Today I am talking about what has been a lifelong battle of learning to love and accept myself. It is vulnerable for me to share what I will be sharing today, but God has guided me to share this so it may help others who also struggle this way.
I have spoken about my younger years, being bullied from about age 10 through high school in my podcast and here on my blog. At some point around the age of 12, I internalized all of it. I was already sensitive, and I was already self-conscious about my weight and my changing body at this age. The daily bullying was like an external validation of what was going on inside. After a couple years of this, I started to hate myself.
I hated getting dressed because I hated my body. I avoided the mirror because I hated seeing myself. I dreaded going to school every day. As I grew up, and as the bullying lessened and eventually stopped when I got out of school, these feelings lessened on the surface, but I had pushed them all way deep down inside.
Over time they turned into different things, like anxiety, feeling unworthy of love or happiness. I went into adulthood extremely shy. I hated social situations. I had become very introverted and closed up. I struggled to let people in because I was afraid of rejection. I wouldn’t dare let any men know if I was attracted to them for fear of rejection. No matter what my weight was I never felt good enough. In my mind, if I didn’t look like a model, which I now know nobody does because they photoshop everyone into an impossible perfection, then no man would be attracted to me. Though the daily bullying was long behind me, the imprint was still there affecting my day to day.
It wasn’t just the bullying though. As time went on, other things happened that just made it worse. Dating in my mid-late twenties and the series of rejections and everything else that comes with that. The things that happened in my marriage and the betrayal that ended it. Later there were things in my jobs, backstabbing, people taking credit for work I’d done, poor character and lack of integrity in others. It all kept reinforcing what was going on inside me. It wasn’t until much later I learned that it was because of what was inside me that this kept happening. People were just reflecting back what was inside me. This realization was a hard pill to swallow, for sure. Once I got over that, I shifted my attention to confronting it and embarked on the journey of loving and accepting myself.
So, how do you do this? It’s not like it’s as easy as just waking up one day and deciding you’re going to start loving yourself, right? It’s much more difficult and it takes a lot of different things. For starters, there are several agreements or understandings you need to come to:
- You have to start becoming aware of where it’s showing up.
- You have to be honest with yourself.
- You have to work at it.
- You have to give yourself grace.
As you can imagine this is a very personal process and journey. There is no perfect way to go about it. A critical first step, though, is to confront it and stop avoiding it. I did this for most of my adult life, just ignored it. It had become so normal I didn’t even notice it most of the time. Now I know I was getting signals all along in the form of emotional triggers, strong reactions to situations, things people said, things people did, if someone looked at me a certain way. It was all in my head, but I’d spend days feeling like shit about something I thought someone thought about me. All because I had this inner part of myself screaming at me to love her, heal her, nurture her, and most of all accept her.
I’m about a year into the deepest part of this journey. I’m coming into a new way of being right now. What I’ve learned is that I will uncover something new to heal or release. I go through the process to heal and release it. I level up, ascend to a higher version of me from that. Then, after some time, something else comes up and I go through all of it again. The good news is that after doing this a few times, you get faster and better at recognizing things and moving through them. On the flip side, sometimes I feel fatigued and wonder if I’ll ever be “done.” At this point I don’t think you ever are. Instead, you gain new levels of love and appreciation for yourself and continue to work through things. I believe it’s because with each stage of growth, you rise to a new level. You start meeting people of a different caliber or status, that’s aligning with who you have become, yet this also triggers new things or re-opens old things at times.
One of the most valuable tools I’ve found is the process I laid out in Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers. Working through that process is essential. This is also where being really, really honest with yourself is important. Another tool I’ve used is called mirror work. There are a couple ways I do this, one is to sit in front of a mirror and stare at myself, into my own eyes. Yes, it sounds strange and feels strange at first, but it helps you see yourself in a different way and it helps you connect to the deeper parts of yourself. Another thing I do is stand in front of the mirror and look at myself and say positive things about my body and myself.
What I’ve been most focused on these past months and what I find the most challenging is changing the running dialog and my knee-jerk reactions when things happen. When something comes up that is stressful or unexpected, I go right into fear, doubt, anxiety, and the story of how things don’t work out for me, and the bottom always drops. I have changed these beliefs. Most of the time I believe that things are always working out for my good, things are always ok, and I am loved and supported. It’s when that unexpected thing happens though and it’s showing me that that old story is still playing in the background, which means there’s more work to do to fully accept and love myself. This alone has been a huge breakthrough, because now I see it for what it is, and I do the work. Several months ago, I’d have been in a state for a while.
I’ve realized that I’ve been living by the old story that the bottom always drops and things don’t work out for me for the better part of 25 years; so, it’s going to take time to completely rewrite and eliminate it. I am doing this by recognizing it when it happens. Reminding myself, ‘wait, I know better than this. This is a lie and I no longer believe this story.’ Next, I remind myself of all the proof of the opposite of this story, how things have always worked out, how things are working out. From there, I go into gratitude. I start listing and saying thank you for all that is working for me, for all that is good. Finally, I verbally release the fear, doubt, unworthiness and ask God and angels to clear it out of my being and my space. I also meditate for a few minutes with 528 hz music, breathing deeply to re-center and return myself to a more calm, peaceful, loving state.
It’s a bunch of little things you do throughout the day each day. You have to start with becoming aware of it, being honest with yourself, working at it, and give yourself grace. Stop beating yourself up about how you look, what you don’t have, what you think you can’t do, where you failed, etc. How is that helping anything? Think about it; what does it accomplish to do that, except make you feel worse about yourself? The more you do this, not only the worse you feel, but the more you push the good things away and attract more of the things that validate these feelings of unworthiness, of not being good enough, of not loving yourself. So, start doing the work to love and accept yourself. It is not something you simply decide and start saying to yourself. Yes, that’s a step, but it’s taking the action to love yourself. They say relationships are work, right? Well, it’s true for the relationship you have with yourself too.
So, that is what I wanted to share with you today. I hope you will consider trying some of this, if you also struggle with loving yourself and self-acceptance. It is work, but it’s more than worth it. I can assure you with each step you take in this direction, you feel better and better. I also offer private sessions and packages, if you would like to work with me privately around this. You can reach me at rachelle@faithfitnessjoy.com or via Facebook at Rachelle Weiss.