"Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
What a smart gal that Eleanor was. Of all the things I've tried to teach my own children this quote is at the very heart of my big lesson plan for life. Being your own friend is hard. It means you have to accept your flaws and your quirks and love yourself anyway. You have to know that absolutely no one is perfect, yourself included. You have to take a good hard look at yourself and refuse to look away until you take it all in...and you have to carry that mirror with you all the time. See the faults and imperfections? That's what makes us human and since we're human we have the ability to smooth our rough spots-no matter how long they've been there. Are we going to slip up and screw up time after time? Of course we are.
I'm certainly no psychologist but I like to think I have common sense. As parents, we set the tone for our children's inner monologue. I've noticed that the people with the harshest inner monologue are the ones who want to look away when faced with the mirror. They have a difficult time keeping and maintaining friendships because they never learned how to be their own friend. Their parents outer monologue, directed at them, became their inner monologue.
"You're fat."
"You're spoiled."
"You're stupid."
"You're trouble."
It sure would be nice to end all that negative dialogue but I'm not Pollyanna enough to believe that it's going to happen. Success would be just one person holding up a mirror and daring to not turn away. Success would be one person shutting off the negative thought stream and learning to hold their own hand.
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