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How to feel happy within yourself? A big sign that you don’t feel good enough about yourself is when you avoid focusing on yourself, because it makes you feel less good about yourself, so instead, you focus on making others happy in order to feel good about yourself. If you feel unworthy of love then you might avoid expressing yourself in order keep your partner happy. It is hard to be happy within yourself if you’re focusing on everyone else but not yourself.
Perhaps expressing yourself causes you to feel silly, vulnerable or like you’re causing trouble, so you avoid communicating your needs to avoid feeling this way. As a result of not feeling good enough about yourself, you end up giving up on yourself so that you do not have to feel this way. In this way, it is easy to feel good about yourself by getting one’s source of happiness from others, rather than within ourselves.
Do you put everyone else first and make them a priority and forget about yourself? Do you give so much of yourself that there is nothing left over for you? Do you feel bad if you cannot please others? Is it hard for you to say no, so you give into what others want? Do you sacrifice yourself to make others happy? Do you constantly put yourself out there for others, at the expense of yourself? If you can relate to this, the chances are that you’re looking for happiness in others, rather than finding happiness within yourself. By making others happy, you hope that they will validate you or accept you, so that you can feel good about yourself. Perhaps deep down you do not feel good about yourself.
If you look externally for others to make you feel good about yourself, then you are most likely not developing confidence within yourself in order to be happy within.
Do you have difficulty expressing yourself? Are you dissatisfied that your life has no direction? Are you lacking the motivation and drive within yourself? Are you struggling to find your purpose or aspirations in life?
If you find it difficult to be assertive then you become helpless in order to take control of yourself. You end up becoming unhappy when life does not go the way you want.
If you do not consider yourself, then your needs will not get met, and you will feel unimportant when others do not consider you. If you give up yourself to please others then you stop fulfilling aspects within yourself that make you happy.
James Masterson defined individuals who accommodate the needs of others as having a false self, by adapting themselves to meet the needs of others, while giving up on their real self that focuses on fulfilling aspects of their own life. When we invest in others, rather than ourselves, we limit our ability to met our own needs and diminish our capacity to be fully functioning within ourselves’.
The false self pleases others based on the need to escape from the embedded feeling of not being good enough, which stems from the person’s childhood. The person’s real self is hidden behind the defensive false self that hides how they feel on the inside. By focusing on expressing oneself, one can unleash the real self that allows them to find happiness within oneself.
Overcoming these deep-seated negative views about oneself can allow a person to free themselves from the defensive false self in order to fulfill aspects of their real self.
The more self-fulfilled the person becomes the less likely they are to compromise themselves or sacrifice themselves for the sake of the relationship. They will feel confident to say no, set boundaries and meet their own needs. In this way, they are more accessible or available to others in a healthy way and therefore can maintain wholesome and healthy relationships, rather than needing others as a source of need fulfillment.
How to be happy within yourself?
Are you struggling to be happy within yourself and wonder why? Have you ever noticed that you put lots of effort into making your partner happy but they complain about you, or are not happy with you? Do you attempt to please them with going along with what they expect from you, but you get told that you’re lacking motivation and are told what to do? If you are so focused on pleasing them then you may have stopped being your ‘self’ or thinking for yourself in order to do things for yourself. If this sounds like you then perhaps you let others guide you or tell you what to do, rather than taking control of your life’.
Whenever you take the focus off your self, then you stop caring about yourself, by attempting to make others happy in order to get your happiness from them. This causes you to give a lot of yourself so that others can approve of you. This occurs when you do not place value on yourself or you feel worthless. This pattern distracts you from focusing on meeting your own needs.
The more we give up our self, the more unfulfilled we become by living everyone else’s lives and not our own. By attending to everyone else’s needs you become unhappy within yourself.
When we feel good within ourselves then we can go for what we need. When we feel unworthy then we can feel as if we do not deserve things in life and avoid putting ourselves out there, because we feel not good enough to do so. We may avoid taking care of ourselves or avoid going for the things we want in life. Rather, we focus on making our partner happy in order to feel worthy of them. Making others happy, at the expense of ourselves, doesn’t mean that they will make us happy. Why would we risk putting our happiness into the hands of others to feel good about ourselves?
You may think that your partner is too critical of you. When we think our partner is judging us or belittling us, it usually means that we are too hard on ourselves. In this way, we project our feelings onto our partner and think that our partner is judging us. So we might give up on doing the things that we think we will be criticized for, in order to avoid feeling judged. In fact, we can give up on doing things for ourselves or putting ourselves out there, in order to avoid perceived failure. By avoiding self-activation in life, we end up escaping from the critical voice within ourselves that berates us for not being good enough. In this way, we give up our self and avoid doing things for ourselves to avoid the inner critic within ourselves.
To protect ourselves from feeling not good enough, we presume that our partner thinks that we are not good enough for them, when they bring up how you avoid doing stuff for yourself. So we ask them to back off or tell them off, rather than listening and taking on constructive feedback by learning about ourselves. The truth is, your husband or wife is not really putting you down or berating you. They are showing you something about yourself, about how you give yourself up by avoiding doing things for yourself or avoiding to think for yourself. If we do not acknowledge how we feel on the inside then we think others are critical or judging us, by holding ourselves back from participating in life and preventing us from activating our real self.
If we try to make others happy rather than focus on ourselves, then we lose touch with ourselves. Our ability to fulfill our own desires is limited. When we comply to make others happy and negate ourselves, the more we lose ourselves in relationships and become unhappy within ourselves.
It is easy to feel that your partner is the cause for your unhappiness and blame them when the relationship evolves around them and not you. Without realizing it, you may end up feeling unimportant as if your needs do not matter. You might even push down these unwanted feelings within yourself, which often stems from childhood. In this way, you see your partner as selfish or controlling when you let them get their way by pleasing them. You’ve perhaps enabled them to act this way because of this pattern where you make it all about them. If we do not take responsibility for ourselves, and blame others when life does not work out for us, then we become too passive to assert ourself in life.
How to become happy about yourself?
Many avoid how they feel deep down by focusing on others in order to feel good about themselves, yet becoming more discontent when they forget to attend to their own lives. When you look to others to feel good about yourself, you do not develop the capacity within yourself to focus on the things that are worthwhile for yourself. In this way it distracts you further away from yourself, making it hard to be happy within yourself.
Many find it difficult to focus on themselves because it leaves them feeling uncomfortable because it triggers how they feel deep down. Addressing these underlying feelings, allows individuals to gain strength in themselves so that they do not need to please other people as a way to avoid how they feel. Working through these negative self-representations allows the person to tap into their real self, and obtain self-fulfillment within. Whereas when a person relies on others to feel good about themselves it leaves them at the mercy of everyone else.
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Previously published here and reprinted with the author’s permission.
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