Self-Confidence
A caring, enthusiastic therapist can help you develop self-confidence.
Self-confidence is a term everyone seems to know. We understand it to mean courage, calm under pressure, a healthy belief in oneself. People who suffer from anxiety and depression, who are afraid to assert themselves, often claim that they “lack confidence”
“Confidence” is related to words like fidelity, truth, the U.S. Marine Corps motto “semper fi” (always faithful). When we have confidence in someone, or tell someone something private “in confidence”, it means that we trust them, we have faith that they will be true to us, honor our truth.
When we have self-confidence, we trust ourselves, we can be true to ourselves. Our feelings, thoughts and actions express what is true about us, not what is expected or required of us by others. People who are true to themselves are better able to let other be true to themselves – they ”inspire confidence”. Aggressive and violent people – bullies - may seem to be self-confident, but they cannot be. They can only handle situations in which they can dominate and spoil the confidence of others; they rely only on their dominance because they lack confidence, they do not know who else they are, and thus cannot let others be who they are. This is arrogance and cruelty, not self-confidence.
Some people have been treated coldly, or with weakness and mixed messages; these people have simply never learned to see who they are, to know themselves, and ultimately remain strangers to themselves. Many people who have been bullied, abused or controlled by others lose, or never develop, the ability to trust or even sense their own inner truth. They have been taught that if they express their will and their way, they will be punished. They learn the false and unfortunate lesson that to be true to themselves is to receive punishment or ridicule, or not to be noticed at all. They may learn to believe that they deserve it. Either way, they will learn to look to others for signs of what to do, whether it is safe to move. They will seek relationships with people who seem to know what is right, but who somehow turn out to be as unsupportive, remote or cruel as those from the past. It can be terrifying to allow oneself, after this kind of experience, to be creative, to be spontaneous. to give or receive pleasure. The result can be terrible anxiety and chronic depression – often in people who, if given the freedom, would find out that they were deserving and valuable after all.
A caring therapist can help you learn who you are – that which is true about you and in which you can trust. Self confidence does not mean learning that you are perfect; it means learning that you are real, and that you deserve to live your life and love yourself, your faults and gifts and potential all included.
