It's been an interesting week processing things that lurked beneath the surface. Some of them were subconscious or so deeply ingrained they were taken as fact when in reality they were learned behaviors and perspectives. Ask the universe for answers and if you're ready they'll find you. This time @nineclaws showed up to point me in the right direction. Well here goes nothing...
When developing self awareness and self acceptance, a big part of the journey is learning how to love yourself and accept yourself for who you are and to not be afraid to breakdown and question your own beliefs. Usually the more frustrating or triggering things are, the stronger the indication that there's room for growth there.
In the process of jumping down rabbit holes and drifting through the abyss, I used the old tried and true method of asking more questions and following them deeper. If you can learn to love and accept yourself as well as find the beauty in others for simply being who they are and appreciating them for existing, what's missing? I suppose to some that will be obvious, but perhaps not. It wasn't to me anyway.
If you can feel these things for yourself and for others, why can they not also feel the same things for you? Well obviously they can, but can you accept that? Can you accept that other people can find you just as amazing and beautiful as you find them or does the self doubt creep in or have you put up walls to avoid rejection? Apparently when you spend all of your time focusing on yourself and accepting others it's easy to overlook the desire to have those feelings reflected back at you.
I had to do some digging into my early childhood to explore where this block came from. Along this journey I've already accepted my childhood, while far from terrible, was definitely lacking something. What was lacking wasn't completely obvious at first glance, there wasn't many things I'd consider outright abuse, but there were some things that were traumatic regardless. One of the biggest ones being that I never felt wanted or that I belonged.
Finding self acceptance should fix that right? Maybe not, perhaps we need to go deeper. I wrote about my relationship with my grandmother in the past and she was definitely the loving maternal figure in my life but after a brutal fight with cancer, she passed when I was in middle school. This was the start of the downward spiral and while I've mostly felt that instilled a fear of death and abandonment that I managed to work through, there's more to it than that.
She was the person that taught me what love is and how to care for someone regardless of circumstances. I was a fairly good kid, but I still did dumb shit on occasion like all kids do and I'm sure I pissed her off plenty of times, but she never once made me feel like she loved me any less. When she was gone, so was that total and complete acceptance from another and with it the feeling of being loved by another and accepted unconditionally. There was a void there that no amount of attention, drugs, or self destructive behavior could fill.
A little over 5 years ago, I came face to face with that feeling of genuine love again, but it wasn't for myself. I had finally come to the realization that I loved someone else but never felt that love returned. Was it a completely one-sided relationship? I don't think so, I think I just lacked the self awareness, acceptance, and self worth to feel love from an external source, which led to a perpetual pursuit of more and stronger external validation. After all, if you can't control it and make it be what you think it needs to be or look how you think it should look then it must not be the genuine thing right? Wrong.
This has gotten quite longwinded, but it's been an interesting dive nonetheless. Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but it's interesting to reflect on past experiences and all of those times I felt like I was killing myself to express love to others and never felt anything in return and to consider that my own expectations and beliefs of what love is, how it has to look, and what it feels like were shaped in a childhood experience of emotional neglect and abandonment, which ultimately left no 'amount of love' to ever be enough. Self acceptance is a great bandage for that wound, but it doesn't cure the whole problem of learning how to both give and receive love freely and unconditionally.
This dive has provided greater acceptance and understanding of the self and its relation to others and should create some interesting changes in how I approach relationships with others. Can we even completely love ourselves if we don't know how to both share with and receive it from the world around us? I'm sure I'll be meditating on this more in the future. There's always more to unpack or to make peace with, but acknowledging the wound is the first step to healing. Much love. Peace.
