If your childhood was spent trying to survive you understand why it’s hard to love yourself. When you’re encouraged to love and believe in yourself you have greater confidence, resilience and take more chances to grow.
When you love yourself it’s easier to continue to think well of yourself even when things don’t work out. In survival mode, things going wrong is like a glitch in the security system that might allow intruders in.
In survival mode the most important thing is safety. Makes sense doesn’t it? You don’t simply switch that off.
It’s a gradual stepping from the darkness and into the light.
Step one is often the realization that you too are worthy of feeling loved and want to see how it feels. The rub is that you need to trust someone in order to experience it.
That’s the fundamental difference between someone raised in survival and someone raised in love – TRUST.
How do you decide who to trust?
Speaking from experience. You watch people and look for those who are consistently kind to others.
Yes, this will involve risk. You approach this person and introduce yourself. Mention how you’ve noticed their kindness and appreciate that there are people like them in the world.
Make a habit of this. This will spark conversations with good people who will want to get to know you and will want to hear your story.
Don’t look for people who want to bathe you in sympathy as you recount the hard times.
You want people who acknowledge your past, the real impact it had on you and believe in your ability to be more than the sum of that past.
Those people are out there and you know it, I’m one of them, and you know it.
For years I wouldn’t trust anyone because I was convinced people wanted nothing more than to screw me over.
That was until I found myself so miserably lonely I couldn’t stand it anymore. I took the chance to trust again and it changed everything.
There is so much richness to life you close yourself off to when you close yourself off to the loving parts of yourself. That’s the price of choosing safety at the expense of love.
