Letter to self-love: I am me. You are you.

Why is self-love so important? I am me, not you. You can’t spend your life pleasing others.you cannot remain oblivious to emotions, nor live in a cage.

These words were written by Fritz Perls, a great psychoanalytic neuropsychiatrist who, together with his wife Lore Posner, strove to explain to us in a simple way how we create our world.

Together they tried to make us understand that wanting to please others we become our own executioners and that valuing our own reality as true is the first step to understanding ourselves and continuing to move forward.

The truth is The lies that hurt us the most are not so much the ones we tell as the ones we live. There are moments in our lives when we can make the mistake of living in a false reality that sometimes we can even believe.

In reality this falsehood is created by all of us at some point in our lives. Although it is excessively common to do so, The reasons we behave this way do not have to be socially acceptable.; That is, we can do it to achieve respect, money, power or prestige.

This not only deceives others, but also This means rejecting ourselves and not believing what we think. and we feel like individual and unique beings.

We can reflect our lack of authenticity in many moments of our lives. In fact, frequently, the way we fail ourselves is so simple that it is enough to deny that we ate the last piece of chocolate that was left in the cupboard or that we were not the first to find the blinds broken.

Why is self-deception and inauthenticity so common?

Actually All of this is closely related to the way in which our parents and society have been educating us since we were little.. Since our birth we have been indoctrinated to repress our feelings and emotions, to avoid expressing what is real and what we truly feel.

We have created an exterior that does not at all resemble the interior that we actually experience.. It frequently happens that our ideals are not what we fight for and that our ideas, our fear and our objectives do not correspond to what we actually manifest…

All of this has a very negative impact on our vital development and ends up encouraging us to put on the mask that we have been making since early childhood. A general level, Our parents and teachers invited us to reject emotions such as anger, fear or pain, which has led us to hide them.

For this reason We believe that we can become indifferent to these emotions when in reality that is not the case. Fear, pain or anger are always there and mean a large part of our life experience. However, we tend to appear strong and emotionally repress frustration and the manifestation of pain.

Another contradiction that we absorb like sponges from a young age responds to that’s not good lie. The elders did it at the same time that they invited us not to do it and as if that were not enough, as we became aware we realized that we had to accept it and also, at times, collaborate with it.

I am me

Keep our self-esteem high and Showing how we really are means not everyone liking us, but it will offer us true, pure, open, sincere and independent relationships.

Accept and commit to who we really are It will help us not be afraid of what we want and who we are and to be able to express it to whoever wants to listen to us, even if we awaken the envy of those who have not dared to unify their inner truth with their outer truth.

It is true that the challenges are not within everyone’s reach but we can all try and even achieve it, the expectations are ours alone. Being authentic and keeping our self-esteem healthy helps us move away from the side of falsehood, promoting that we be the same at all times and that we do not lack the love that we owe ourselves.

Authenticity and therapy

For those who want to work on authenticity, Gestalt therapy is the most suitable for this, Well, it is one of its pillars, in addition to spontaneity and presence in the here and now.

Gestalt therapy is part of the humanistic psychology movement. Therefore, share the hopeful vision of the human being that tends towards self-realizationnot as a pathologized individual, but with healthy resources for optimal development in the here and now.

The purpose of this type of therapy is to enhance:

An honest, confrontational and emotionally involved attitude. The development of a voluntary attitude of inhibition (inhibiting obsessive conceptualization, manipulation and inauthentic games or behaviors) The development of spontaneity (faith in impulse, the fluidity of experience )The deep acceptance of who we are

Thus, With the therapeutic process the person acquires greater knowledge of themselves, increases their self-esteem and gives themselves greater self-support.. Gestalt Therapy facilitates the development of our loving potential, and has a spiritual dimension due to the benefits it brings to the person’s being.

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