As we begin to create our story of who we are, for example, we also start to compare ourselves to others, and to social ideals of who we should be. Thus, the unfortunate side effect of the same cognitive skills that allow a sense of ourselves as conscious human beings is that we often soon become self-critical, or excessively seek to be attended to, to be important or notable based on the specialness of our self-stories. We have begun to fashion the conceptualized self, and this imagined self often takes on the illusion of being our “real” self. We begin to become the content of our stories,
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