by Guest » Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:55 am
[QUOTE=Neuromancer;33501]look at it this way, no fat chicks because you think your people will look down on you and reject you because of it, no hot chicks because they will shoot you down and you just can't handle that anymore. Actually getting rejected by fat chicks would be even worse. It's not rational but then again that is the issue, irrational fear.
When I said, no treatment, I didn't mean a pill, pills don't work anyway. When I said no treatment, I mean that unlike most self esteem issues, this specific one doesn't have any trigger adjustments. there is no thing you can change to improve self esteem. It's something you will battle your whole life. That's just the cursory research I have done on the interwebs.
Furthermore, I'm not saying poor me either, I haven't been diagnosed with it or anything. I just sounds like me. It also won't do me any good to get an official diagnosis either since they can't do anything about it. From what I read, doing what I'm doing right now is what they would tell me to do anyway.[/QUOTE]
I call BULLSHIT on this one brother. Self esteem can be improved.
Without going into specifics, I had an emotionally and physically abusive father. Who, in secret, berated me and belittled me and generally made me feel like shit. For most of my youth, I genuinely believed that I was a piece of shit.
To cope I turned to food and got fat, still am a little bit. My understanding is that I ate to comfort myself but I also got fat as a way of keeping people from getting close to me. It literally became a suit of armor. It prevented me from getting close enough to anyone to allow them to really hurt me. The sad irony of this is that I wanted to be close to people, we all do, but I didn't want them close out of fear that they would treat me like my father.
As a result, I was very anti-social with my peers. I pretty much had zero friends from the ages of 13 to 18. That's a long time to not have friends. As most fat kids, I was ridiculed and made fun of by my peers and generally felt like crap just like my father made me feel. So, I spent a lot of time alone.
I didn't have sports or hobbies or friends so I turned to my studies. I was a great student and it provided me with some basic level of self esteem. My classmates had no problem cheating off of me, but when it came time for me to sit with them at lunch I was worthless.
When I was 16, I met a girl (she was 6 years older, married, my boss at the toy store I worked at, and relatively hot). During my time with her, she infused me with a bunch of self esteem. It was artificial but still it was self esteem. I became more social the last year of high school and actually spent the year having FRIENDS.
I went off to college, on scholarship. There I continued to excel in my studies. About 6 months into my time there, the older woman I had been seeing for the last few years broke it off with me. I continued getting fatter and fatter and she was no longer attracted to me and she decided to focus 100% on her husband. Ouch. I completely regressed. Then, I turned to alcohol.
Most of you guys know that I like to drink. But, there was a period of time when I was literally an alcoholic. I would drink all day, every day. I didn't fall asleep, I passed out. Then I woke up and did it all over again. There was no one close enough to me to notice and family wasn't always around (they never suspected) so I never got caught.
I proceeded to do this for the rest of my time in college. The day I graduated, with honors, I saw my father again for the first time in like 6 years. Again, he made me feel so small and pathetic. The day after my graduation I had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch for 10 days.
When I left I was sober, I did go through withdrawals the first 3 days I was there, but heavily medicated on anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. I spent the next 6 months on these meds that made me feel nothing. I felt like a zombie. So, I stopped taking them. I went cold turkey. I needed to put my life back together and I did it the only way I knew how: academics and food.
I went to grad school and got my MBA, while there I got fatter. I had some girlfriends, but I had to resort to meeting them online. I had to build uber amounts of comfort with women before I could see them in person, because I felt so self-conscious. These women were usually NOT quality, and if they were quality I would dump them before they could dump me. My thinking was that someone's going to get hurt, someone always does, and it's not going to be me.
I was still very unhappy and had very little confidence outside of the classroom. At that time, I weighted in at 285+ pounds on a 5'11" frame. Not good. So, I decided I hated being alone and hated being me. I proceeded to shed a shit ton of weight over the next year, approximately 100 pounds.
BAM!!! My self-esteem went through the roof. I started making friends, I started dating higher quality women. I no longer was afraid to be close to someone. I no longer thought of myself as inadequate.
I wanted to increase my self-esteem with women even more so I decided to enter the community. BAM!!! I'm more comfortable around attractive women. I don't always change my behavior from when I was a fat kid, but they don't scare me like they used to because I know my life isn't tied up in what they think of me.
Self-esteem and confidence, if not properly instilled in you at a young age, can be created through life experiences and accomplishments. My education, my weight loss, the way I changed my thinking from worrying about what others want to what I want, and the Game have all acted as sources of pride and esteem. If you don't have self esteem as a direct result of the successes you've confronted in the Game, then I would argue that you have underlying, fundamental problems with yourself. The Game is really only useful, and dangerous, when you have all the other pieces of your life in place. Esteem and security is the foundation upon which you built Game. If it isn't built on a solid foundation, read well rounded life, then it will crumble and you will feel lost. (Interestingly enough, I think it's possible to build your foundation at the same time you're learning Game...I've seen it done a lot so I know it's possible).
There was a time once when I never used to worry about what to do with my life because I knew I could do nothing. Now, I look at my life and am frozen, at times, by all of the possibilities that I have because now I genuinely believe I can do just about anything. Everyday, I think to myself that I need to continue to be better, to grow. To make my loved ones proud, to make myself proud, and to prove to myself that I'm not the lonely fat kid that would loose himself in a bottle of whiskey.
No one helped me. I got no helping hand. I just grabbed myself by the bootstraps and pulled myself up. If you want to create some esteem, tear yourself down and find those things that you despise about yourself. Make a list of what you want to change and how you're going to do it. Then, get to work. Remain vigilant and keep working. You may not feel like you're not making any progress, but the funny thing about change is that it's so subtle, so stealthy that you don't know you've changed until you have.
Esteem can be destroyed, therefore it holds that it can also be created. It's up to you which you allow.