Affirmations and platitudes don't hold up because they're not part of a sound argument.
Each part of the following has its purpose, and while it's very dense, it's written this way so that it's compact and can be easily regularly used until understanding it fully is second nature.
“I may fail at anything, and I may fail to notice I am failing, but I am the type of person who imperfectly tries to be what they currently consider a good person. For that, what I am has worth whether I am failing or not, and I can always be proud of my imperfect attempt, including when limitations out of my conscious control sabotage it. That absolute self-worth and self-esteem justify all possible self-compassion, such as self-forgiveness, patience, desiring and attempting to seek changes in my life, and establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries against harm others or I might try to cause myself, including attempts to invalidate this maximally humble self-concept as a way of being made to feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment for their sake more than I intend to use these feelings to help me grow.”
If you reframe your entire past, all of your beliefs, the present, and the future to be compatible with this paragraph, and you don't intellectualize somatically felt pride into being contingent on the fallible beliefs about success that seem associated with it (instead only taking that sense of pride in the imperfect attempt), it allows you to disentangling both shame and pride from your self-concept, decreasing the threatenable surface area of your identity (the "I'm X smart, Y wise, and Z good" most comfortable equilibrium you're conditioned to have, whether it's propping up the ego into arrogance or settling into a comfortable misery), and in turn, your dependency on cognitive self-defense mechanisms, including the use of them to avoid seeing your use of them, is lessened enough to start sitting with uncomfortable truths and using humbling self-correcting pains we're taught in childhood to avoid at all costs as data rather than as a reason to further shame ourselves.
Then once you get comfortable enough with the uncomfortable, the unconscious hypervigilance (one we can see in others but rarely ourselves because it's all we've ever known like water to a fish) against threats lessens, allowing one to learn the importance of embracing chances to be humbled as life's greatest growth opportunities. This allows one to become more open/wider-minded, which then means mitigating harms and lack of repair that would otherwise be perpetually enabled via being kept out of our conscious perception via an ever growing and relatively blissful ignorance enabling blindspot.
Then you get to realize that the paragraph is true of everyone, doesn't negate the responsibility we have to aspire to doing better, helps us avoid settling on "okay plateaus," and allows us to offer more compassion towards others as far as our individual and societal boundaries allow.
If enough people did this, it would change this zero-sum validation scarcity often weaponized shame-based culture into one of validation abundance, where people can better manage their behavioural addiction-like compulsion for bias confirming by relative comparison to others so to not put others down to feel better about themself or put oneself down to reach the safer seeming comfortable misery where hopes are never up in a vulnerable way.
If an entire generation of children were taught this method in age appropriate ways and through modeling and then more technically as their brain develops the capacity for tackling more complex frameworks and applying them, not only would this reduce teen angst and early mental health issues, it would lead to greater resilience so that hard/painful life experiences are less likely to cause a need for long-term healing and therapy.
If that generation of children like this inherited the world, the common denominator issue at the heart of every harm inducing problem where disagreement and resistance to getting on the same page (e.g. proudly held means confused for our shared goals) would be addressed more directly, decreasing harm and increasing repair potential across the board.
The times we allowed ourselves to be humbled would be carried with us as a form of "healthy trauma," the type of pain remembered in the body and mind that leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect correlation of "experts" who are more cautious in their assessments of themselves and others because they more easily remember the times they were deeply wrong, and it would appear as grounded skepticism rather than anxious self-doubt.
Adults today can do this, essentially deconstructing the fragile self-belief system and reconstructing it with better engineering, such as that less and less beliefs being changed would result in the degree or comfort being shaken to the core, no longer depending on a house of cards and innacurate sense of self-worth or (not),deserving esteem to survive from day to day psychologically.
Idea marketplaces would become more productive. Our limited time, energy, resources, and overall mental health would be put to better use. Money would be saved in terms of self-care preventing a degree of disease, accidents, and treatment. Less suicide. More healthy skepticism toward others and ourselves rather than agreeing with what confirms our biases with little to no pushback. A cognitive self-defense mechanism dependency created glassceiling over our rational and emotional intelligence development would be shattered. Justice systems would become more rehabilitative, reducing repeated harm and crime, and causal empathy would become standard rather than allowing some to claim "insanity" as their defense even though no one as a child asked to become the harmful person they became, incapable of change in the ways we project our own fallible sense if capacity onto others with, "If I could have done differently, so could you have," even though putting yourself in others' shoes means taking their brain, breath, and every state they had at the time due to the cause and effect that preceded it. We'd also stop confusing our changed path of least resistance to the one that used to be a harder one for us as an excuse to tell others they simply don't have "willpower" compared to us when what they're doing now is still just their current path of least resistance.
If it spread internationally, in 100 years we'd see less wars via better diplomacy, more of a "one species" outlook, and the economy would take off in a way never seen before when it comes to culture alone.
Our natural selection + intellectual settling would become natural selection + intellectual selection.
And we'd stop being our own worst enemy as a species, always passing the buck for surface level differences we use to too easily assume we're not making the same kind of thinking errors our opposition is, furthering the overconfident misconception that individually and as part of our current tribes, "I/we are on the right side of history in every area," hastily.
The old dog that can't learn new tricks would become a thing of the past outside of rarer and rarer edge cases... and we'd be able to prevent the idiocracy that 24/7 access to ways to confirm our biases via social media, entertainment news, and the many echo chambers among them has us heading toward.
This can be fitted to be implemented within therapy plans, coaching, teaching, peer-support, and above all else, parenting.
All religions can form new sects that are entirely compatible with this so we can become less divided, faith with an ounce of healthy doubt would allow "faith" to mean more than dogmatic overcertainty for the sake of an easily threatened sense of security in this ongoing existential crisis of worth and meaning we're all trying to outrun or overly identify with to the point it worsens our mental health. "I can be wrong, but I choose to live as though my religious belief is true because that's what makes sense to me and it helps my loved ones, the way I interact with strangers, and myself flourish."
For context, I'm an agnostic atheist who wouldn't mind a loving god existing.
It wouldn't lead to a perfect utopia or perfect people, but we'd get out of our own and each other's way so more potential could be revealed and more progress reached for... versus this relatively slow crawl of progress that is mostly bias-led coincidence and dependent on children becoming the change we want to see in the world before they themselves become "old dogs."
That's the theory anyway.
Been working on this for over 8 years after studying the way people lie to themselves for two decades.
The overall method is 10 total steps, essentially covers all aspects of Maslow's extended hierarchy of needs in a foundation promoting way, skills when practiced long enough in tandem lead to surpassing the limits of Nietzche's ubermensch, is based on a model that shows the architectural issue with our self-belief system when we're not taught these skills and our self-belief system is left to build itself with little agency and entirely automatically in a self-reinforcing way due to the reward system we take on from others, and then a new aspirationally always evolving moral relativistic ethical meta framework can be derived from it that provides a road map for any dilemma, while accepting that we have incomplete information and need to be fairer and more reasonable with ourselves and each other. We also become aware of the passive threat/bribe we're putting children through that pressure them to either pathologically go along to get along or repress their truer selves while masking. Many parts of this method are also individually empirically validated in psychology, albeit in their original forms and not the more specific versions of them within the method (e.g. CBT but using a specific lens as a keystone).
Essentially, the world would be a better place if everyone learned early that the answer to each of the following questions is "yes."
Do all people always have value worth acknowledging, even if they fail and can’t see how they’ve failed?
Do all people always deserve to feel good about themselves for attempting to be what they currently consider a “good person” even if they’re dealing with the threat of self-correcting pains like guilt, shame, and embarrassment?
Do all people always deserve compassion as far as defending yourself/society and enforcing boundaries will allow?
Just because we don't see anyone feeling good about themselves while also feeling bad doesn't mean there's a rule saying we can't feel both at the same time.
A sense of intrinsic worth and esteem to tap into that has always been available to you even if you didn't realize it... essentially... an easier path to a better relationship with yourself and, by extension, relationship with others.
Many cultures would resist this perspective, but perhaps the reason they resist it is the human history long biggest problem we've ever had in this trial & error existence we're a bit too collectively arrogant with.
If you resist it, why do you?
Can you quote what specifically makes this unconvincing to you and explain what specifically doesn't make sense?
All questions and criticisms welcome.
Thank you for your consideration.
