Terry Real

What happened to your worth?

And so healthy self-esteem, if I may, and I may double back and talk more about it, which I have to teach men, is the capacity to feel proportionally bad about bad behavior.

I screwed up.

I hurt you.

I'm sorry.

And at the same time, hold yourself in warm regard as the imperfect person.

And what we do is we either don't feel bad about bad behavior, that's shameless, that's grandiose, sociopathic even.

Or if we do feel bad, we go right into shame.

I'm a useless piece of shit.

I feel terrible.

I have to teach men to come up out of shame and not be obsessed with... You know, one of the things I say is when you go from shameless bad behavior...

irresponsible, selfish, insensitive, to, oh, my God, that's terrible.

I'm a big shit.

I should just beat the hell out of myself.

You're trading one form of self-preoccupation or, guess what, another form of self-preoccupation.

Everybody does.

Can I slow that down for a second, Andrew?

Yeah, please.

What we have is what I call the Icarus syndrome.

In the absence of worthiness, so many of us feel we have to earn love.