Month: December 2014

I know how it feels to have people I care about (family and friends) choose to stay in abusive relationships.  From the outside looking in the view for those of us who appreciate that love does not abuse, use, control or prevent someone from interacting with his/her family and other people is so clear.  Yet if we have ever been on the inside looking out then we also appreciate what a challenge it is to step away from a situation when we believe the person hurting us loves us and someday will change. We know what it is like to lack self-respect, self-worth, and self-love.

No matter how much we want to help someone see the truth of his or her situation we cannot. No matter how much we love them our love is not powerful enough to cause other people to wake up to how they are allowing themselves to be treated. The only love powerful enough to cause someone to walk away from abuse is self-love.

While we cannot make other people love themselves we sure can show them what it looks like.  We can be examples that what they truly want, deep within their heart and beyond the fear, is really possible for them too.

A big misconception we have is that it is possible, and often our duty, to love someone more than we love ourselves.  I was raised to believe this.  I was supposed to love a religious savior, or God, or another person more than myself. So I spent much of my life attempting to do this and I failed miserably.

Why? Because love is more than affection or caring for someone or something; love is behavior.  To love is to be kind, patient, forgiving, loyal, honest, etc.

It is only possible to be forgiving with another when I forgive myself first.  It is only possible to be honest with another if I am honest with myself first.  It is only possible to give patience, loyalty, and kindness to someone else when those qualities are first within me to give.

Loving ourselves first is NOT selfish as some of us are taught to believe.  Giving the behaviors of love to ourselves, making them a real and consistent part of our everyday interactions, is the only way we can give love to another.

Often I am contacted by people who have been left in relationship and they are desperate to get the person back.  Why? If someone does not want to be with me why would I want to force them to?

Love is not about coercing someone into something they do not want to do.  Love is setting someone free if that is what he or she wants even if they did make a promise to stay.

Just because we are left does not mean we are not good enough. It simply means he or she was not the right person for us. Our self-love and respect depends on accepting that when someone leaves, even if that is for another person, it is for the best, even if we cannot in the present moment see how that can be true. One day we will.

For twenty two years I was a slave to cigarettes. Some days I smoked two packs. Back then it was like setting a $5 bill a day on fire. Not to mention the constant coughing, bad breath, horrible smelling clothing, reoccurring bronchitis, and inability to walk up a flight of stairs without having to rest. I was only in my early forties and I was terrified of dying. Yet, day after day, year after year, I continued to justify smoking. Just like any addiction, smoking was my way of stuffing emotional pain so with each inhale I sucked in more self-hatred, denial, and disappointment.

While I hated being under the control of a tiny white tube of tobacco, I believed I was too weak-willed to quit. Until one day it hit me. I was NOT weak at all. I was strong for having successfully survived all of the crap life had thrown at me. No, I was just scared of what life would be like and who I would be without the emotional crutch I’d used for over two decades.

Accepting the fact I was using cigarettes to avoid opening up to loving and respecting myself, was the game-changing “aha.”  The truth was that no matter how painful my life had been, intentionally continuing to hurt myself was even more painful and disappointing. A little over ten years ago, at 9 p.m. on a Sunday evening, I put cigarettes down for good.

When we finally decided to love ourselves enough to do whatever it takes to accomplish a goal we will succeed.  It begins with an intentional choice to stop allowing something to control us and we start controlling ourselves.