Post by Della Wren on Mar 2, 2023 13:32:19 GMT -6
Self-discovery causes fear in a lot of people. They are very afraid of what they are going to find when they go looking.
Here's the answer: Everything you already knew.
All those crappy choices you made, all those mistakes you made, all the bad things you think you did you already know about. Those events aren't a surprise to you. You were present for them. When you go digging through them you aren't going to find anything new there. What you will find is a new perspective around them. You will find a new way to see them.
What you won't find is that you're an awful human being and that you don't deserve to be happy. What you won't find is that you're worthless or not good enough or not deserving enough. Those things are human ego projections of pain and they aren't true, ever. When you tell yourself those things, you're projecting the pain at yourself. You become your own internal worst enemy.
I could have put this thread in Acceptance or even Healing the Pain because it all goes together. When we go on this self-discovery journey what we're trying to do is find a way to understand ourselves so that we don't have to beat ourselves up. We want to understand the pain. We're going for clarity. There is truth in the pain. There is a reason why you made those choices and did those things. Your job is to go find those reasons.
For myself, when I went looking back on all the dumb shit that I'd done, I found a girl that didn't think she could make her own choices. I found a girl who felt trapped in making other people happy. I found a girl who had no self-confidence at all. So, when I looked back at her and compared the choices she made to the wounds that she had, I understood why she made those choices. Anybody that felt the way she did would have also made similar choices. The pain made the whole thing make sense. I didn't need to victimize her or villainize her for doing something wrong. I was able to accept that she was just doing the best that she could.
How does this affect your relationship with yourself?
When you look back at the pain and you instead hate yourself for what you did or didn't do, you pull back from your relationship with yourself. You divorce from yourself in a lot of cases. It makes the self-discovery process almost impossible. You can't get there from there because anything you find now just becomes a weapon to use against yourself.
What I want to offer you is this:
You did the best you could from where you were. It's easy to look back now and know what you should have done. It's easy to look back now and see the better path or a different route. Yes, even I can do that. But from where you were then you didn't see that better route. You didn't have the better option in front of you. You're beating yourself up for what you didn't know and couldn't do. That's not fair to your younger self. That's not fair to the person that you were.
Let yourself off the hook. You weren't bad, you were in pain. Learn to see the difference. Learn to see what pain causes and how it affects your behavior and choices. Your pain made you do things that you don't like, but your pain is also the reason you decided to heal. Without the pain you wouldn't be here now. Without the pain I wouldn't be here now.
The pain caused you to make one very good choice, one life-altering choice - to heal yourself. See the power in that choice. You deserve to be able to heal, but the only way you can do that is by giving yourself permission to be human and be in pain. You have to allow your younger self the opportunity to learn too because that's all they were doing. They were learning and growing just like you are now. Eventually, they learned that healing was the way forward. That's a massive step. Don't discount it.
Your pain brought you to it and that means that your pain also became the best thing that ever happened to you because it taught who you were and who you most definitely were not.
Be proud of yourself. You got this far didn't you? Keep going.
Love to all.
Della
Here's the answer: Everything you already knew.
All those crappy choices you made, all those mistakes you made, all the bad things you think you did you already know about. Those events aren't a surprise to you. You were present for them. When you go digging through them you aren't going to find anything new there. What you will find is a new perspective around them. You will find a new way to see them.
What you won't find is that you're an awful human being and that you don't deserve to be happy. What you won't find is that you're worthless or not good enough or not deserving enough. Those things are human ego projections of pain and they aren't true, ever. When you tell yourself those things, you're projecting the pain at yourself. You become your own internal worst enemy.
I could have put this thread in Acceptance or even Healing the Pain because it all goes together. When we go on this self-discovery journey what we're trying to do is find a way to understand ourselves so that we don't have to beat ourselves up. We want to understand the pain. We're going for clarity. There is truth in the pain. There is a reason why you made those choices and did those things. Your job is to go find those reasons.
For myself, when I went looking back on all the dumb shit that I'd done, I found a girl that didn't think she could make her own choices. I found a girl who felt trapped in making other people happy. I found a girl who had no self-confidence at all. So, when I looked back at her and compared the choices she made to the wounds that she had, I understood why she made those choices. Anybody that felt the way she did would have also made similar choices. The pain made the whole thing make sense. I didn't need to victimize her or villainize her for doing something wrong. I was able to accept that she was just doing the best that she could.
How does this affect your relationship with yourself?
When you look back at the pain and you instead hate yourself for what you did or didn't do, you pull back from your relationship with yourself. You divorce from yourself in a lot of cases. It makes the self-discovery process almost impossible. You can't get there from there because anything you find now just becomes a weapon to use against yourself.
What I want to offer you is this:
You did the best you could from where you were. It's easy to look back now and know what you should have done. It's easy to look back now and see the better path or a different route. Yes, even I can do that. But from where you were then you didn't see that better route. You didn't have the better option in front of you. You're beating yourself up for what you didn't know and couldn't do. That's not fair to your younger self. That's not fair to the person that you were.
Let yourself off the hook. You weren't bad, you were in pain. Learn to see the difference. Learn to see what pain causes and how it affects your behavior and choices. Your pain made you do things that you don't like, but your pain is also the reason you decided to heal. Without the pain you wouldn't be here now. Without the pain I wouldn't be here now.
The pain caused you to make one very good choice, one life-altering choice - to heal yourself. See the power in that choice. You deserve to be able to heal, but the only way you can do that is by giving yourself permission to be human and be in pain. You have to allow your younger self the opportunity to learn too because that's all they were doing. They were learning and growing just like you are now. Eventually, they learned that healing was the way forward. That's a massive step. Don't discount it.
Your pain brought you to it and that means that your pain also became the best thing that ever happened to you because it taught who you were and who you most definitely were not.
Be proud of yourself. You got this far didn't you? Keep going.
Love to all.
Della