Finding Our Way Onto The Self Love Path

Hello Love!

Welcome to part three of this monster of a post 😉

If you've not done so yet, you can read

Part One Here

Part Two Here

Today let's dive into our last few reasons why we tend to resist self love, and how we can start to move THROUGH that resistance into this new path.

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We've got the fact that we HAVE been told how horrible, inadequate and pathetic we are, and have experienced painful rejection and the deep fear that comes with this rejection in our actual lives without being given the tools of self resourcing and seeing that we can still be ok. Again remember that in the codependent reality of our childhoods, when our nervous system and pattern recognizing brains were being programmed, we DID rely upon the approval of those around us for survival. We did need to be loved, understood, cared for and provided for by those around us. We couldn’t identify our own needs. We couldn’t fulfill our own desires and give ourselves what we needed when we needed it. For the first several years of our lives, we were having our basic understandings of how the world functions laid down in our bodies and minds. What we were experiencing and learning was that approval = survival. We weren’t learning how to interact with real reality in a one to one way. We weren’t learning how to identify our needs or how to get those needs met in an empowered way. Rather, our caregivers had to be acutely attuned to us, figuring out from our grunts, facial expressions, body movements and other non-verbal cues what was going on with us at any given time in order to offer us relief from pain and access to pleasure.

As we grew, we still didn’t have the capacity to figure out what was going on inside of us and around us, and how this translated to what we needed to do in real reality to be happy and fulfilled. Instead we were learning how to behave, how to express, how to move and speak so that our caregivers would give us what we needed.

Over time we would have slowly learned how to identify things like hunger or needing to go to the bathroom and how to ask for these things directly - but by that time, the idea that the WAY to getting what we wanted and needed was through behaving in the right ways so that our caregivers would understand us and give us what we wanted had been firmly ingrained.

We also didn’t have the capacity to understand that our caregivers and those around us were simply people who had their own lives, feelings and reasons for doing things. In our early lives, we were deeply self obsessed (in a healthy way! We needed to be in order to learn how to operate in these complex bodies and the complex world around us).

This meant that we perceived that every pain we were in that our caregivers didn’t fix, that ever pleasure we wanted that our caregivers didn’t provide, every amount of rejection or expectation that was placed on us was BECAUSE OF US and for a good reason. We believed that our caregivers had access to EVERYTHING - and thus if they weren’t giving us something, it was because we were doing something wrong. We believed for the most part that our caregivers were RIGHT about everything - because we didn’t have the awareness or capacity to question them. We believed that if they were rejecting us for some reason, that whatever they were rejecting was objectively bad. We believed that if we were behaving in some way and this wasn’t leading our caregivers to rescue us from pain or give us pleasure that this was because we were doing something wrong. If our caregivers were short with us, abandoned us, were not interested in something that we were - we interpreted ALL of this as being something deeply wrong with US - and as being parts of self that were now DANGEROUS because they were leading to our source of all things to pull away. 

To us at the time, they were all knowing and had access to ALL the resources we needed.

Thus, any part of ourselves that was rejected by our caregivers would have felt like an existential threat to us - because these parts were separating us from our point of access.

We would have learned early on that anything that got us rejected, shamed, abandoned, scolded, OR that were not loved and appreciated by our caregivers were bad and needed to be eradicated or fixed in some way.

Whether we were overtly told/shown that parts of self were bad via shaming, scolding and blaming or covertly shown that parts of self were bad via being ignored or abandoned - we learned deep in our BODIES that these parts were parts we had to change in some way otherwise we were at risk of death.

This is a DEEP program.

The idea that rejection and abandonment = death is not something we should take lightly as adults.

At the same time, we have to understand that we could easily have been misinterpreting our caregivers actions and expectations, believing that we were being rejected and abandoned for things that in real reality, we weren’t. Many of us are going to realize that so many of the expectations we have of ourselves (that many of us aren’t even consciously aware we have) weren’t actually expectations our caregivers had of us - but rather were us trying to make sense of their behavior in the only ways we knew how - by interpreting what they were doing as having something specifically to do with US.

For instance if our caregivers had a headache often, and constantly snapped at us for making loud noises, we may have learned deep in our bodies that being LOUD and taking up space was inherently BAD and WRONG. Our bodies would have developed a deep fear around expressing in these ways, and our minds would have come up with all sorts of stories around why being loud was rude, unnecessary, wrong and shameful in order to make this suppression of our natural expression make sense. We may have started to believe that we were inherently shameful for being ‘so loud’. We may have started to believe that our expression, our natural expression, was fundamentally wrong and that we needed to be continually on top of ourselves. We may have been literally completely NORMAL and HEALTHY in our expression, but due to being told over and over again that we needed to be quiet, would have started to develop a belief that we were obnoxious, loud and annoying, and that these were things we HAD to stifle in ourselves.

We would have come up with a whole bunch of stories about who and what we were that were false in order to make the rejection make sense - and then carried those stories with us into adulthood where we would still feel shame over natural expression and have a false belief about ourselves all due to something that wasn’t really about us at all.

In real reality, being loud isn’t inherently bad or wrong in any way - it was just something that bothered our caregiver in times when they were in pain.

It had nothing to do with us.

The rejection we experienced from being loud when they had a headache wasn’t actually because being loud is bad, or because we are naturally too loud of obnoxious - it was 100% because they needed silence to feel good and any interruption to that silence made them feel bad - and rather than them learning to deal with that or even rather than them explaining this to us - we were told to be quiet and their irritation was taken to mean that we were doing something wrong.

Most of us in our adulthoods still feel incredibly vulnerable to the opinions, thoughts, beliefs and ideas of those around us, and many of us are still continually trying to live up to the expectations of our caregivers - whether we know it or not.

SO many of the things we reject in ourselves and believe to be bad aren’t bad at all in real reality - meaning they don’t actually cause harm or hinder growth in any way. Rather, they were just things our caregivers didn’t like, didn’t understand or reacted to in a way that we interpreted as rejection and abandonment of some other reason. We never learned that in adulthood, we are no longer fully dependent upon others to live. We no longer rely upon being understood, loved, accepted and included by everyone around us in order to get our needs met. We now, as adults, can find our own food, figure out how to make ourselves comfortable, can navigate being rejected by one person or a group of people via finding new people or supporting ourselves. Now as adults, we are mobile. We have agency. We can be rejected and still be ok.

But again, in our BODIES this doesn’t feel like the truth.

At the same time, our bodies are so programmed to what our caregivers expected/what we perceived our caregivers were expecting - that to us this IS reality.

Many of us have never deeply looked at the parts of ourselves we feel shame about, or at the reasons why we feel we must become this or that. Rather they are simply ‘assumed’ to be bad and our judgements of them obviously true. We instinctively reject parts of self and believe we HAVE to become certain things, and our bodies recoil any time we veer from that path - because again to our bodies being these things/not being these things = rejection which = abandonment which = not being understood = not having provision = death. Even if we have a whole new social circle in our adulthood that believes totally different things that our caregivers did - we may still have trouble shifting our ways of being to match our new circumstances, and if we do shift we may continually feel like we’re doing something ‘wrong’.

The shame and guilt we feel is a self protective mechanism.

This is how we kept ourselves in line and memorized the behaviors we needed to embody/reject in order to be accepted and thus cared for by our caregivers.

It’s a huge web for most of us, and again the body is going to instinctively reject any attempt to dive deep into what’s going on with our shame and guilt, any attempt to stray from our conditioning - because to our bodies this means DEATH. It takes a lot of work to reprogram the nervous system and our patterns of what is and isn’t ok. And the first step is realizing that all those instinctual relations we have to rejecting, shaming, blaming and abandoning ourselves are not coming from real reality showing us that these parts are actually wrong and bad - but instead are coming from a nervous system that learned that this is what was expected in our households where we were dependent.

Learning that we are now adults who can be rejected and be ok, is a HUGE shift.

Even seeing this is hard - most of us still feel like if we were to be our true selves our partners, friends, bosses and coworkers would abandon and reject us - and that this would be the end of the world. We don’t see that even if this happens, we still have agency. We don’t see that rejection in adulthood is nothing like rejection in childhood. It all still feels the same to us. So we never question it and live our whole lives like this is REALITY when it is in fact, a program. It’s true that we need some acceptance and understanding - but again in adulthood it’s a totally different ballgame. We need it FAR less than we think, and as adults we can be rejected by certain people or groups and find new people or groups to replace them.

We’re not as trapped and immobilized as we were. We have so much more agency now. So this isn’t about believing we can be 100% independent but it is about understanding that we need approval and acceptance so much LESS than we did as children.

This Path Is So Different From Consensus Reality As To Be Unrecognizable:

The truth is, when most of us get onto the self love path, when we REALLY get onto the self love path, we ARE going to realize that a whole bunch of things we’ve been trying to force ourselves to do/be (that we were indoctrinated into believing we had to do/be in order to be good/successful) are things that simply HURT. 

We’re going to come to see that all of our scapegoats, self sabotage, addictive and stimulating behaviors aren’t rooted in self hate/ignorance/weakness - but rather are rooted in a desire to meet the needs we have that aren’t being met in healthy ways (due to being misunderstood or rejected) or are tools we’re using to COPE with a life that feels TERRIBLE - no matter how convinced we are of it’s ‘rightness’. We’re hurting due to having been rejected, never having been allowed to grow parts of self that are genuine to us (which is incredibly painful) and because we’ve developed identities and perceptions of self that are negative purely because we didn’t fit into the expectations of those around us OR because we interpreted the actions of those around us as meaning things about us that they didn’t mean. We’re all mixed up inside, and who we think we need to be to get love is opposed to who we actually are.

We’re going to come to see that so much of what we’re expecting ourselves to do and be, causes us deep amounts of PAIN because they simply don’t align with what’s healthy for us as an individual, or what’s healthy for a human in general. We’re going to come face to face with all the pain we’ve experienced living lives where we weren’t understood, seen, validated or supported in our growth. 

We’re going to come to see that many of our FOUNDATIONS for what we believe to be good, right, the way to success and fulfillment - simply aren’t. That our rules for life, the programs we were handed, the patterns we have built into our bodies at this point, aren’t ‘right’ - in the sense that they don’t align with real reality. Aren’t really TRUE. We’re going to come face to face with the fact that in many of our more vulnerable times we weren’t safe. We weren’t being seen by our caregivers. We weren’t being given what we needed. 

We’re going to realize that SO much of what we reject, hate and feel shame about within ourselves are not actually BAD parts, but parts that got rejected by the world around us. That so much of what we’ve been feeling badly about for our whole lives aren’t actually shameful, wrong, bad or harmful in REAL reality - rather they are simply NOT what society expects of us. We are going to come to see that that which is genuinely important to us, that which actually serves our growth, that which actually aligns with the person we ARE does get us rejected and misunderstood by those around us - and that the way forward is learning to resources ourselves so that we can own who we are and live lives that match our true values in spite of being misunderstood. Having to reconnect with parts that again, we’ve developed existential dread about - and having to figure out how to give those parts of self the ability to grow and express, even as the world around us judges us. It’s scary to own the parts our bodies believe we will DIE if we’re going to own. It’s scary to realize that we are still going to be rejected and misunderstood in our adulthoods when we start to embrace our true nature. It’s scary to see that parts of us are stuck in immaturity, and that we’re going to have to nurture and support these parts instead of expecting ourselves to be full grown adults in all areas of our lives. It’s a whole re-working of what is and isn’t safe, what is and isn’t right, what rejection means, what success means and how we define ourselves.

We’re going to realize that we need space and time to go BACK to those painful memories of being rejected, abandoned, shamed, misunderstood and abused so that we can re-witness them from an adult perspective - seeing that we were innocent and not in any way to blame. Seeing that we weren’t BAD but rather again that we were young and in need of protecting/understanding that we didn’t get. We will have to process these painful experiences in order to be able to question the assumptions we’ve had placed on us about who and what we should/shouldn’t be and do -  that we’ve been carrying forward as law. We have to re-experience our traumas from an adult perspective where we can witness that things are different NOW as an adult, and where we can LOVE these parts of self we had to reject when we were younger. We’re going to have to nurture ourselves into maturity where we weren’t nurtured by our caregivers and society. Many will have to nurture and love parts that society STILL says we should be rejecting and trying to get rid of.

This instinct to resist self love isn’t coming as any kind of ‘proof’ that you’re actually bad and need to reject yourself.

It’s coming from a nervous system that is programmed to believe that fitting in/approval from the outside = life, and rejection = death. It’s coming from all the programming that has you believing that you have to be a way that hurts, and that the way you're coping with trying to live in alignment with that lifestyle that hurts/the ways you’re ‘failing’ to live that life - are weaknesses and flaws in your character. It’s coming from the fear we ALL have around questioning our foundational assumptions/teachings about what a good life is, what is right and wrong, and what we ACTUALLY want to do and be. It’s coming up to protect you from rebelling from your conditioning and being rejected. It’s coming up to protect you from the existential crisis that will come with questioning foundations. It’s coming up as a protection from having to go back and feel all that pain, rejection, shaming, guilt and misunderstanding you experienced that would lead you to understanding what you REALLY want and need - again to just keep you SAFE via constantly trying to force you to be what was expected of you. Thus to actually accept who you are right now

THIS is why shifting to self love is so hard.

We all believe it means being stuck in pain, stuck in illness, never figuring out how to make things better. We all believe it means that we will be abandoned and rejected by everyone forever. We all believe it means that we’re going to die. We all believe we can’t figure out what the truth is, what we actually want and need and how to get it. We all doubt in our capacity to grow parts of self and have them be GOOD instead of evil. 

Switching to assuming innocence means coming up against all our conditioning and realizing that we’re going to have to figure things out for ourselves in a lot of ways. That we’re going to have to FEEL a lot more rather than relying upon intellect. That we’re going to have to question what’s been law in our lives forever.

Taking this path will lead you to a whole different kind of reality.  Not right away. Not all at once. Not in a moment or a flash.

Slowly, over time, one moment of being compassionate and curious at a time.

This is a hard shift to make, so be gentle on you.

<3