What Does it Mean to "Self Improve?"
Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books, including "Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You? and "Healing Your Aloneness." She is the co-creator of the Inner Bonding healing process.
Becoming Strong Enough to Love
Self Improvement has become mainstream. In the last few years, since I have been writing articles and submitting them to article sites, I've noticed that the category of "Self Improvement" has been showing up lately when it was never there before. To me, this is very good news.
But what does it really mean to "Self Improve?" What are we really improving when we self improve? And what "self" are we improving?
We each have two "selves" - our wounded self and our core Self. Our core Self is our true self, our natural soul self - our essence. Our core Self is our passion, our joy, our gifts and talents, our ability to love, our creativity. We come into this life as our core Self, and when this Self is loved and valued by our parents, we continue to naturally grow our God-given gifts and talents and manifest the fullness of our beings. This Self wants to improve by learning the skills necessary to fully express itself.
But when this Self is not seen and valued in the way we needed, we create an alternative self, a self we hope will have control over getting the love we need and avoiding the pain we can't handle - a self to help us feel safe. This is our false self, our wounded self, our ego self. This self is filled with the false beliefs that we absorbed as we were growing up - beliefs that end up limiting our true, core Self. This self does not needs improving - it needs healing.
The term "self improvement" can sometimes be a bit misleading, because we do not want to improve our wounded self. We do not want to improve on the ways we lie, manipulate, and avoid in our attempts to have control over getting love and avoiding pain. We don't want to improve on our many addictions to substance and processes. We don't want to improve on our anger, our compliance, our withdrawal and our resistance.
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