Ideally, a person shouldn't care what others think about them. Their self-esteem should be entirely dependent upon how they view themselves and how they hold themselves accountable to their own moral code.
But because we have people in our lives who we care about, it can cause us to care about how others see us. A certain degree of seeking approval makes sense in this regard, as we're not completely insulated creatures living independently of all other humans. The problem comes when we begin to obsess over how others view us, as we worry whether people are gossiping or talking about us in a negative light.
And honestly, the likelihood that someone in your life is talking behind your back is pretty high. Insecurities are about as common as opinions, as it's no wonder the former influences the latter. Inevitably, someone will feel the need to discuss your life in a negative light.
They might be discussing how you could be doing things smarter or better in one way or another. How you should be making more money, how you're not taking care of one thing or another. That you're a failure, a disappointment. That you're not living up to your potential and it's a shame you aren't further along in your career.
My upbringing didn't develop my self-esteem or leave me with a solid foundation from which to stand on. In truth, my family life did quite the opposite, making me constantly question everything about my own identity and who I was 'supposed' to be. It led to constant paranoia and anxiety about how others viewed me, which often acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as my insecurity led to people placing judgment upon me.
It wouldn't be until many years later that I would come to understand how this was a reflection of how I was viewing myself. To a large degree, my worries perpetuated my reality, creating a vicious circle that became a challenge to exit from. It's taken years of stepping outside of my thought patterns and engaging in activities that shake things up and allow me to shift my personal paradigm and develop more self-worth and confidence.
Admittedly, I still struggle with this fact about myself on a daily basis. My own personal itty-bitty-shitty-committee is consistently attempting to tear me down, utilizing any insecurity or self-doubt to tear a gaping hole in my personal reality. One of the easiest ways the committee does this is floating the idea that people in my life view me in a negative light and are constantly talking shit about me.
These are the ways in which our mind distorts our reality, usually to paint things with a self-loathing brush. A common distortion is the concept of 'mindreading', which means you believe you know what others are thinking and saying about you. Because you're just so damn smart and intuitive, you're sure others are saying things behind your back to demean your character or to judge your overall existence.
In these groups, we would often try to change a person's thought process by explaining that this was a distortion of their mind and that the chances of this actually occurring were much lower than what they believed. And if it was occurring, it wasn't happening as frequently or in the way that they believed.
While there is some truth to this method, I've come to the realization that it was an inadequate way to address the problem. The reason being: you can never fully disprove whether someone is talking badly about you behind your back simply because you aren't present to witness it. As a result, your mind will find a way to convince you that they are talking about you and that you should, therefore, feel like the failure they hypothetically believe you to be.
This may seem like a simple realization, something that's widely available and been spoken about at length by many other people from many different sources. But often, we must come to terms with this fact ourselves on our own terms if we're to actually internalize it.
Recently, I've begun to respond to my doubting mind's ideas of persistent shit-talking by others with a simple response: yep, they're talking shit. And it doesn't matter.
Instead of getting caught in the neverending internal debate of whether people are or aren't talking trash behind my back, I've decided to end the debate by acknowledging they are and that I don't care. I've found this response to carry a much larger amount of weight, simply because I remove myself from the pointless dispute and relieve myself to move on with my day.
Because let's face it: people talk shit about other people all the time. Even people they love and are close to. You know it's true because you probably do the same to some extent. Though you strive to not be the constant shit-talker, we all have moments where we give in to gossip and let our lower selves run rampant.
What matters most is that you stop allowing this fact of life to affect how you feel about yourself. And at the end of the day, the only shit-talking that counts is when we're saying it to ourselves.
All uncredited pictures from pixabay.com or my personal account
