My Family Self or Myself : Who Do I Know Myself to Be ?

I am on a journey to understand myself. This involves both understanding who I thought I was based on the information I gathered as a child, and who I think Myself to be thus far as an adult. And knowing that I have the power to change what I think of me ensures I stay in process and don’t get stuck in my past. But for people who are used to being told who they are, considering being anyone different may be a daunting and inconceivable project. But it’s quite necessary if you are to decide on what makes you happy because truly no one else knows that but you.

Our upbringing and childhoods play a major role in who we define ourselves to be. And as our primary personality was formed within our households and families growing up, it may put us at internal odds to choose to know ourselves otherwise. We are afraid that if we choose to be someone other than who we perceived our families to want us to be, we may be insulting and discrediting our families. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I completely understand devotion to those whom we love. And at the same time, I can not imagine that our families wouldn’t want us to rise and feel better about ourselves. That they did the best they could is a given. And quietly acknowledging the less than positive things that happened isn’t a bad thing. It just is life.

In other words, we are not dissing our families if we say we have low self-esteem as a result of our upbringing. That our parents did the best they could was a given. But we can not see what we can not see. If they couldn’t bring their own esteem up to a healthy place because of their own upbringings than they were not aware of what they were giving or not giving us.  It was still their best. Sometimes our best is just the best we could do at the time under the circumstances

To claim your lowered self-esteem and to re-parent yourself and trust yourself doesn’t have to cost you the disrespect of your family. It is not in judgement but in compassion that we rise beyond our roots. We give tribute to our pasts and our fight. So having compassion for our upbringings and ourselves will be the permission combination to then decide who we now want to be based on what we need in our lives to make us happy. How do we trust ourselves if we are not governing ourselves by our own rules and standards? We don’t.

At some point, who we are and what we believe we need for ourselves and our families has to be created by us. And that will then be who we are and what we pass along, as functional or dysfunctional as it may be, it was chosen and not auto-set by what we thought we should do. We always have the power to choose our way even if it’s wrong in someone else’s eyes. We only trust ourselves when we do what we know in our hearts is true to us. And trusting ourselves is tantamount to our happiness. You know this too.

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