Throughout my life, it has amazed me how much self-impressions and identities seem to be formed by early relationships with parents, siblings, and others. I’ve had women tell me they feel pressure to be beautiful because of how often they were told they were beautiful as children. I’ve heard friends who grew up with dishonest adults say they have a hard time learning to trust anyone or anything. I’ve seen kids who were treated as favorites turn into adults who expect everything to revolve around them—and kids who grew up unable to get attention learning to find it by causing trouble, both as children and then as adults. I know so many people who have defined what they were good at not by how they did in the outside world, but by how they compared to siblings. Visit a nursing home, and you will be amazed to hear so many eighty- and ninety-year-olds tell stories about how their parents and siblings treated them at young ages—both good and bad—and to see the impact of that treatment in their self-perception, relationships, and lives. (Parenting tip: choose what you praise your children for carefully—it may very well be what they try to live up to for the rest of their lives!)
One way to see yourself anew is to consider how strangers see you. Remember that, “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.” Those who know you (including you) may have a hard time seeing change in you—may not be able to see who you are now. One of the great things about moving to a new school, a new job, or joining new groups is that people who don’t know you will view you with “fresh eyes”—they are not blinded by stories they already have about you. Seek out new people and new experiences. They will help you grow—and help you see how you’ve changed.
No matter how hard your parents may have tried to encourage
you to ‘be your own person’ and explore your own special talents and interests,
you probably bear the prints of your understanding of your place in your
family. Whether that understanding was right, wrong, or irrelevant, you most
likely formed a large part of your identity within that context. Your challenge
as you emerge as an adult is to keep that understanding, that identity, from
confining you—to open your mind to how you relate and are perceived in the
world outside your family and be able to transform your understanding of
yourself to accommodate your fullest and most healthy identity.
There is a wonderful episode of VeggieTales, “A Snoodle’s
Tale” that helps make the point. (As an aside, the original VeggieTales TV
shows and movies were entertaining resources for character and faith
development in kids.) It is a story of a child being physically given negative
self-images (they are actually handed to him), which burden him as he carries
them around, preventing him from discovering his true potential. He eventually
meets someone who removes these burdens, thereby allowing him to explore all he
was born to be.
But self-images don’t have to be negative to be confining and to keep you from perceiving who you can be. It is just as easy to feel responsible to live up to a positive self-image (which, don’t get me wrong, can sometimes be good) as to feel burdened by a negative self-image. As Kipling says,
If you can meet with Triumph and
Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
Self-images are stories inside your head, which may not be
consistent with reality—and may prevent you from exploring and achieving your
potential.
You need to continually consider and guard against that. To
the extent possible (I know this is hard), you need to hold these stories
loosely—and let them go if they are harmful or limiting. Don’t get type-cast by
yourself or others. You don’t need to be burdened by a history or reputation as
a bully or a nerd or insensitive or a jock or a wallflower or whatever. You can
and will change over your life—for the better if you work hard on it.
https://kindlingwilliamclyde.blogspot.com
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