So what is self-respect anyway?
Self-respect is treating yourself with care.
Self-respect is staying true to your authentic self.
Self-respect is staying true to your values.
Self-respect is knowing your worth and acting accordingly.
The thing is that originally children learn self-respect from their parents.
They see the parents respecting each other, and if you didn't grow up with your parents, from your primary caregivers, or whoever that was.
So we watch our primary caregivers respecting each other, and then we watch our primary caregivers respecting us, and then they get respect back.
But what I see a lot of is that a lot of women don't grow up with respect, so they are very good at respecting others, but they are not very good at getting respect because they don't know what that looks like.
Because growing up in abusive households or households where your parents were really busy and didn't give you a lot of time and dedication or households where there are mental health problems or where there are drugs and alcohol problems.
Households where there is a lot of misogyny, meaning the male of the family gets all the respect and the woman doesn't get any respect.
What happens is that the woman in any of these cases will grow up not knowing self-respect because she has never been allowed to respect herself.
She's always been demanded to give respect to others, but whenever she has put boundaries, or she has tried to get self-respect, she has been told one way or another that she's not worthy of respect.
