Pride: Is it really a sin?

Pride is often seen as a negative emotion, but is that really true? After all, we have all our emotions for a reason, and most emotions are there to help you. For example, if you’re not feeling well, this can be a way to find the motivation to do something that will actually make you feel better again. Couldn’t pride serve a similar function?

What's Proud.

Pride is an emotion in which you have evaluated yourself, reaching a positive conclusion[1]. For example, you think you did a good job, or that you look good, or that you have a nice family. You give yourself a nice big 10.

Is that actually a sin? I personally don't think so. In my opinion, especially people who find someone else unjustly proud find pride a sin. But then, in my opinion, those people actually just suffer from jealousy.

But you can also divide pride into two types: authentic pride and overconfident pride. With authentic pride, you’re proud of what you’ve achieved, whereas with overconfident pride, you’re actually just arrogant and conceited[2]. For example, you might consider yourself better than other people. And thinking you’re better than others is really quite different from simply thinking highly of yourself.

Proudly Recognizing

You might say that every positive emotion has roughly the same expression in people, but that's not true. In fact, when you are proud, you have a little smile. Your head stands back slightly and you may have your hands on your hips or held above your head. You also make yourself physically taller[3].

Take pride in yourself

Being proud of yourself even has certain benefits. At the very least, it is logically good for your self-confidence .

In social interactions, it also helps if you are proud of yourself. This can have very distinct effects, though. In a study where people were encouraged to feel proud before working together, the "proud" participants often took charge of the team tasked with solving something. You might find this scary, but other people often found those "proud" leaders most likeable or "likeable."[4] So pride that matches what you have accomplished can already help you move forward in social situations and can cause you to take on a leadership role.

In addition, pride can also motivate you to tackle a difficult task. It therefore helps you with your perseverance[5]. For example, you want to live up to your own idea of what you’re capable of achieving.

What are you proud of?

You can be proud of everything about yourself, such as your looks and your accomplishments and everything in between and around them. When you're young, such as during adolescence, you often haven't achieved a whole lot that you can be proud of. Still, it is more convenient to focus on that rather than your appearance.

In fact, research shows that if young people took pride in themselves in general they were often happier than if they felt it was especially important to take pride in their appearance. If appearance was a major source of pride they often had lower self-confidence and felt that they did not perform as well in school and that their social skills were also not good enough[6].

Proudly Strengthen

Strengthening pride is also useful for improving your self-confidence and thus feeling better in general. This is something hypnotherapists help adults and children with.

For example, helping children with hypnotherapy can also give them a sense of pride[7]. This may be because hypnotherapy primarily helps the child solve his or her own problems. A hypnotherapist primarily offers suggestions, but ultimately, it is the person receiving treatment who does most of the thinking and who undergoes the transformation that resolves the problem.

Helping people anchor good feelings also often involves looking for a time when someone could be proud of themselves in their life. For example, if you are seeking help because you are insecure at work or something similar, retrieving an earlier feeling in your life when everything was going well and when you were confident in yourself can help you regain this feeling. So a feeling of pride that you had before can be used to feel proud again even in a later moment in your life[8].

Those feelings of pride and success, in turn, can motivate you to perform certain tasks. It helps you to have some kind of foundation on which to build again (source 8).

Feeling proud

Sometimes you may also find it difficult to feel pride. For example, if you've been in the military and have experience going to war, that's an experience you can be proud of. After all, you survived, but because war is violent you may find it difficult to feel proud of that. After all, many people learn from childhood that violence is bad.

Or you are dependent on people and instead of being proud of your ability to have social relationships with people who actually want to help you, you are ashamed that you need the help. In that case, too, you can actually look at your resources as a source of pride rather than a source of shame (source 8).

Sometimes unconscious beliefs can prevent you from being proud of something you have accomplished, when you should be.

For example, if you are dependent, regression can help you experience love instead of feeling like you are somehow failing. When your mother or someone else used to care for you you probably felt love and accepted that care. With regression, you can retrieve that feeling again and that can help you to recall those feelings in the future when someone cares for you.

You can also use regression to find out why you subconsciously think you shouldn't feel proud. That when you become happy about what you have, or have done, there is something in you that stops you from being truly proud.

With regression, you can then go back to the first moment you blocked yourself from feeling pride. That way, you can find out why this feeling occurred, but more importantly, you can reinterpret this moment and even change your mind so that you can be proud.

Next, you can also get suggestions that strengthen your ego and pride, such as:

"I am allowed to be there."

"I have accomplished a lot in my life."

"I can be proud of who I am and where I stand."

These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs and issues with pride, you may receive other suggestions.

So pride is certainly not a sin to feel when you feel it about something you have accomplished. It is more convenient to be proud of yourself in general than of your appearance for your sense of well-being.

You can improve your motivation through your pride. After all, you also want to continue to live up to what you achieved before, and being proud of that can cause you to take on difficult tasks anyway, to achieve that very thing again.

Pride can be empowered and evoked with hypnotherapy. It can be used in the resolution of other problems, and if pride is not feeling a problem, hypnosis can also be used to identify and remove limiting beliefs.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then join the free online masterclass on hypnosis. There , you’ll learn more about the basics of hypnosis.

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