Loving My Self

Self-love.

Loving yourself.

This has been one of my biggest, darkest battles since I was molested. Even without childhood trauma loving ourselves is something that proves difficult for folks living in Western culture. We rarely - if ever - see it modeled for us, and we sure as hell don’t talk about it. In middle school and high school health classes, I remember talking bout venereal disease and psychological defense mechanisms – of all things – but not how to love ourselves.

And yet, in many Eastern cultures, the concept of not loving yourself is absolutely so foreign they can’t even conceive of how that would ever happen – their reaction is how could you not love yourself?

*sigh*

I just know that ever since I was molested and all those negative thoughts and feelings came raining into my life and my energy, loving myself never seemed to be on my radar. Love sent to me from me never entered my consciousness as even in the realm of possibility.

And yet, I got glimpses that loving myself might possibly exist as a concept when I got into my late teens and early twenties.

When I interacted with people I deeply admired and came to love, I would get … whispers that maybe it was somehow feasible, somewhere, sometime in my existence to feel something other than hatred toward myself, something other than unworthiness, something other than self-revulsion, something other than isolation from myself and others, something other than separation from ME. Maybe I could feel whole. Whispers of this came here and there from the people who taught me along my way.

And, too, when I gained the courage and emotional and spiritual fortitude to dig into my own garbage, my own baggage, and really heal from the inside out, I saw with more pain, and more clarity, and more and more dismay all the ways in which I did not love myself.

The universe seems to have graciously allowed me to heal a lot of other things before adamantly requiring me to square off with my lack of self-love. That’s how it feels like it’s happened – like I’ve been permitted to tackle so many other issues and parts of myself before finally being forced to reckon with loving myself.

Or maybe it’s like building with blocks. Each issue I found and healed is a building block of what it means to love me. I just needed to find enough blocks to get a sense of what I was really building toward.

I dunno. I digress.

Anyway -

Things came to a head this year in particular. Since the New Year I have continually butted up against the myriad ways I don’t show up for myself, I don’t give myself the love I give to others, I don’t give myself the acceptance and care that I give others.

These instances where I clearly saw my own self-hatred and my own lack of self-acceptance came harder and faster as the weeks of 2017 wore on, until they were coming down on me in what felt like an emotional and spiritual fist-fight. Like I was getting punched with these moments of painful clarity where I didn’t love myself, over and over – rapid-fire, pummeling me.

And dear God, I cannot tell you how much it hurts to come face-to-face, up-close and personal with all the ways I don’t love myself. Seeing it now, with my heart wider than it ever has been before, makes me ache. It makes me love that little girl inside me with even more compassion. It makes me think of teen-aged me sitting alone in her bedroom because she didn’t feel she was worthy to go out with her friends and have fun. It makes me think of when I would date guys and become the clingy, co-dependent mess that they would off-load as soon as they possibly could get clear of me.

I ache for those parts of me. I feel so much sadness for those parts of me. Because it really hurts to go back and see where I abandoned myself, where I rejected myself, where I flatly refused to give myself what I really needed.

The hurt has just been building and building because I really wasn’t addressing it. The universe kept giving it to me, I kept turning away. So each time the universe brought it to me, the confrontation was more stark, more clear, more painful – so that it could not be ignored.

I finally had to scream “Uncle.”

I finally had to turn around and sit with this for a while, sit with the pile of seething hatred and utter abandonment I seem to have created or held for myself because of Jamie’s actions, because of the misunderstandings and emotional survival methods my childhood heart and spirit took on to survive what happened to me.

I figured I was dirty, unworthy, undeserving, disgusting, defective, no good, and utterly unlovable because I was complicit in what Jamie did to me.

Somehow even transferring the blame for the trauma I suffered back to Jamie didn’t erase these feelings and thoughts. Knowing after all those decades that I really WASN’T complicit didn’t matter; the thoughts and feelings had become too embedded.

These chronic thoughts and feelings … I feel like they sort of made me into a monster. Even though I began believing them because I didn’t know any better, because I was trying to survive extreme emotional and spiritual pain as a child, they eventually took on a life of their own and I started hurting myself with them – over and over, for decades – until now.

I was guided to a video series on YouTube put out by Dr. Matt Kahn. If you haven’t heard his presentations, I highly suggest them, they are loving and powerful. His presentations on loving ourselves, on giving up judging ourselves really penetrated me in a tremendous way. Between his videos and all the healing work I’d been doing up to this point, I came to some important and shattering realizations over the past few days:

1. I didn’t just survive what Jamie did to me. I then had to survive what I DID TO ME.

2. Every single relationship I am in and have EVER been in, whether it’s friendships, family, or dating relationships, shows me where my neediness is, and that neediness is just a manifestation of my lack of self love. I’ve been looking for external ways to get love for myself instead of giving what I need me, me.

All my feelings of disappointment in relationships come from the fact that those people, those relationships could never and would never give me what I needed to receive from myself.

Looking back I can see how I’ve been given this lesson over and over, but never learned it. As Pema Chodron writes, “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” We just get the same lesson in different packaging in an endless, repeating loop until we finally wise up and catch on.

Well played, Universe. I got it. Finally.

Thanks for beating me over the head with it.

So I took some of Dr. Kahn’s advice the other night. I turned off all my self-help videos. I closed all my self-help books. I didn’t meditate. I just sat on the couch with myself. No distractions – no tv, no radio, no meditation. I just sat there with myself, listening to whatever thoughts needed to come up, and I talked to myself. “Hey self. How are you? You’ve been through some major shit. I’m so sorry you had to go through that, all of that.”

Dr. Kahn says not to play coy and not to let the fact that we don’t know how to love ourselves prevent us from starting, so I took his advice there, too. I was just honest. I said to myself, “I don’t know how to love you. I’ve never done it before. Nobody taught me how. But I’m just going to love you as best I can right now, and have faith that it will be right.”

And – don’t ask me how this happened because I cannot even explain it to you, but it seemed like I was able to take all the love I feel for the people closest to me and turn that love onto and into myself.

Instead of asking my closest loved ones to make me feel loved, comforted, supported, and special in that moment – I did it for myself. I gave it to myself.

I did as Dr. Kahn described – I just breathed and sent love into wherever it felt like I needed it inside. And you know what? It did work. I had no idea what I was doing, but the right places got the love they needed.

I needed.

It felt soft. It felt like a balm. It felt strong. It felt peaceful. And it was powerful, too. I released some emotion through tears – I like to think that they were tears of relief and gratitude from me, thanking myself for finally sending love where it was needed.

It wasn’t weird at all. It felt right.

And I’m eagerly looking forward to repeating the exercise tonight.

I know I still have a lot of practice to do on this, but the beginning makes me feel hopeful and confident that I can keep going. I can give me what I need. I can finally break the cycle of my neediness, my endless disappointment and loneliness by loving myself.

I’m really proud of myself for this, too. Because I’ve fought so hard and hurt so much to get here.

I had to survive me to love me.