For yourself…by yourself.
Hello 👋,
How are you? I hope you’ve had a great weekend filled with things that made you happy, and sparked some joy. And I hope that you are able to enter the new week with a clear mind and some level of optimism.
“The axe forgets but the tree remembers.”
How often have you heard or thought about this phrase or some variant of it used when we talk about bad experiences we’ve had with people in the past and the impact of their actions whether deliberate or not and how it stays with us way after. A few times? Quite often? But how do we process how we have been that person for ourselves? How we hurt our own selves?
There’s a lot of takes and opinions about how we should act, deal with it or get it together at some point when others hurt us, but how often do we get to hear how to deal with how we have treated ourselves?
I wrote about my struggles with self-loathing in an earlier post, I believe this has improved greatly. I have moved from self-loathing to begrudgingly accepting parts of myself while working on the other parts that still suffer from the consequences of my actions against myself.
Self-abandonment is a strange concept and comes from a host of different places, from a place of wanting to be accepted, wanting to avoid conflicts, not knowing better or learning ways to navigate life and as a response to trauma, anxiety or a troubled upbringing. At the point where we are self-abandoning, regardless of the cause, whether it’s situational or as a result of deep rooted issues, it’s hard to see, and the longer it goes on, the more damaging it is, not only to ourselves but to the people around us too.
One thing I have learned from experience is when we don’t listen to ourselves and bury ourselves in a pattern of putting everyone and everything else first, we reach a point where the mind revolts knowing that something wrong is being done to it and needs to take back control-this unfortunately leads to a series of resentment, resenting ourselves and the people we have abandoned ourselves for and might have taken advantage of us along the way or benefited from this pattern.
How then do we break away from the pattern? To be honest, I don’t have the answers, but I know it should be similar to how we attempt to forgive others when we’ve been hurt- acknowledging what has been done. When we start with acknowledgment, we recognize the actions that has led us to where we are, we take responsibility for our role whether it was conscious or not, or a coping mechanism we’ve developed as some sort of response to unpleasant past experiences. We recognize what led us here, and make a commitment to trusting and taking care of our selves.
It’s going to be hard, there’ll be a lot of guilt around how making such a change might make us and the people around us feel-but that will pass, I think. There will probably be some major backsliding every now and then, self-abandonment didn’t magically start in a day and there’s no quick and easy fix to what has probably become your identity. So, when falling back into the familiar pattern seems like an easy option, I hope that we remember that when we are committed to unlearning and developing compassion for ourselves we are learning to build a foundation of healthy boundaries and consequently healthy relationships with ourselves and others around us.
This week, I leave you with the word of a famous writer: “Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others”.
I hope you have a great week and have things to look forward to, no matter how little they might be.
With love,
— OMS.