There  are two problems about deciding things for yourself. First, it means you can’t blame anyone else when things turn out badly. (But you can take the credit when  things turn out well.)  Second, other people can get very angry with you for not doing what they want.

Valuing yourself is a risky business.

Which risk is preferable? The risk of making your own decisions or the risk of not valuing yourself?

Undoing the training of our early years, when we learned that we weren’t good enough, that we had to be good to earn the right to exist, and never even think about, much less question, why and how we were taught this, is not easy. If you have spent all the years you remember feeling that somehow you have to prove yourself by your achievements , so that you have to earn the right yourself by your achievements, or that  you have to earn the right to breathe by working hard in devoted service to others, for if you don’t prove yourself to be brave or a hard worker, some vast hand will come down from heaven and pick you off the face of the earth like a flea off a dog’s back and cast you into nothingness, if this is how you have spent your life, then deciding that you are simply going to be and that you accept your being is a revolution in thought that you aren’t likely to achieve  in the twinkling of an eye.

Though some people do  it, just like that. They say to themselves. I’m not going to go on carrying this load of  s __t  that other people have dumped on me over the years. I’m dropping it now. And they do. They are free, just being themselves.

But some people, I find, don’t even know what I am talking about when I say, ‘Just be yourself.’

So we have to begin by saying, ‘Do we have a right to exist?’

If we exist, we have the right to exist.

We do not have to ask anyone’s permission to exist.”

SOURCE:  Beyond Fear.   Dorothy Rowe., PhD.  ( 1987) Fontana Paperbooks. London. Pages 383-384.