Nathaniel Branden's Self-Esteem Every Day


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September 13 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Everyone knows this cliche: If you don't love yourself, it is difficult to love another. Less well understood is the other half of the story: If you don't love yourself, it is very difficult to accept the love of another—very difficult to believe in its reality, very difficult to let it fully in—because such love clashes with your self-concept.
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September 14 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you enjoy a fundamental sense of efficacy and worth, and if, as a consequence, you feel lovable as a human being, you have a basis for appreciating and loving others. You are not trapped in feelings of deficiency. You have a surplus of life within you, an emotional wealth that you can channel into loving.
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September 15 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Without respect for and enjoyment of who you are, you have very little to give emotionally. You tend to see others primarily as sources of approval or disapproval. You do not appreciate them in their own right. But if you can learn to do so—and this is something that can be learned—you grow in self-esteem. And you begin to feel less needy.
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September 18 – Self-Esteem Every Day

The fact that you and your partner love each other does not guarantee that you will be able to create a joyful and rewarding relationship. Love per se does not ensure maturity and wisdom; yet without these qualities love is in jeopardy. Love does not automatically teach communication skills, effective methods of conflict resolution, or the art of integrating your love into the rest of your existence; yet the absence of such knowledge can lead to the death of love. Love does not produce self-esteem; it may reinforce and nurture it, but it cannot create it; still, without self-esteem love is difficult or impossible to sustain.
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September 20 – Self-Esteem Every Day

A successful relationship between a man and a woman rests on fundamental similarities between them and on complimentary differences. Harmony in love requires a partner with whom we enjoy essential affinities in values and sense of life. But the excitement we also hope to find requires there be some differences in personality development, in skills, in styles of being and doing—complimentary differences, obviously, not antagonistic ones (like intelligences and its opposite). This special combination is necessary to make two people right for each other.
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September 22 – Self-Esteem Every Day

If you do not feel deserving of happiness, consciously or subconsciously, or if you have accepted the idea that happiness is somehow wrong or cannot last, you will not respond appropriately when happiness comes knocking at your door in the form of romantic love. No matter how much you may have waited and cried, you will not welcome love when it arrives—you will find a way to sabotage it. What a challenge to resist this temptation! What an opportunity for true spiritual growth and transformation—to defy your negative feelings and honor the gift that life offers you!
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September 26 – Self-Esteem Every Day

To nurture another person is to accept him or her unreservedly, to respect his or her sovereignty, to support his or her growth toward self-actualization, and to care about his or her thoughts, feelings and wants. Ideally, nurturing is a reciprocal process. If you care only about your own needs and not those of your partner, you relate as a child to a parent, not as an equal to an equal. In romantic love independent equals do not drain or explot each other. Mutual nurturing is one of the characteristics of happy relationships.
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September 28 – Self-Esteem Every Day

In successful romantic love there is a unique depth of absorption by and facination with with being and personality of the partner. Hence, for each there can be a powerful experience of visibility—which creates a powerful bond. It is supremely important to know how to make your partner feel visible, seen, understood, appreciated.
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September 30 – Self-Esteem Every Day

What you love is the embodiment of your values in another human being—hardly an act of self-abnegation. Love is not selfless. Ask yourself whether you want your lover to caress you unselfishly, with no pleasure or gratification, or whether you want your lover to caress you because it is a joy for him or her to do so. Ask yourself whether you want your partner to spend time alone with you and to experience doing so as an act of self-sacrifice—or whether you want your partner to experience doing so as glory. And if it's glory that you want your partner to feel, if you want your partner to experience joy in your presence, to feel excitement and/or passion, fascination, delight—then stop talking about selfless love as a noble ideal. Would anyone with even a shred of self-respect say, "I want you to love me selflessly?" It is a very strange "spirituality" that defines love with selflessness. The great compliment of love is that your personal concept of self-interest expands to include the happiness and well-being of your partner. Your partner's joy and fulfillment matter to you selfishly. And when your partner sees that attitude in you, he or she feels truly loved.
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October 1 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Your desire for love from others is inseparable from your desire for visibility. Think about it. If someone professed love for you but when talking about what he or she found lovable name characteristics you did not think you possessed, did not especially admire, and could not personally related to, you would hardly feel nourished or loved. You do not merely wish to be loved; you wish to be loved for reasons that are personally meaningful to you and that are congruent with your perception of yourself. Celebrities and beautiful people in general often feel invisible in spite of having numerous admirers precisely because they recognize that their fans are in love with their own fantasy of the person, not the real person.
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October 2 – Self-Esteem Every Day

Romantic love at its best: In loving your partner, you encounter yourself. A lover ideally reacts to you as, in effect, you would react to yourself in the person of another. Thus, you preceive your self through your lover's reaction. You perceive your own person through its consequences in the consciousness—and, as a result, the behavior—of your partner.
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