Читать книгу Self Esteem: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 20

Essentially our strategy is a series of constructive action plans designed to guide us through the emotional healing process which should, ideally, have taken place soon after each wound was incurred.

…we could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.

Helen Keller

Let’s start with reminding ourselves of the five essential and two bonus stages. I have devised a mnemonic sentence to help fix the names and their order in your mind (see here). (The sentence could be pinned up somewhere as an encouraging reminder of your positive goal.)

Ideally, each stage should be worked through step-by-step, but in your real world it is likely that there will often need to be some overlap. However an important point to remind yourself of from time to time is that the healing process will not work efficiently if you try to go too quickly or if you skip a stage or two. I have found that a favourite trick of people with low self-esteem is to try to rush headlong to No 7 – ie FORGIVENESS. This is a habit which they have probably had since early childhood. Maybe at that time the ‘goodies’ required for other stages were not available, or perhaps they needed the safety and approval that FORGIVENESS can undoubtedly bring in the short term. If you find yourself tempted to skip or rush, remind yourself that this habit cannot begin to compete with the long-term boost to your self-esteem which genuine Emotional Healing can bring.

Before reading through the following guide to the strategy, take a little time to reflect on some of the minor and major emotional hurts you have received in the course of your life. If you can select one or two of your own unhealed emotional wounds to use as examples, the following guidelines will make much more sense for you. But remember, when choosing, that these wounds come in all shapes and sizes and that what will feel like a wound to one person at a certain time in life will be ‘water off a duck’s back’ to another at any time. (If your memory needs a little jogging you could reread the list of examples of knocks to self-esteem in our childhood – here – and our adulthood – here.)

It is often a good idea to choose one relatively minor hurt and another which is likely to require more sophisticated action. To illustrate the strategy I have chosen two very different examples from my own childhood – but don’t forget that yours could be taken also from much more recent adult experiences.

Every	Exploration
Emotional	Expression
Cut	Comfort
Can	Compensation
Produce	Perspective
Creative	Channelling
Fruit	Forgiveness

Example A

Disappointment arising from not being selected for the school tennis team

Example B

Hurt from being inadequately loved by a parent

At the end of each section I will offer some appropriate action for each example, and I suggest that you do the same for the wounds which you have selected.