“Be yourself,” my therapist says.
Yeah. Right.
Easy for him to say.
Look, man. I need people to like me.
If they don’t, how can I like myself?
Then again, I know the real me.
Which leaves me no choice in the matter.
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Want more?
Oscar Wilde once said with his usual wit: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
As humorous as this might seem, it’s a basic summation of the truth.
Yet you can’t be yourself if you don’t know, understand, and accept yourself first.
It should be your primary goal to find this out.
Click here to read the rest of the WikiHow article “How to be yourself.”
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And check this out:
A poem by Fritz Perls:
Graphics and music by David Kettlewell.
June 6th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Love the blog, as always.
“I need people to like me.”
“If they don’t, then how can I like myself?”
But why do we care so much about what people think? You might say it’s that our mothers didn’t love us enough and we’re forever trying to make up for that.
But what do you think of an evolutionary argument instead? That is, we want people to like us because there are costs associated with being disliked. Evolutionarily, our ancestors who were most liked also had the best access to resources, protection, etc, and overall had a better chance of passing on their DNA. So maybe we’re genetically programmed to want others to like us. And maybe that’s still important for survival in the modern world.
Thanks for your thoughts.
June 6th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Good point. However neurotic it sometimes seems, our craving for social acceptance probably did begin as a survival mechanism — at a time when exclusion by the tribe was essentially a death sentence, leaving one vulnerable to starvation, predators and god knows what else. And certainly acceptance by others remains essential to human beings, though now more for emotional than physical reasons.
But I also think that even legitimate needs can be perverted by emotional factors. Food’s a good example. We need to eat to survive. But we don’t need to overeat; when we stuff ourselves it’s usually for emotional reasons, because we’re depressed or lonely or angry or lazy. And that behavior doesn’t guarantee our survival, it threatens it. Similarly, I think most of us depend on winning approval from others instead of developing a healthy self-acceptance — mainly by practicing “being ourselves” in public. And I think most of us do it to the point where we actually damage our emotional health instead of strengthening it.