What happens to us when we lose our self-respect? That is the respect we hold for ourselves.
We may think nothing happens at all, but that's not quite true. I was practicing just now and the following points just jumped out at me.
When we lose self-respect we lose respect for others. Our capacity to respect others in fact becomes small…
It becomes difficult for us to see anyone with respectful eyes. Everyone has to be seen below or equal. This is because it is profoundly painful to have lost the respect for ourselves and seeing others above us due to their moral and ethical behaviour which naturally command respect, reminds us of our loss of self-respect and we don't want to feel that painful humiliation. We like to feel that everyone is just as corrupt and flawed as us. But not everyone is!
This is of course an unfair situation, as others deserve our respect and we can't give them respect because we lost our self-respect all because we did things that made us to lose it, which others had nothing to do with.
We become very judgemental of others and especially ourselves. Because to have lost our self-respect we went against our better judgement and acted this and that way. We broke and disobeyed our inner discernment or judgement and so we judge others and ourselves to try and get it back hurting others and ourselves.
We are needy, insecure, dependent and this impacts heavily on our relationships. We bring these needs constantly into our relationships. Because we lost our self-respect we need some kind of support or comfort or attention or presence from others to substitute that loss.
We don't like to see anything as right or wrong. Nothing is right or wrong we say. We develop an aversion to judgement, we become very sensitive to be judged because it was precisely there where we lost our self-respect because we did things that we knew deep down inside of ourselves was not right. Of course the first few times it was not right for us but then it became 'right'.
We lose our self-respect by doing silly things, abusing ourselves, harming others most unnecessarily, even misuse of sexuality leads to a loss of self-respect, for example all these teenagers having sex here and there think that they are great and it is great, but its not really, they are losing unknown to themselves bit by bit their self-respect and when they enter a relationship later on, that really means something to them, they will feel their neediness, and all kinds of other inadequacies and needs that come from having lost their self-respect and this will harm that relationship that is meaningful to them.
Everything has its price. Losing any value of our essence costs us dearly. Whatever you do don’t lose your values and don’t allow others to lose theirs.
End (4212).
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