What It Really Means To Be Self-Centred (and why it's important for YOU)
Out of all the pieces of the puzzle that is self-confidence, this is one of the biggest.
If you’ve ever walked into a room of people laughing, and thought they were laughing at you — keep reading.
This is a personal reflection —this is how I found out I was ego-centric and how it was slowly destroying me.
Let’s dive into the concept of being self-centred.
What is ‘self-centred’?
Let’s start with what it isn’t— self-centred doesn’t mean selfish.
Being selfish is lacking concern for others — the opposite of empathetic. Selfish people will do shitty things at the expense of others because it’s not them who will wear the consequence —the snaky people who’ll throw you under the bus to raise their own status.
To be self-centred is to believe that everything is about you. To use the earlier example → walking into a room of laughing people and thinking they’re laughing at you. Tripping over and thinking the whole street thinks you’re silly.
The self-centred person views the world as if they’re the main character.
Why are we self-centred?
It’s a defence mechanism we assume to make sure we protect ourselves. We’re not trying to feed our neighbour, we’re trying to survive. Only when our needs are taken care of can we begin to look outward.
You can see this in children, they’re naturally self-centred. They haven’t developed their minds enough to understand the context of the world just yet.
A child makes its early experiences about the self, because a child can’t help interpret it that way, it’s not even conscious.
— Dr Gabor Mate
If a mother comes home angry and stressed after a long day of work, the child doesn’t consider what she went through at work, or that she’s providing for the family, the child’s thinks:
Mum is angry → I made her angry → I’m bad.
The quote you read earlier was from Dr Gabor Mate, born to Jewish parents in Hungary — 1944. To protect him from the dangers to Jewish people in the ghettos of Budapest, his mother was forced to pass him onto a stranger to take him to safety — he never saw his mother again.
All his little brain could understand was that he’d been abandoned — he thought his mother didn’t want him because he was worthless.
Luckily for humanity, his mother kept a journal during this time — he couldn’t bring himself to read it for many years, until one day.
“Only the sight of you next to me in your crib gave me reason to go on, I will give up my son when they’re here to throw me into the cattle train, [but] not one second before.”
He realised that although he felt he was worthless, it wasn’t so. As a child, he was too self-centred to realise the context of the situation.
Sometimes, the defence mechanism backfires, especially with early childhood trauma. It can be as little as a parent not paying much attention to the child that causes it to ask questions internally.
“Am I not good enough?”
People say Comedians are depressed people, that’s why they pick up comedy. Interestingly, it’s usually the parent’s of Comedians who are the sad and mundane type, and the children’s natural reaction is to try to impress them, to lighten the mood. They feel that the parents are sad because of them, so they feel obliged to fix it.
Being self-centred is a natural part of life for a lot of people, but there’s a way out.
Escape your mental prison — see the truth
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
— Seneca
Nobody cares about you. They’re too busy being self-centred themselves.
Even your loved ones think about you much less than you think — they’re living their own life, the same way you’re living yours.
If you think about the situation from an outside perspective, and not your own self-critical mind, you’ll see how ridiculous that voice in your head is. Would you speak to your best friend the way you speak to yourself?
“They’re laughing at you. You’re a joke. You’re worthless.”
Can you explain why they would be laughing at you? They’re just people laughing. There is something within you that is blaming yourself.
The feeling of others judging you is actually you judging yourself.
Read that again.
The internal work begins
Being self-centred is caused by the self. It’s a mindset, a perspective — it can change.
When you feel like people are judging you, there’s something within you that you don’t like. Ask yourself what that is, and why you’re so self-conscious about it. Analyse your behaviour, journal, get to the bottom of it.
When you have those self-centred and self-critical thoughts, stop and think about the truth.
As you heal your relationship with yourself, the outside noise will start to fade away. You’ll see that this judgement was inside you all along.
You’ll go from living a life walking on a razorblades, to drifting along in a calm sea.
I hope you liked this week’s article, it took many iterations to write this. I found it difficult to convey what I meant in a succinct way. This topic fans out so much and I found myself writing about lots of different things — topics that we’ll explore together in the coming weeks.
The lessons I share are ones that resonate with me deeply, and the practice of calling myself out whenever I have these irrational thoughts has made a huge difference.
If you did like it, please give it a ‘like’ or even share it with someone who you think it might help.
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Thank you for reading, see you next Friday — bright and early.
Sincerely,
Eren
