Mental Health Tip of the Week: Self-empowerment

• When you look outside yourself for self-definition and self-worth, you are giving your power away and setting yourself up to be a victim. Society has trained you to be victim. You have been taught to give your power away.
• As just one small example of how pervasively you were trained to be a victim, consider how often you have said, or heard someone say, "I have to go to work tomorrow." When a person says "I have to" they are making a victim statement. To say, "I have to get up, and I have to go to work," is a lie. No one forces an adult to get up and go to work. The truth is "I choose to get up and I choose to go to work today, because I choose to not have the consequences of not working."
• To say "I choose" is not only the truth, it is empowering and acknowledges an act of self-love. When we "have to" do something we feel like a victim. And because we feel victimized, we will then be angry, and want to punish whomever we see as forcing us do something we do not want to do.
• We always have a choice. The choice may sometimes seem to be awful - but in reality, allowing ourselves to buy into the illusion that we are trapped will have far worse consequences in the long run.
  
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