Self Acceptance

“The wounds of the past have sacrificed the heart. The mind has cramped closed. The body has entrophied in hard-bellied distrust. But the feeling of loss, and being lost, eventually gets our attention and we see that no one can make us happy but us. And we begin to take responsibility. We begin to build the capacity to respond instead of react. And we focus on our resistance and recognize that relationship is work on ourselves. Taking “the whole catastrophe of relationship” into your merciful heart and investigative mind so that the next one will not be a repeat of the last one.” – Stephen and Ondrea Levine

When I was still trying to save an unsalvageable marriage, my counselor told me “your relationship is action and reaction.” I had no idea what it meant, but later on I was to see that we did react and not respond to everything the other did.

There was so much I pushed out and pushed away. I was unable to take the issues and the faults and my own issues into my “merciful heart.” I was too busy judging and being judged.

I was the walking wounded. I was so cut off from myself because of past wounds and betrayals. I could not soften up or trust anyone, let alone myself. I was hard and bitter and played out my inner torment in relationships for quite a number of years.

The difference between being the hard-bellied distrusting person and the open person who found soft love, was a lot of stepping back and stepping away from judgment.

I stopped judging myself harshly and stopped allowing others to do the same. I had my teachers, my shoot-straight-from-the-hip teachers who taught me about me, but they did not judge. They were straight up and sometimes harsh, but never cruel.

I learned to step back, to observe, to see what I was doing in my interaction with others. I learned to take responsibility for me, to soften to me and eventually to others…to stop cutting myself off from myself…the way others had…to stop disdaining myself as others had…to stop hiding the parts of me I thought others might find offensive.

I eventually accepted all of me…and took responsibility and softened my heart.

To get to this place I had to do a lot of journaling, a lot of introspection, a lot of being there for me during the quiet times that I was not used to.

Instead of “acting and reacting” to outside criticism…instead of trying to be what you and you and you and you wanted me to be, I learned to sit quietly and think, honestly and openly, what about me needed to change to be happier with myself, to be happier in the world, to be happier in my relationships.

I worked on it for me..I was able to come to terms with things I didn’t like that needed to change and things I didn’t particularly like that probably wouldn’t change any time soon. For some of the latter I found people who didn’t find it too tough for accept. I stopped shoulding all over myself and stopped trying to will myself to change things that were never going to change.

I was born into one family and raised in another. In the family I grew up in, it was obvious a lot of times that I did not have the innate whatevers they had. My “stuff” came from another set of genes. My adoptive mother was a finished carpenter, self-taught, and a perfectionist so her work was superb. I couldn’t hang a picture right and she would scream at me for my crooked eye or crooked hand or whatever.

When I “met” my birth mother in my 30s she joked that she couldn’t hang a picture straight. Although it was a throw away line for her, it was an astonishing moment for me. After knowing her a while I could see that so many of the things my adoptive family disdained about me came from my biological family. So many of those things I had to “take back” and own about myself. It was born into me…and even if I didn’t like them, I could no longer disown them.

Disown. Disown is a big thing for me. I felt as if my birth mother had disowned me and in being like her, my adoptive family disowned me. What I learned to do, growing up, was to disown myself. A person so vile that her own mother could not love her/keep her! And a person so different from her adoptive family that they could not love her! Horrible being!

I disowned myself SO MUCH for so many years. As others had rejected me, I rejected myself. Worthless. Useless. Of NO value! The families said so…. I had to learn to reclaim myself. To take myself back from the scrap heap and brush myself off and said, “Maybe no one else wants me, but I’m okay for me!” I couldn’t continue to treat myself the way others had. It wasn’t working.

The self-talk became powerful. The refusal to cut myself off whenever I did something wrong or made a mistake. Finding the balance between recognizing what needed to change and changing it and overcoming the self-denigration that had become second nature.

It takes self-judgment to figure out what needs to change. It takes self-inventory and looking at a messy pile and figuiring out what to keep and what to let go. There are many things about me that needed to change but I had to learn to say, “Okay this needs to change because it is harming me.” not “I need to change because I suck as a human being and have no business even breathing the same air as the rest of humanity.”

I had to soften my heart toward myself and when I saw something that needed changing, take the judgment out of it and just change it. Stop thinking I was the only person in the world who had this character flaw or issue.

It required a lot of time alone…a lot of time to quiet the stormy mind and the whirling dervish within…a lot of time to observe myself, my thoughts, my actions and my feelings…I had to give myself time to heal and to be replenished by me and only me…after I took these steps to melt my own heart and take down my own walls, I found my way to self acceptance.