My eyes were opened to just how deep my self-hatred was. My eyes were opened. I finally saw that I was chasing healing because I was never ok with who I was, I was never ok with where I was. I chased healing because I wanted to be someone else. Every time I saw people with similar wounds making their own dreams come true, I would think, "Now why can't I do that?" My eyes were opened to how much I rejected myself. I sought healing thinking I couldn't be valued until I did enough healing. The search for healing had way more to do with my deep-seated self-hatred than with healing. The obsessive nature of my quest for healing came from my complete inability to accept myself. That is why the healing did not appear to be working. I was seeking healing with the belief that I am not inherently good enough...with the thought that I'm not inherently worthy.
My obsession with self-hatred was disguised as an obsession with healing.Healing cannot occur in the fullest sense until you add self-compassion to the process.
All the healing I was striving for couldn't truly reach me because my heart was still closed to myself. I was asking for healing while habitually and unconsciously contaminating it with toxic shame. You can't heal shame if shame is why you want to heal; we can't heal our wounds by adding to the infection.
But given my familiarity with pain and suffering, I struggled to understand their opposites. Self-love was a foreign language for me and self-compassion was utterly impossible. I did not know how to treat myself like a loved one. I did not know how to open my heart to myself. My early childhood force-fed me an endless narrative of why I am not good enough...it force-fed me an endless narrative of why I am unworthy of safety, love, joy, and peace.
Seeking healing from a deeply wounded place, from a place of shame, is like abusing a pain-killer so you can ignore the message pain is trying to tell you... My pain was asking for compassion...specifically from me.
In order for this to change, I had to learn the hard way just how much my self-hatred could damage relationships.
