You Come First: Self-Respect | Healing through Jewish Wisdom

The conversation

That story you keep telling about the thing that hurt you? According to Gili, every time you repeat it you aren't only remembering the past, you're creating it again, and you go on drawing more and more of the same kind toward you. The one who hurt and the one who was hurt trade places all the time, exactly like a driver leaning on the horn in anger who forgets that they were once the one being honked at. Self-respect starts the moment you stop living inside the story and start asking where you go from here.

The truth

A story of pain that you repeat over and over doesn't only reflect the past, it creates it again, like a kind of manifesto for the future.

We all take our turn in every role, the one who hurts and the one who is hurt, like the honking example on the road.

Giving the pain a place and treating it is something completely different from going on living inside it and telling it as if it were who you are.

Focus on the pain itself and you suffer. Focus on what the pain taught you and you grow.

The way we talk to ourselves in our own heads can be changed, and once you notice it you can trade criticism for compassion.

Unlike animals and plants, which act on instinct, human beings have free will to plan their lives, and that's the foundation of self-respect.

Questions and answers

Why is it even harmful if I keep going back and telling the story of that one time I got hurt?

Because every time you repeat that story you aren't only remembering it, you're creating it again. Gili calls it a manifesto for the future: the more you go on telling the same story about yourself, the more you actually become that character, and the more events of the same kind you pull toward you.

When do you actually feel real confidence, the kind that isn't faked?

Confidence doesn't come before you act, it comes after. The way Gili puts it, it gets built when you deal with something hard or frightening, whether you succeed or whether you fail, because the mind learns that you did it and you're still standing.

Why isn't it selfish of me to take care of myself first?

According to what's said in the episode, when a person puts themselves and their own needs first, they get stronger physically, emotionally and mentally. As a result they give the people around them, family and friends, the best and fullest version of themselves. So it's a service to the people in their life, not an act of ego.

Gili's original episode description

A person who respects themselves is someone who steers rather than just drifting, someone who has plans for the future, who has wants and dreams to fulfill, something to look forward to. And that's exactly where they become a partner in creating their own future reality.

Our subject today: self-respect.

A respectable subject, and I have quite a bit to say about it.

Self-respect is an important commodity for a lot of reasons, but there's one that's critical: if you have no respect for yourself, you will always look for that respect on the outside. You don't have to look like someone hungry for other people's respect for this to be true. You'll constantly be looking for people to give you respect so that you can feel good about yourself. Because if you don't feel respect, appreciation or love for yourself, then you're in a nonstop chase after outside approval for it, which at best is like fuel that runs out and has to be topped up again, and at worst is like an addictive drug. You're in a loop. But when you have self-respect and self-appreciation and self-love, the fuel tank fills itself. You're fed out of your own fullness.

Self-respect means loving yourself more than you love the idea of other people loving you.