Each week I choose one of your questions and do my best to offer guidance and support to help you along your journey. I also encourage everyone who is reading this to offer their words of wisdom as well by leaving a comment at the end. Please click here to learn more about this feature.

Here is this week’s question (sent anonymously):

How do you learn how to love yourself when everyone you ever loved has put you down?

First, I want to share a bit of the what I know about this reader to help each of us be able to offer guidance for her. She is a healer, and she offers guidance to her clients. As is so often the case with those of us in the healing fields, we have a gift of helping others, but it isn’t always as easy for us to turn our gift back onto ourselves for inner healing.This person grew up with a father who would call her names with regard to her weight. She never confronted him, and she ended up dating men throughout her life who would also criticize her and treat her poorly. She ended up leaving the last relationship after the birth of her daughter – she didn’t want to continue the cycle of abuse.

Okay, what I would first like to say to you is that I thank you for being vulnerable enough to ask this question. I would also like to say that I applaud you for leaving your relationship. This tells me that you DO love yourself! You DO have enough self love to know that you deserve better than that. You DO know deep within that you are lovable, you deserve love, and you are worth being treated with respect. So bravo for that!

And then I want to acknowledge that you are definitely not alone in your journey back to self love. I truly believe that this is the core of our existence. I believe that our main lesson here on Earth is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally, treat ourselves kindly, and get back to our soul – which is made of pure love.

And so the question becomes – how do we do that?

You have taken the first step by acknowledging that you are worthy of self esteem and love, which is huge.

We are all born with our self esteem intact. And then events occur in our lives that chip away at it little by little – a careless word said here, an outrage against you there…and after many years of this happening, if we aren’t aware of this we wake up one day and realize that our self esteem is minimal. And we can usually pinpoint a moment as a child where your self esteem took a big hit. Sometimes this hit can be so big that it can set the path for your entire life.

I wonder if you would consider doing an exercise with me. Try to imagine the moment where you first remember feeling badly about yourself. Go back as far as you can go. How old were you? What was happening? Who was involved? What exactly was said? How did it make you feel? How did you react?

And now imagine going back to that event and comforting the child that you were then. Tell yourself that it wasn’t your fault. What would you say to this part of you? How would you comfort yourself? Realize that you were just a child – anything that happened then or was said then or made you feel badly then had absolutely nothing at all do to with you. It had everything to do with the person who said it to you. It was their baggage – not yours.

And then imagine that you are holding a remote control, and you are able to hit the fast forward button to view your entire life on a big screen – just fast enough so that you can see the major events. Think about the event that you just imagined and how the effects of it have played out in each moment of your life from then on.

So for you, your father called you names and made fun of you from a young age. Therefore, you believed that there was something wrong with you. You believed that on some level, it was okay for others to put you own and make fun of you as well. And so you attracted these people into your life – your low self esteem was a magnet for the type of person who likes to keep people inferior.

So now imagine that you are holding an empty suitcase. And as you hit the rewind button on your remote control, each time you see an event that occurred in your life that wasn’t coming from a place of self love, imagine that you are putting that event into the suitcase. Continue doing this until you are all the way back to the very first event. Hopefully your suitcase is very full by now. And hopefully you realize that you no longer need to carry this weight with you. You can either give it back to the person who started it all, or you can simply throw it away. Start fresh.

Do you feel lighter?

Now you get to decide what to put into your suitcase! You can fill it with love; pats on the back; positive affirmations; and moments in your life where you felt loved, cherished, amazing, beautiful, happy, smart, and any other word that makes you feel good.

You are free! And you get to start building yourself up and loving yourself the way you want to be loved. You have allowed this event that happened when you were a child to steer your entire life thus far. But because you are aware of this, you can now choose to steer your life in a completely different direction. You are in the driver’s seat – you get to decide what goes in your suitcase.

I am so excited for you – you are on an amazing journey!

***

For everyone who is reading, please offer your words of wisdom as well! Let’s all chime in and offer guidance and support for this brave soul who opened themselves up by asking for help!

I would love to answer your question in next’s week’s post!
Please email your question to: info@soulfuljournals.com. (Please put “Ask Away” in the subject line.)

If your question is chosen for that Friday’s feature, I will let you know if I need any additional information. It’s completely up to you if you would like your question to be anonymous or public. If you would like to keep it anonymous, please make sure to leave out any identifying details.