D.G. Kaye on growing self-esteem

Working through the past
to live powerfully in the present

Guest Blogger:  © Debby Gies (author D.G. Kaye)

©Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC

Returning the favor

©Michel Scott | Found HERE

In mid-August I was honored by a request to write an article for blogger Debby Gies, (author D.G. Kaye), so that she could spend her time getting her latest book ready for publication.

I chose to focus on the brain-based benefits to those of us who take frequent vacations between the pages of a book.

(CLICK HERE to read the entire article on her site)

I had a wonderful time putting something together for the writing/reading followers of Debby’s blog.  However, I made her promise that she would write something suitable for the readers of ADDandSoMuchMORE.com — as soon as she had a bit of that illusive free-time that seems to be in short supply for most of us.

And so she deliberately set aside time in her super-busy life to return the favor. I was thrilled when I discovered that she decided to feature self-esteem, one of the topics she covers in “Words We Carry,” a wonderfully heartfelt book I devoured on my Kindle and recently reviewed.

Because so many of us in Alphabet City have heard so many times that “we’re not doing it right,” we frequently develop low self-esteem as a result. A few of us struggle with it still.  I’ll let Debby explain a bit about how she battled that particular demon below.

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Words We Carry by D.G. Kaye

Thank you for inviting me here today, Madelyn, to your esteemed blog. For those who don’t know me, I’m D.G. Kaye, a Canadian nonfiction writer/author. All my books are written from my own experiences about some of my life’s triumphs and tribulations.

I wrote Words We Carry by taking what I’ve learned through life, relationships, people, and growing up with a low self-esteem.

This book contains short essays on those elements, sharing my own insecurities and how I overcame them, creating awareness on relationship pitfalls, and sharing some of my own hang-ups and quirks I developed through the process of growing my own self-esteem.

I titled the book Words We Carry because much of our character is built on the way in which we’re treated by friends and family when we’re young. When we’re not given any confidence boosts by the people in our lives and endure teasing about our flaws, those are the qualities our self-doubt tends to focus on. Alternatively, if we grow up in a healthy environment where we’re made to feel secure and loved and appreciated for who we are, we will look at ourselves in more positive light.

I use an example in my book where I talk about growing up in my teen years struggling with weight issues. But as I started working on boosting my self-confidence and finally lost the weight, I still had body image issues because I was the same me who looked in the mirror and still saw myself as the chubby girl. This is a common issue that many girls struggle with and often wind up turning Anorexic because of what their minds continue to focus on regardless of what they see in the mirror.

Growing up with family nicknaming us ‘pet names’ they might think are cute, but in fact are demeaning, implants those words within us, and I can tell you it takes a lot of mental work and willingness to learn to love yourself, especially when nobody is offering a helping hand. I was fortunate that I had the determination to learn to love myself and spent many years reading self-help books which finally brought me to the point where I was happy with myself and those hurtful words finally became hidden scars instead of remaining open wounds.

Words are powerful. They have the power to break us or inspire us. Nobody is a bigger person because they belittle someone. In fact, they become the smaller person when inflicting hurt on others.

I’d like to share an excerpt of my book here relating to some of the issues I’ve just talked about here.

Negativity and Jealousy 

It’s a fact that negativity underlies our fears, and our guilt can play a big part in lowering our self-esteem. All of these traits connect with our levels of confidence, our strength of character, and our wellbeing. When we’re constantly berated and not placing ourselves in positive circumstances, our energies are drained, which can hinder our ability to maintain a positive outlook on life.

Our fears can cripple us, holding us back from living our lives to the fullest. If we can take a moment to assess the things in our lives that aren’t fulfilling us, and acknowledge what we feel is holding us back from what we wish to attain, we can begin to do some damage control. But if we choose to live our lives in the same unhappy patterns we’ve grown accustomed to without bothering to figure out the root cause of our problems, those problems become nearly impossible to overcome.

Sometimes facing our demons is hard, but that’s the only way we can grow and become stronger. If we choose to remain complacent in our unhappiness, we become trapped there, and many people’s lives remain stagnant because they fail to recognize why they’re unsatisfied.

It’s all about taking the time to stop and listen, paying attention to the things that bother us instead of surrendering to them. If we can learn to take charge of ourselves and dig deep within to confront our fears and the injustices we face, we’ve made a great start, and we can then begin taking action to resolve our issues. We have to make a positive out of the negatives in order to become happy and emit our positivity, attracting similarly positive people into our lives.

Many women tend to surround themselves with negative people, resulting in damaging effects to their state of mind. We not only have the ability to inflict our own negativities, we sometimes find ourselves existing in negative surroundings because of the people we allow into our lives.

Take our moods, for example. Have you been in a great mood but found yourself in a conversation with someone who complained about everything, unable to show any happiness for any of the good things you share with them about your life? This type of negative force sucks out our enthusiasm like a leech.

This negative power can also linger from childhood.

As children, we experience negative forces from incidents such as being reprimanded by a parent. In those moments when a parent is disciplining us, we immediately recoil and begin to feel inadequate about ourselves. If our actions are not explained to us with kindness, we’re inclined to shrivel back in fear, a fear created by the negative approach used to rectify our wrongdoing. Incidents such as these are the beginnings of allowing negativity to steer our emotions.

The critics, naysayers, and unhappy people we allow into our lives have the ability to drain our good energy, leaving us feeling unoptimistic, as though they have let the air out of our enthusiasm. The influence of negativity becomes the barometer for our moods. People who constantly live under this umbrella of negativity get so used to it that they may not even realize where their happiness has gone. They’ve simply adjusted to living that way.

If a child grows up under those influences, he or she will more than likely grow into a person with low self-esteem and a lack of self-confidence. As we mature, we may also acquire friendships with people who have flawed perceptions of life and the world because of injustices that occurred in their own lives.

I’m the type of person who is very sensitive to energies. When I’m around negativity, I feel low. My compassion for others forces me to try to uplift them. If I try with my best efforts to no avail and don’t walk away, I feel very uncomfortable and begin to question my own optimism. This is not a healthy situation. Some might call this a bad vibe. However we choose to label them, these energies are very contagious.

It has taken me half a lifetime to learn to walk away from those situations.

For the first few decades of my life, the veil of negativity I felt in my mother’s presence made me very uncomfortable. The unhappiness she felt in her own life reflected in the way she spoke to my siblings and me. Eventually, through enduring her moods for decades, I made a decision to walk away. Nobody should have to subject themselves to toxicity, whether from friends, family, or strangers.

Sometimes we make bad choices about who we allow into our personal lives. We may overlook someone’s flaws or feel as though we can make them better. When it turns out we can’t, we find ourselves unhappily saddled in those relationships. We tend to feel obligated to these friendships out of some sort of loyalty instead of allowing ourselves to walk away.

It took me decades before I realized I couldn’t be the caretaker for everyone in my life. When I reached the point of feeling brought down by those negative influences, I learned to leave. It wasn’t easy for me to do this as a young adult. At the time, I was much more susceptible to allowing negative thoughts and people into my life, and this took a toll on me emotionally. I discovered I wasn’t feeling inner peace, yet I stayed in relationships for too long to avoid hurting others’ feelings.

Dwelling on negative thoughts doesn’t open us up to appreciating and attracting positive forces or people. When I began to reassess my life and discover ways to better myself, I read self-help books and uplifting stories about spirituality. One book in particular that made me begin to understand the effects of being positive was The Law of Attraction, by Esther and Jerry Hicks. It’s a universal fact that we attract what we project and focus on.

The old cliché “Misery loves company” is profound. It equates well with the theory of the law of attraction. Just think about it for a moment. If we’re miserable and go through life moping around with nothing positive to offer anyone in spirit or with words, what can we hope to attract? Most likely, we’ll attract likeminded people—or possibly nobody at all. In the event that we may be lucky enough to attract a high-spirited person who extends a helping hand to us, it would be a blessing and a longshot.

You can read more of this book by purchasing at Amazon HERE.

ABOUT the Author

D.G. Kaye is a Canadian nonfiction/memoir writer who writes about her own life experiences and about how she learned to overcome emotional abuse and low self-esteem. She writes on topics such as: kindness, forgiveness self-growth, and compassion. Her sunny outlook on life developed from learning to overcome challenges in her life, and finding the upside from those situations, while practicing gratitude for all the positives.

When she isn’t writing books, you can find her on her blog at DGKayewriter.com where you’ll find an eclectic mix of life lessons, rants of injustice, writing tips, book reviews, and featured interviews of guest authors. She’s known to inject humor into her work whenever it’s warranted. D.G.’s motto is: Live Laugh Love . . . And Don’t Forget to Breathe!

Find and follow Debby

Blog/website     Goodreads     Amazon author page     Facebook     Wiseintro
Google+     Instagram     Stumbleupon    Pinterest     LinkedIn.com
www.twitter.com/@pokercubster (Of course there’s a story to this name!)

BOOKLINKS:

Conflicted Hearts    MenoWhat? A Memoir    Words We Carry
Have Bags, Will Travel    P.S. I Forgive You        

© 2017, all rights reserved
(reblogs always okay, and much appreciated)

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You might also be interested in some of the following articles
available right now – on this site and elsewhere.

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COACHING LINKS at end of all posts

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Related articles on ADDandSoMuchMore.com

• Read any good books lately?
• Until they believe they can, they CAN’T

• Advice and Boundaries
• Benefits of Boundaries – and how to set them – Part 1
• Back to Boundaries

A Few LinkLists by Category
(to articles by topic on ADDandSoMuchMore.com)

• The Optimal Functioning (Challenges) Series of articles
  (about the Inventory & articles from each category)

• When you are NEW to ADD (or this blog/Attentional Struggles/ADD Coaching)
• Variations on ADD-ADHD
• The Walking A Mile in Another’s Shoes Series (you are NOT alone here!)

Related Articles ’round the ‘net

• My own Amazon review of Words We Carry – featured on Debby’s blog
• Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Sally’s Book Reviews – Words We Carry by D.G.Kaye
• Tina Frisco’s review of Meno-What?
• Guest author: D. G. Kaye – Messages from Beyond
• Aging and Wisdom, The Perennial Years by D.G. Kaye
• #Author/BloggerSpotlight D.G. Kaye aka Debby Gies – P.S. I Forgive You
• 39 Weeks: 39 Blogs Everyone Should Follow In 2017 – Week 3: Debby Gies – D. G. Kaye Writer

BY THE WAY: Since ADDandSoMuchMore.com is an Evergreen site, I revisit all my content periodically to update links — when you link back, like, follow or comment, you STAY on the page. When you do not, you run a high risk of getting replaced by a site with a more generous come-from.