Forgive yourself for hoping, trusting, loving someone who betrayed you.
Your heart is beautiful. May the scars heal.
May you find those who deserve you.
Following Christ is still the best decision I’ve ever made.
I’ve stumbled, I’ve fallen,
I’ve had moments where I got it all wrong, but God kept me through it all.
I’m grateful for grace that never gives up on me.
I want my relationship with God to exist beyond emergencies. It's easy to pray when life hurts. I also want to remember gratitude, quietness, and conversation when life is going well.
I promise you, when you’re done, you’ll have perhaps the greatest pile of evidence of the fact that you’re actually doing better than you ever give yourself for. And perhaps, this will be your first step towards learning to believe and trust in you a little bit more🌸
A good place to start from today would be taking up this challenge:
Make a list of all the positive things you can recall doing over your lifetime. Go as far down the memory lane as you can and write them all down. The little, seemingly silly things and the big wins, across every aspect of your life. From that little improvement to your routine, to following-through on something that really meant a lot to you.
It is in answering these questions that you begin to learn real skills, acquire knowledge and make better use of resources that would help you improve, maintain and repair the relationship with yourself through ruptures.
As you do so, you steadily achieve that internal equilibrium, safety and stability that’s necessary for the life, relationships, and goals you wish to accomplish.
“How can I forgive myself when I let me down?” “How can I be kinder to myself even as I hold myself accountable through mistakes?” “How can I rebuild my confidence after difficulties and repeated losses?” “How can I reclaim my self-worth despite past trauma?” “How can I find my way back home to me every time I lose it?” And more.
So indeed, there are numerous factors, many forces that continuously impact your capacity for a stable, healthy self-relationship.
Hence why the questions you really need answers to are:
And when you wish to be kinder to you, you remember how you made that mistake you still haven’t been able to forgive yourself for and the only words you can find are stinging words you hope would remind you not to ever repeat the same again. But all those words really do is cut you down and make you feel even worse, miserable, irredeemable.
You want to love yourself more, but you remember all the times someone made you feel like you weren’t worthy of that love and how you struggled to walk away, then your resolve weakens: “Maybe it’s true. Maybe they couldn’t love me and I struggle to love me too because well, there’s just something unloveable about me.”
You want to trust yourself more, but you remember the time you said you’d do something, then didn’t get to, and this makes you despair. Never mind that you couldn’t because you were just too overwhelmed from having to handle so much all by yourself.
When you realize you handled some situations not as well as you’d have hoped to, when your flaws become a little more visible, when you drop the ball in certain regards, when you let down certain people or perhaps, even yourself… Rather than see it more as a manifestation of your humanness, you count it as evidence against the integrity and morality as a person.
When you’ve been striving so hard towards certain goals, but things just aren’t turning out the way you hoped they would. When the kind of success you dream of seem to be taking longer to arrive despite your best efforts, and you can see others steadily achieving those same goals, these make you struggle to see yourself as someone who’s truly competent, capable, destined for the greatness you can feel bubbling inside of you.
When you’ve been in relationships with people who have treated you less than, taken advantage of you, broken your trust and you still found yourself struggling to walk away and cut them off, these experiences leave their mark. They make you feel disappointed in yourself, make you fault yourself for not being strong enough to walk away, not standing up for you, not being someone you can rely on. When, actually, you’ve just been stuck in a trauma cycle.
When in your formative years, you were made to believe that your life wasn’t yours alone, that it belonged to others whom you had to live every moment for; when your worth was tied to how best you could neglect your wellbeing for the benefit of others, these things remain with you. Make you feel unworthy, identity-confused, and internally displaced.
We ask these questions because we somehow blame ourselves for not being able to experience that sense of stability and safety within. Like it were our fault we struggle with self-trust, self-compassion, self-worth, when in truth, there are many external factors that adversely influence our capacity to experience a better relationship with self. Past trauma, broken relationships, failed expectations, overwhelm, grief and loss, futile efforts, to mention a few.
“I just want to get my spark back.”
“I don’t even know who I am, anymore.”
“It’s hard going through this roller coaster of emotions, I just want to be happy for good.”
“I wish I could pursue my dreams without struggling so badly.”
And the most common question I hear over and over again in my sessions with clients (questions I also ask myself often if I’m being honest), “What is wrong with me?”
If you’re the woman I’m speaking to, I’m sure you’ve probably found yourself thinking thoughts and asking questions along these lines a frequent number of times:
“Why do I always feel so affected by everything?”
“Things feel okay now, but I can’t even enjoy it because I’m holding my breath for when everything turns upside down again.”
“Will I ever truly feel whole?”
“I wish I could just stop overthinking everything!!!”