by Kym H. R. Kennedy
I want to talk about the importance of loving ourselves. I don’t know about you but I wasn’t exactly taught as a child to do this. It wasn’t that my parents purposefully didn’t teach me, but truthfully, they didn’t know how to do it for themselves.
My childhood is to a large extent fuzzy in my mind, but certainly I came out of it feeling that it was my job to do and say what my parents and other authority figures wanted me to do and say and if I did so satisfactorily then I would be okay. “Okay”? What did pleasing others have to do with me being “okay”? Well it meant then that I would not get a spanking, or for example in the 3rd grade it meant that my teacher would “let” me stay after class to help her clean the blackboard and the erasers. Oh boy! It meant that maybe, just maybe… Dennis Mason (my girlfriend’s brother) would really like me one day and not just be polite to me.
Unfortunately we are taught as children to look for validation outside of ourselves. We are taught that we deserve to be loved “if” we clean up our rooms, or “if” we get good grades or “if” we dress properly and speak properly. No one ever said, don’t do this or that, unless YOU want to. No one said, just do what makes you happy, not what makes me happy. Really, no one said that to me. I was in my forties before someone finally told me that it was in my best interest to love ME, and yes even then I had to be told.
Now you might ask why I had to be told that at that late stage in my life. I think that most of us even now, run around acting out with the mind-set we had during our youth. Many of our fears and the resultant behavior come from un-resolved issues from childhood. We act the same way that we did when we were 4 and 5 years old or even younger and we don’t realize it. I know that I have been so out of control in arguments with my former husbands that I couldn’t even begin to tell you where all that emotion and whining and fear and sadness was coming from. Whatever they did really wasn’t all that deep!
What happens is that when we are children and we are wounded in any one of a myriad of ways… we get a groove dug in our psyche. The next time that we get a similar wound, the groove gets deeper, then again, and again the groove gets deeper and deeper and deeper. When we grow up, if that groove has not been dealt with, healed, smoothed over, we will react in exactly the same way that we did when we were young and what that looked like for a child, is not a pretty sight on an adult (trust me…I know!).
For example it could be something as simple as I wake up as a baby and am standing up in my crib awaiting the arrival of my life-line, my mother. She however is next door chatting with the neighbor and helping her to hang her laundry on the line (I know, I am telling my age with that example). She is only gone 10 minutes, and doesn’t hear me crying. My infantile psyche registers that as abandonment, and Abandonment Groove #1 is dug. The next time it happens I am on the floor and I want to be picked up. Mom is on the phone and though she hears me and if fact sees me, she has to finish her call with a bill collector so she ignores me…Abandonment Groove # 2 is dug.
Can you imagine how many such grooves are dug before we become adults? How many “Abandonment”, “Rejection”, “Not Good Enough” grooves get dug during the course of just our first 10 years of life? “Girlfriends don’t want to come play with me grooves”, “Daddy wants to watch the game and not talk to me grooves”, “Teacher ignores my hand that is waving widely to answer a question groove”, “The cute boy in the orchestra with me doesn’t know I exist groove”, “None of my friends are in the cafeteria to sit with me groove” and on and on.
Fast forward 30 years and my husband wants to watch the game and doesn’t want to talk to me and my 5 year-old psyche shows up and shows out just like it did wayyyy back when it first happened! I either scream or shout (if that was allowed in my home as a child) or I pout and withdraw, taking my “toys” which are now mostly represented by my love, affection, (and of course sexual favors) home.
So what is a GROWN UP to do? Surely we don’t intend for our 5 year-old to show up today. Sometimes I just couldn’t understand myself why I was acting the way I was…it was almost like I was possessed!! Someone had invaded my body and was making me act like a madwoman! But who was doing that was my inner-child. She had un-resolved issues and was determined to get them resolved in one relationship or the other!
What we must do is to learn to re-parent ourselves. We must give ourselves the love that we didn’t get as children. None of us got all the love we wanted as children. Not because our parents intentionally withheld it, but because the level of our desire for constant attention (which we translated as love) was impossible for any parent to live up to. Our juvenile minds took that reality the wrong way. Now that is so for those of us that had great parents, yet you know that there are many, many others who indeed had parents that were not even trying to do the right thing. Many parents had so many of their own wounds that they didn’t have what was necessary to give us the bare minimum of love and attention. The adult children of such parents might best be served by getting some form of professional assistance to heal their childhood wounds.
The rest of us can begin by learning all we can about self-love. We MUST learn to demonstrate self-love because we get what we ARE. If we don’t love us, NO one else will love us. Our life is a mirror reflection of who we are. So if my boss is mean and trifling, it is only a reflection of me being mean and trifling and usually it means that I am mean and trifling, to myself as much as to others. If my spouse takes me for granted and doesn’t value me, then it is a reflection of how I take me for granted and don’t value me.
One Christmas, of my entire family, my then husband, daughter, two adopted children and two step-sons (all teens), no one bought me as much as a Christmas card. Not a one of them. Of course I had gotten each of them gifts, had orchestrated the purchase of the Christmas tree and its decoration, and the decoration of the house, had shopped for and cooked the Christmas meal replete with our traditional duck and all the trimmings, cakes and pies and so forth and yet for me, I got…NADA!! I was such a doormat that it took me a week to realize how badly I had been dissed! I remember sitting out in the car for hours on New Year’s Eve crying about how un-loved I was. Knowing what I know now, I can say that that entire experience was a divine eye opening event that was a necessary step to begin my healing process. When we learn to love ourselves, the people in our lives will have to love us too because they are always a reflection of what is going on inside of us. I didn’t love me then, didn’t care about what made me happy, and it was reflected in the way my family treated me. It wasn’t there fault. It wasn’t my “fault” either, but I was responsible for it.
So how does one “love” oneself? There are books and books written on the subject and of the many techniques espoused, some will work for you and others will not, but the first step to healing is always awareness. You must first realize that you don’t love yourself and then you can look for ways to correct that.
My awareness came after my 2nd divorce. Still looking for love in all the wrong places I met a married man in Miami (a minister no less, with 5 children! Lawdy!!) I fell head over heals in desire for this guy. We began a torrid email affair that lasted for months. One day I decided to discuss this with my Science of Mind minister and I said to her that I didn’t know why this guy liked me. After all he was 7 years younger than me and he was so handsome and he had graduated from Yale and…and… and she stopped me in mid-sentence and asked me if I had heard what I was saying about myself. Of course I hadn’t heard what I was saying about myself and now feel blessed that she did! She asked me if I had heard of Louise Hay’s work and if not I needed to run to the bookstore to get her book You Can Heal Your Life, and read it. I did and it put me on a path to self-recovery that I am eternally grateful for. (By the way once I realized the purpose that the “married minister” served in my life, I was able to drop him like a hot potato.)
I cannot say that I have been a self-loving machine ever since then or even that I am totally there now. My self-loathing grooves were very deep. I feel often like I take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. I know that the biggest mission I have is to stop looking for love outside of myself…yet still…at 53…after studying spirituality for years… I still yearn for the love of a man. As recently as this year I was the Queen of Internet dating. Even my friends thought that was nuts, but I was (and still am) convinced that it didn’t make a difference where I met a guy, online or in the mall…I just needed to meet “HIM”. Since I work from home and just changed cities, I had lots of justification for dating online, yet the deal wasn’t really where I was looking, but THAT I was looking. Still working on accepting that I must BE the love that I seek…
I wish I could say that I am really thrilled being mate-less. I am not, yet I do prefer it to being in a bad relationship and I am determined not to settle for any more of those. I do love myself enough to be just fine dining alone, going to a movie alone, traveling alone or with girlfriends, and in general entertaining myself. I prefer MY own company to that of anyone that takes me for granted or plays with my affections.
I realize now that learning all of this is a life-long process and that these lessons are ones that I chose to explore in this lifetime so I don’t beat myself up anymore when I find myself in self-sabotaging situations and/or behavior. I know that learning to forgive myself and others is a big part of why I came to the planet. Meanwhile I have loved myself enough to attract a slew of good friends a great career with amazing co-workers and now I am building an important coaching/teaching practice with wonderful clients and students. Love is all around me and I am soaking it up every single day. I wish the same for you!!