Intro [0:00]
Hello my dears! My name is Johanna, and I welcome you to the Johanna Draconis - The Deconstruction Of C-PTSD podcast.
In this episode we will talk about self confidence, feeling unlovable and loneliness. How to be self confident and able to love oneself is integral for a life with happiness and love.
So let us talk about it.

Prelude [0:26]
This is a continuation from last episode, where we talked about feeling unlovable and lonely. I strongly recommend to listen to it first. These three topics are sort of a chain reaction - you feel unlovable, that causes low self confidence and thats leads to loneliness.
Feeling unlovable and loneliness is strongly linked, because if you feel unlovable then no matter how many people tell you that they love you - you won’t believe them. Which is usually reinforced by not being able to connect or getting rejected by other people.
That usually happens as a response to a person feeling unlovable, because you know yourself best, so if you don’t believe it, why would anyone believe something else? And this leads to this viscous circle of loneliness and low self confidence.
But how do we break this cycle? For truly being able to love yourself - you need to know yourself. This might sound a bit strange, which is why I prefer the literal translation of the German word for it - Selbstbewusstsein means self awareness. Being aware of ones self.
We will talk first about what is self confidence truly, then ow to become self confident and then from questions to self love.

What is self confidence truly? [1:54]
There are many ways to appear self confident, but it always shines through. If you are truly self confident, you know who you are - the good, the bad, the meh, etc. You have a complete picture of yourself. Now this picture isn’t one solid block - its like a jigsaw puzzle.
The more puzzle pieces you have and - even better - are in the right place - the more self confident you are. For basically complete self confidence you have almost all the pieces in their place - as everyone has a blind spot and we do grow and change.
But at this stage you are truly aware of yourself and who you are. Which means you are harder to rattle or shaken and harder to manipulate, as no one can just put any foreign puzzle pieces in there. Which also helps with future trauma or other hard times in life.
Its like there is suddenly a frame that can’t be just pushed away. It also means wasting less times walking in circles or doing things you don’t actually want to do. And it shoos away predators and other abusers - too much work and you now can more easily detect them.
Though the most important in relation to our title is, that you will attract healthy partners, be it romantic or platonic, know what you want, know where you are heading and be able to truly love yourself as you should be.

How to become self confident? [3:33]
Which leads us now naturally to the question of how to become self confident. Now I could say the usual ‘Get good’, but that would be incorrect. Surely it helps, but that is once again for outside confirmation and not coming from yourself.
No - for that we need to get to know ourselves and we are going to start really small and simple. What is your favorite color and why? And the second part is absolutely crucial - as by trying to explain yourself you get closer to understanding why.
Now the start is hard as usual - you likely will struggle to form an answer and be frustrated why I would ask such a ‘stupid’ question, but I encourage you to stick with it and try again. Often these sort of questions need a bit to set in before you can answer them.
It is surprisingly difficult and - as usual - the more you do it the easier it gets. The question about why this is your favorite color is often answered with how it makes you feel, what it reminds you of, how it compares to the other colors and so on.
But figuring out the reasons is how you truly understand why you like or dislike something. Learning to explain why you like or dislike something is a good way to learn to understand why you like or dislike something.

From questions to self love [5:11]
Now the colors are of course only a start. You can move on to what colors you like to wear and then about when you like to wear them. Another good topic is food. Why do you like this food? Why do you like this music? Why do you like your hobby?
With each question answered you get better at it and faster as well, but most importantly you get another puzzle piece in its place. Now as you can imagine this takes a bit. So this isn’t something to be your main focus - as that can be frustrating.
It is better to keep picking something up and then dropping it and do something else. Especially at the start when it can be really frustrating as you lack the skill and easily miss the answer. This discovery process also helps you with past trauma.
This way you can find them more easily, discover the undiscovered and get more information about the trauma itself. Which makes removing it so much easier. It also helps with discovering why you just act sometimes in ways, that you just don’t understand.
And most importantly, it helps with loving yourself. By truly knowing who we are we also get rid of the illusions how we should be or who we thought we were. Even if we don’t like an aspect of us - we know now where to look and how to change it.

Outro [6:52]
That was it for todays episode, I hope you found it helpful. Hope you are safe and well. And as always, if you have any questions or feedback and the like, please let me know at contactme@johannadraconis.com.
More information and transcript you can find as usually under johannadraconis.com and links are in the description.
I hope to see you next time. Watch yourselves and have a wonderful time.