I’ve written so many different times about the effects of not feeling like I was enough and the way I self sabotaged because of it.
It takes a lot of digging to see my role in all of these painful patterns. For a long time I gave others the power by blaming or being angry with them.
I have written about how I sabotaged friendships because I had an underlying belief that girls didn’t want to be friends with me.
I have written about the ways I needed to feel needed by helping others and how I ended up in some pretty dysfunctional relationships because of it.
I have written about boys and fears and money and kids and courage and bravery and love. But very rarely have I talked about all of the self love I have had to muster up to face the underlying beliefs and the mistakes and the demons.
Before I started doing the digging I was a ticking time bomb.
I was doing so many work-arounds to avoid all of the situations that might make me feel bad. The work-arounds were all of the ways I was lying to myself or self sabotaging.
When you are continuously doing something that you don’t feel good about (usually because there is a payoff you are giving a higher priority to than yourself) you fall out of alignment. That’s when you start doing work-arounds.
During these work-arounds you have to close your heart a little bit every time, and that never feels good. Then the symptoms of doing that begin. You might start treating others badly (compared to your normal standard), you might have to be forceful in your manifestations, you might say things you wouldn’t normally say, or you might do what I typically did…shut down because you refuse to say the things or treat others badly.
If someone would speak to me about I was doing, either I would have an outburst because I was “doing the best I could”, or I would apologetically scramble to try to fix it and then shut down further, feeling like I couldn’t win.
To break out of this cycle, I had to love myself enough to stay in alignment with what feels right to me.
I had to love myself more than all of the others that I wanted to please or thought would be disappointed with my choices.
I had to love myself enough to uncover unhealthy thought patterns and to dig in and find the underlying beliefs and reasons why I had made the choices that I did.
I had to love myself enough to forgive myself for not being perfect and for all of the mistakes I had made.
And I have to keep loving myself enough to continue the journey that will never be complete.
You aren’t loving when you have withdrawn and your heart is closed.
Before I learned how to love myself I was too wrapped up in my wounds, my powerlessness and my story to love others well.
Self love isn’t selfish. In fact it’s the least selfish thing I have ever done.