My Life Story Part 2- Find self-love now!

I am going to attempt to write down in chronological order, how I learned to tackle my self-respect related issues.  Like I said before, I have always struggled with anxiety and with not feeling like I was “good enough”. I didn’t want to continue feeling this way, but I did not know how to stop it. All I could do was JUST KEEP GOING. I graduated from high school in June 2000 and performed at a local theme park that summer. I had tons of fun, but still I was always afraid that I would make a mistake.  Say something wrong, look stupid, not seem smart enough, etc, etc.  I had countless self-sabotaging ways of making my life harder for myself.  I spent most of my time doing battle with myself or trying to be somebody else. I decided I had had enough when I read Goodbye to guilt by Gerald Jampolsky.  When I read this I said to myself “That is what I do, and I never realized I was doing this to myself!” Jampolsky states,

 

“I decided to fulfill the negative expectations others had of me by doing things to make myself wrong in order to make them right. It gave me a crazy sense of power finally to be right about something...By provoking anger, I reinforced my belief that I could control something by demonstrating convincingly what an unworthy and unloving person I was…I experienced the world as a precarious place where I might be attacked at any moment.” (Jampolsky, 16).  

At this place in my life I knew I needed to find some love for myself somewhere.  But it still would take a few more years before I really started to change.  I went to college the fall of 2000-until the summer of 2002 when I served an LDS mission in Argentina for 18 months.  I did grow in many ways and some of my insecurities were strengthened, but still I was suffering with my lack of self- respect.  In 2004, I started college again and started dating my best friend, who came to be my husband.  We literally met in the 8th grade and he told me later that he always knew he would marry me.  Thank goodness he was patient because it took me that long to realize that he was perfect for me.  We were married 05/05/05 and moved to Rochester, NY for my internship in Music Therapy.  I still struggled with my insecurities and my husband wasn’t perfect either.  We loved each other, but that first year of marriage was tough!  Each year we learned more and more about each other and our love and patience for each other grew.  

Travis, my husband, is really the only person I think that understands me in a way that I need to help me grow.  He is, in many ways, the complete opposite of me.  My strengths are his weaknesses, and vice versa.  He is able to communicate how he feels and knows exactly who he is.  So to say the least, he has been, and continues to be a major support in my search for self-love.  So in a nutshell:

I knew I had a problem. I knew I didn’t want to feel negative about myself anymore. I was ready to not let fear lead my life.  

Winter of 2009, was the year that everything started to come together. I started finding answers to my lifelong questions as far as why did I feel about myself the way I did.  I started to relate to a character in a book I was reading.  She did not care one bit about what anyone thought about her, and she was in her own life and that was it.  I wanted to be like that.  At that same time, I started reading self-help books my sister suggested for me.  It was a this time that darkness started to clear into light for me. 

For me, these books taught me first, to realize I needed more love. Second, they helped me to feel love for myself.  Third, showed me how to start looking at things differently, and fourth gave me specific exercises to try in my everyday life that would increase my self-respect and gain trust in the world.

I have these books dog-eared like crazy.  I love them.  When I went back through them trying to figure out how to compile the information, I came to the conclusion that I could not mix up the content between the books. So I am going to share, in order, the books I read and comment on the content and how it helped me.   All of these authors have at least a doctorate in the field of psychology, but they are also spiritual people.  They put it into words, things that I could never have learned anywhere else.  I used to think that anything outside my religious books/materials was actually bad in some way.  But I have truly learned that God gives EVERYONE something important to share in this world, whether they are from my religion or not.

  I used to judge and was completely closed minded. I was afraid of people who were different from me. I have learned that each of us can be who we are, and hold true to our deep beliefs, and still live in harmony together, and find things in common to enrich each others lives.  

To read a specific story about this read here.  The first book I would like to share is called Living, Loving and Learning by Leo Buscaglia. 

 This book was the perfect one for me to read first, because in it, he teaches you how to love yourself.  He actually taught a course at a University called Love.  It taught you how to love yourself and others.  I wish I could have taken his class. But thank goodness he wrote down his beautiful words of love to help people like me and maybe you.  Stay tuned.  It starts getting good from here on. You will learn things about yourself that you never knew.  He teaches you how to discover those, and you don’t have to go anywhere else but inside yourself.  Step by step, I’ll show you how I did it.  Hopefully you can benefit from it the way I have. It has literally changed my whole outlook on myself and on the world around me.  I am so excited to re-hash this out! It is AMAZING stuff. 

“We believe that everything there is to find is out there in the light where it’s easy to find, when the only answers for you are in you…Nobody has your answers only you have your answers (Buscaglia, 70).

Thanks for reading. If you would like to read My Life Story (part 1) read here.
To take the Self Respect Test click here.

Posted in: envy, extra notions, happiness, judgement, self love, self-respect