lon-gnome:
My therapist gave me a sheet of paper with a list of legitimate rights. We seem to forget we have these rights sometimes, so I thought I’d share it.
YOUR LEGITIMATE RIGHTS
- You have a right to need things from others.
- You have a right to put yourself first sometimes.
- You have a right to feel and express your emotions or your pain.
- You have a right to be the final judge of your beliefs and accept them as legitimate.
- You have the right to your opinions and convictions.
- You have the right to your experience - even if it’s different from that of other people.
- You have a right to protest any treatment or criticism that feels bad to you.
- You have a right to negotiate for change.
- You have a right to ask for help, emotional support, or anything else you need (even though you may not always get it).
- You have a right to say no; saying no doesn’t make you bad or selfish.
- You have a right not to justify yourself to others.
- You have a right not to take responsibility for someone else’s problem.
- You have a right to choose not to respond to a situation.
- You have a right, sometimes, to inconvenience or disappoint others.
Sometimes, when I get seriously low, things like this turn into such foreign concepts. Like, “What? I can disappoint people? But then they’ll hate me and leave me.” “How can I tell someone else that what they think about me is wrong? I’m the wrong one.” “Crying? I shouldn’t cry. Crying is for children and for people who have something to cry about. Crying is unprofessional.”
However, there’s still something that stays with me the longest. Let’s call it rule 0:
0. You have a right to be.
