lovely and praise-worthy.  Choose to forgive immediately.

2.    Breath and count to ten: If you flip to the next stage – feeling anger brewing inside you, look at it and identify its color and watch it without judging. This shift of attention into your ability and intention to maintain peace and joy will immediately reduce the building up process. Remember you are not your mind and therefore can watch the scene as a separate being. This simple act of taking in fresh air though your nostrils will enable you to watch your anger without participating in it.   Watching it gives you power to reduce its velocity and will enable you to respond and not react to the incident.

3.    Engage in physical activity: If you have fitness equipment engage in exercises; if not find something to do like cleaning the floor, walls, cupboards. This will cause your body to produce happy hormones that will offset the fight or run hormones.

4.    Be conscious about the tense muscles and relax your shoulders while breathing deeply:  When anger sets in, your body prepares to fight or run. It pours in adrenalins into your system for increased strength.  The heart rate increases and other body functions are temporarily on hold because your brain has sent alert message for a crisis. Shift your thoughts by focusing on any picture that will neutralize this state. I normally sing or pray in the spirit and move away from the scene. Unmanaged ager will eventually result in the following health issues:

·        High blood pressure

·        Stroke

·        Coronary conditions

·        Digestive issues which may lead to cancer

·        Lowered immune system which leads to colds, flu and other health conditions.

If you sit and ask yourself if there is any reason to allow anger to ruin your life, you will have recognized the need to overcome the tendency to let circumstances disrupt your environment. Indulging in anger means allowing negative emotions to influence your life because you are not fully conscious; that is, you have given up your choice to lifestyle that supports holistic wellness. 

Taking control: How to maintain your cool in relationships!

Attaining a peaceful attitude is a virtue we all seek and must learn to maintain when we find it. We fall back because we do not have basic skills  and tend to react to our environment which in most cases consist of absent minded people who are not aware when they create negative energy around others.

Relationships in this context refer to how you interact with your parents and friends. Managing relationships is a challenge that could become a hurdle and curtails your speed towards your goals.  Let me highlight common challenges in life:

1.           Nagging parents.  If you are born into challenging family it means you are in danger of adopting their way of life or developing undesirable defense mechanisms.  If you have a noisy family you will not appreciate the importance of quite environment and its benefits of enabling you to hear when people speak with normal volume.  Nagging and controlling are cousins.  It is a tendency to constantly breaths down somebody’s neck, dishing out instructions of how to do everything.

When you feel the anger rise within you for being mistaken for a mentally disable person, the best way to ward-off such intrusion is to politely request your mum or dad to comment after you have completed the task at hand.  This will send the message that you will request assistance when you need it and that they are not empowering you to become you.

2.           Suspicious parents:  Parenting is a challenge to many parents and they approach it through trial and error because they too are the products of poor parenting.  Instilling trust in a child is a very important milestone.  For an example, when parents do not trust you  that you do have a study group after classes it could damage your relationship with them and lower your self-esteem in the eyes of your friends.  How do you handle that?

If they are approachable, ask them politely why they do not trust you? Find out what you have done that might have cause the mistrust and do your best to be a person of integrity – behaving well all the time especially when you are alone or away from them.

3.           Over-zealous partner: How do you handle a relationship partner who wants to know minute details of what you want to do daily? If you are a lady and you have this overwhelming attention how would you handle it? Would you be happy to be monitored that way? 

It is normal for love partners to want to do activities together. Should there be exceptions if for instance you are a lady going out with a girl friend for shopping then a hair salon? Be honest about needing your private time to be alone and being you; because if you are like me, I do need my time and space to read my spiritual books, listen to empowerment videos and simply enjoying being quite. I need this!

We could walk away from friends, but we do not choose parents.  Although in most case parents mean well when they demand compliance to their way of dong things, they need to be made aware that their beliefs and values have been adjusted and that you have new ones which they must respect as you exit into adulthood or other social stages of development.  You take control of your life when you do not tip-toe around your dislikes. Let your parents and friends know who you are.  They will like you for being honest about maintaining your cool.