March 17, 2010

• Loving Yourself

  Guess where I was yesterday?
  

  
  

  

  No one enjoys this, not anyone that I know of anyway.
  I put them off as long as possible, I hate it.
  I saw that sitting in the sink when I was getting undressed
  and I wanted to get my clothes back on and get out of Dodge.

  Taking care of yourself is part of loving yourself and the ones who care about you.
  I am coming to realize how difficult it is to really love yourself 'in action'.
   I believe that if you don't, you can not fully accept the love of others
  or even love in a truly healthy manner.

  I was sexually molested and emotionally abused before I even remember it,
  I remember very little of the sexual abuse but it started early on.
  Somehow I connected that with what happens when people love you
  and I wasn't having any part of that.
  Our thought process is so amazing, our reasoning to accept what happened,
  the situations we block out because we can not deal with it
  and the effect that has on us all through our lives.

  I have always liked me, my personality and the way I made people feel around me.
  I can talk to  almost anyone, they relax and open up
  and tell me things they do not usually share with others.
  I like much about me but I never loved me, I couldn't, I was too hurt.
   I started looking into the hurts ,I cleaned them out, took the shame out,
  I made it a piece of my a history, a part of my fabric as if my life were a weaving,
  it was blended in now and not a mess of knots on the floor.
  This is the first step I took towards loving myself and
  not letting the past determine how I see myself.
  It was/is very painful to unravel some memories
  but I believe it is more painful to carry the hurt.
  I have learned that I can process the original hurt with grace,
  it is the damage that happened around the wound that hurts me more.
  Once I clear that away the original wound can heal,
  there may be a scar but it is not infected anymore.

  As I see it...the 'infection' is mostly lies I have told myself to accept what happened like...
  *No one loves me
  *I am damaged,no one wants me
  *I am only good if I help people
  *People only like me because they pity me
  *It's all my fault.
  Those thoughts were a hurting child's reasoning.
  I had combined those thoughts
  with the real condemnation I heard .
  My dad said he was ashamed of me for being fat,
  he hated to take me out to eat but then he felt guilty and rewarded me with food.
  I still feel shame when I eat out in front of someone.

  It is only in the past two years that I have been able to break through
  the wall I put up inside and get to the hurt to sort it out.
  In doing that, I am loving myself 'in motion'.
  If I can not forgive myself or look at myself or love myself
  how can I do it for someone else?

  If I want to live by the golden rule
  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
  or
  "Love one another as you love yourself"
  I then need to love myself.
  I need to accept the love of others,not just that they like me but that they do love me.
  That means that they would be able to hurt me too.
  Once I get rid of the stored up hurts I no longer have an overflow
  and the new hurts do not carry the pain of all the past hurts,
  I can process the new hurts and love through them.
  I guess this is why they say
  "Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all".
  I believe God's love is the greatest love there is
  but if we do not love ourselves we can  not accept that fully,I couldn't.

  All these thoughts from a few pap smear photos.

  I challenge you to see if there are things you tell yourself
  that keep you from loving yourself.

  • 7:24 am
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