This is just MY opinion:
People who lose faith in themselves and others should first understand the difference between faith and trust.
Faith is something you give unconditionally and often regardless of evidence. Trust is something you gain by seeing reality through your own efforts. It may be okay to start with faith in something, but it will certainly turn into trust.
However, when faith is lacking, it can still be replaced by trust; through effort, through "doing things anyway." To gain self-trust, therefore, you must be able to prove to yourself that you deserve it. Furthermore, trust is not something generic.
For example: I have trust that in a fight against a street thug I will be victorious because I know martial arts. But I have no trust at all that if an electrical system breaks at home, I will be able to follow the instruction sheet well to fix it.
But faith is important here because if my electrical system breaks and I don't have faith that I can fix it myself, I will never even try and therefore I will be left in the dark until I can call the technician. If I don't have faith in the technician, I will probably never be able to have a habitable house again.
When I was in the early stages of Satanism, I had to "choose" whether to meditate or not. At first I didn't have faith that I could make the meditations work. But then I asked myself: "is my lack of faith in myself actually getting me somewhere?". I started giving myself a chance, over the years I found that the meditations were successful for me.
Often, not having faith in yourself is just an obstacle to what you could achieve. If you decide to give yourself a chance, you might find yourself surprised by yourself.
Of course, having faith is not enough. I can have faith my whole life that I will become something wonderful, and stay on the couch all the time fantasizing about what I will "one day" achieve, and never achieve it.
Faith is the first step, the initial concession you give yourself to allow yourself to start working on big goals. But then you have to start working on those goals. If you do that, you will gain confidence that you are doing well, and that is the only way to have self-esteem.
True self-esteem is built through recognition of your own achievements. Sometimes you will fall, but faith in yourself will allow you to always get back up.
Some time ago I kind of lost faith in myself and people.
Faith is something you have to give yourself. Faith is called that because it is often blind, as such, you can afford to make this effort. For yourself.
Faith should not be wasted on things that do not deserve it (like Jesus, etc.) precisely because faith, being non-rational, could be dangerous if mismanaged. Christians are an example of this.
But having faith in yourself is always an advantage, it is always a good thing. It is the way you have to get a chance to advance yourself. You are not wasting it or mismanaging it, as long as you give it to yourself and the Gods.
Maybe you can lose your self-confidence, not your faith. However, if you continue to strive, your trust will be rewarded. We are Satanists. Satanism is exactly the way that shows us how our faith is well placed, to transform our actions into trust. What concerns us in strong self-esteem.
With others it is a little different because they have to prove to you that they deserve your trust. Every individual, as Satanas teaches, is different. They will not all be the same in your eyes. So there will be those who do not deserve your trust and those who do. They are not all the same. There can be no general rule of judgment on this. It may be worth it in some cases to allow them to prove to you that they deserve your trust. In others not, but you will recognize it.
Satan, he told me not to fixate on something so often and that I have to free myself from my obsession, what exactly does that mean?
Here I speak from experience: often when judging others we focus on specific things that aren't very important, to the point of becoming paranoid about them.
Once I got fixated on the fact that the girl I love hadn't even told me one of her jokes the whole time (she's very funny and playful), for a few days. I started to fixate on this thing and ask myself what I could have done wrong to her, how to fix it. I had literally lost faith in that context in our relationship, etc. I focused on this thing very worried. Then she started to joke with me again calmly. Nothing had happened in practice, just my unfounded paranoia.
Things like this that I was fixating on a lot had repeated themselves three or four times. On the fourth time I finally understood what you're saying: you shouldn't fixate on things: otherwise we risk making the situation worse, and it's VERY PROBABLE because that's how obsessions work, that it's just our paranoia that doesn't exist in reality, but we created it out of nothing. Maybe by obsessing over this erroneous belief that we have become fixated on, we also risk ruining existing beautiful situations.
When I spoke about this thought to the girl I love, she "reprimanded" me for a moment, saying: "why do you fixate on these things?", then she explained to me how things really were and from there I finally understood. Since then I know that what you said is absolutely true. Don't fixate on things obsessively.
