A time will come where you feel loved, cherished, appreciated, surrounded by everyone and cared for by many. A few days later, loneliness surprises you, and confusion blinds your sight. What happened? I thought I was doing fine… What did I do
wrong?!
A little voice in your head tries to get heard. It tries to tell you something: a small chance that it’s the answers you’re looking for. But you push it away and enjoy living the drama you’ve just created for yourself. I’m so lonely. No one cares about me. I work hard, I try my best, and yet I fail.
Since the story is leading from one chapter to another, you decide to make it more interesting. Egoism. Always an essential ingredient for self-thoughts, due to the fear of “losing one’s self”, whatever that means. No one deserves me. No one really knows how much I’m worth. Well it’s their loss. I didn’t do anything wrong.
Knock knock, who’s there? Arrogance! Oh well, let them be. I’m not going to stoop to their level. I know what I am, who I am, and I love myself. I always try to fix things first – but na’ah, not this time. It’s time I give myself some credit.
But things don’t get fixed. The story either continues to become even bluer, where denial, anger, annoyance, aggressiveness, and finally depression join the drama, or a splash of realization surprises your thoughts and leaves you with utter confusion. You know you’ve got to stop thinking like that, but what are you supposed to do? What’s the “right path” this time?
The thing is, to simply demand the situation to change for the best effortlessly, and ignoring self wrongdoings, will never be the right move. Self-help books’ authors and psychologists persist that under-confidence, a quality implicitly yet widely spread in humans, could be a root cause to many relationship problems. They enforce the importance of loving your self, nurturing it, protecting it, and allowing some time each day to tell yourself that you’re better than what you think.
And this idea is becoming stronger in our daily lives. We have to take “some time to think” before allowing ourselves to ….. our spouses unconditionally. We don’t call back if our missed call wasn’t returned. We don’t excuse friends who haven’t been in touch for a while, because “it’s clear that they’re not interested”. And then we wonder what went wrong!
In contrast with the psychologists, Islam teaches humbleness, loving others and putting their needs before ours. It tells us that if we have a minuscule bit of arrogance then we don’t deserve to go to heaven. Islam warns us of negatively thinking of others without solid proof. And even if proven guilty, we’ve got to forgive to be forgiven.
So yeah, I disagree with modern day psychologists. I think they’re giving out wrong advice (in this aspect). This whole bullshit about self-importance, self-this and self-that, either results in total confusion or complete anger. When you’re deep in negative thoughts and want to get out of them, start with a positive gesture (a smile, a gift, spread some love, revise your last few actions and consider apologizing) to break the negative cycle. Trust me, it’ll work. We’re just humans; we live a short life, better make the best of it rather than dwell on how important and significant we are.
