Fear, Self-Hatred, and Loneliness

Linkie link.

Tonight, all three of those issues came roaring up tonight, though they've been hitting pretty hard for a good week or so. I don't really understand Tantra or know what goes into it. However, I feel that this article does illustrate how fear, self-hatred, and loneliness are largely controlled by ourselves. I am hoping that realizing I control this negativity and my own life in general will empower me and move me more into the positive.

Some highlights:

Fear

We usually don't like to think of ourselves as being fearful. We use softer words, such as 'worried' and 'anxious', which seem a little more acceptable. But worry is a form of fear, and being anxious is how we feel when we succumb to fear. Since we do it often, we get pretty good at it. Most of us become so skilled at worrying that it becomes part of our lives. And yet the only thing we accomplish by worrying is misery for ourselves and others.

Self-hatred

Self-esteem and self-respect grow out of the experience of committed effort. Whether or not you succeed is not as important to your self-respect as when you know that you tried your best. And if you continue to make the effort, if you continue to work with your resources, you will eventually succeed. Self-mastery arises out of effort, the underpinning of success.

Loneliness

Most of us engage in a desperate search for someone to love us, but we confuse the issue by saying that we need someone to love. We say we want someone to share with, someone we can love, but what we are really saying is that we need someone to love us, someone who will make us feel important and keep us from feeling lonely. This is not love, but emotional attachment, which leads us into dependency.

We believe that we need this person to be happy, to be content, to be fulfilled. So our loving becomes distorted by our emotional needs. When they don't love us back, we feel miserable and unloved. When they aren't around, we feel lonely. We all have a remarkable, unlimited capacity to love one another. There is a wide range of expression of our love, from brotherly and sisterly love to romantic, sexual love. But as long as we continue to confuse love and emotional attachment, we will continue to be lonely, even when we have someone to love.

Each of these have quite an effect on me. My impression is this: by doing my best and focusing on the positive, I will increase my self-esteem. Increasing that helps with dealing with my emotional needs. Doing that will help with loneliness. Realizing that I can deal with self-esteem and loneliness will help me conquer fear. And somewhere in there assertiveness and other codependency attributes are dealt with. I realize this won't all go away perfectly and maybe I'm just babbling.