I enjoy it when I find a blog post that is discussing something I have been thinking about.  That happened this morning.  Chere Michelle wrote an awesome article on self esteem called Self Esteem Why Does It Seem So Hard To Keep Hold Of.?

In it she wonders why people, women in particular have such a difficult time with maintaining a healthy amount of self esteem for themselves, as well as getting respect from others.  She indicates that the amount of respect we get from others is directly tied to the respect we give ourselves, how much self esteem we have. 

For most of my life I have lacked self esteem/self respect.  For me it is partially caused to some extent from learned behavior.  (Mom if you are reading this please know that nothing in here is meant to intentionally hurt you, it is just the truth, and I am over being angry and hurt by it)  From the time I was very little, my mother said very negative, insulting things to me.  As I child I took the things she said for truth.  I internalized what she said, and it became a running dialogue in my head.  I felt I was unworthy of love or respect. If my mother could say those things to me, then they must be true.

I went through my childhood, especially my teen years with a very negative outlook on myself.  Because of my own feelings of not being worthy, I looked for love, or what I thought was love, in the wrong places.  This got me in trouble more than once, mostly with the type of men I usually “settled” for.  

In my first marriage I settled for a man who could not/would not take care of his family.  My second marriage I settled for a man that I knew there was something “off” about him.  I would say for sure something was off about him, he broke my nose and stalked me for a while.  Plus there were the various men in between.  

My lack of self esteem has led to me not having a voice and speaking up with my opinion about something.  It has led to me being resentful because I did not like how the situation turned out, but I also had failed to speak up.  I have let friends, family and strangers walk all over me because that is what I thought I deserved.  

I am sure that on some level these people picked up on the fact that I did not love myself, that I had no self esteem.  They in turn treated me as less of a person than they were.  I do not think everyone did it intentionally, some did but not everyone.  Of course the more I was treated disrespectfully, the lower my self esteem became, the more negative my internal dialogue became.  The more negative my internal dialogue became the lower my self esteem was, and  I was treated with even more dis-respect.

I believe that this issue of no self esteem, not having a voice and negative dialogue contributed greatly to the depression I have had over the years.  Especially this last time when it became so severe. 

In my depression recovery process, I have been finding my  voice, and gaining self esteem.  It does make me sad at times that it took me until I was almost forty to even start learning that I am worthy of having self esteem, and respect from others.  I think about all the years I have wasted with that negative internal dialogue telling me what a loser I am.

However, at least I am learning those things now, and finally for the first time in my life I have a voice.  I have the next forty years to tell myself I am a good person, I am not a loser, to speak up for myself and to have a healthy amount of self esteem.  

Do you have a healthy amount of self respect? If so, have you always.  If not, what do you think is holding you back from having it?  If you have a healthy amount of self respect, what do you do to maintain it?  If you do not, what can you do to try and improve it?