Learning to Love Yourself: How to Begin and Where to Start

I have been trying to learn how to love myself and felt quite lost as to where to start with that…I am a genuinely good person, but despite living up to my own standards I believe in, I still have yet to truly learn to love myself. I went to confession and, without making any excuses, listed my confession mater of factly, almost like I was reading off a shopping list. The priest, without knowing me personally, or knowing that I am a survivor of abuse, immediately asked me if I was married, and very specific questions about abuse and self-love. He then handed me a green sheet of paper with 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 printed on it and asked me to read it. When I was finished, he told me that my penance was to love myself like that.

I wanted to make sure that he understood what I had done was still my own actions, even if I never would have done them had it not been for the abuse. I wanted to assure him that I was responsible for my own sins (which were all SELF-destructive in nature) and that it was not my ex’s fault even though he had abused me. I told him I didn’t want to get off easy. He told me “This is your penance. I fully understand what your sins are, and you are not getting off easy. Learning to love yourself will not be easy for you. But that is your penance.” I just cried.

I still didn’t know how to even begin to love myself, so at my next counseling appointment I talked to my therapist about it. She said that to start, being patient and kind to myself just as the scripture says about love was the first step. I think that we often have different expectations or ways that we treat ourselves as opposed to how we treat others or what we expect from them. We may be too hard on ourselves, be impatient with ourselves, have unrealistic expectations of perfection, abilities, success, etc…all because we fail to understand that we deserve love not based on our performance, but for simply being who we are…we deserve to be loved just for being uniquely ourselves. So, with that thought, I encourage anyone who reads this to be patient and kind to yourself…when talking to yourself, first decide what you would think, feel, or say to another person with your circumstances and then treat yourself THAT way. Maybe even imagine how you would care for or treat a small child if they were going through whatever you are at the moment, and then care for yourself the way you would for that child. That is how you begin the journey of learning how to love yourself.

“Even when you think you have your life all mapped out, things happen that shape your destiny in ways you might never have imagined.” ~Deepak Chopra

I’ve joked about being a “chronic planner.” When I was younger, I planned on being a wife and mother and everything else was negotiable, but that was the ultimate plan. Then after I left my first marriage due to extreme physical violence and other forms of domestic abuse, I made a new plan to finish school first because I thought that would provide me “safety”…that it would make me safe from future abuse through providing myself financial independence. For 3 years I worked so hard on this goal that there was no room for anything else in my life. My friends didn’t know how I was doing it without burning out, but to me my whole “life” was riding on my success or failure at finishing school and being financially independent, and I never wanted to be anyone’s victim ever again. I made a lot of sacrifices during those 3 years, but I told myself that it was a short-term sacrifice for a long-term goal and that it would all pay off in the end. I lived in unfavorable conditions, saving every last penny I could so that I could get my own place. I worked 18 hours a day, 7 days a week between classes, homework, and for awhile even volunteered doing recreational therapies with dementia patients. I gave up any kind of social life because I felt I couldn’t afford for this plan to fail. To me that meant that I had to maintain a 4.0 gpa so that I would open as many doors as possible to scholarships and transfer schools. I had no balance in my life and poured 100% of my energy into this one single plan. Then, in the spring of 2010 a man who seemed charming and intelligent started aggressively pursuing me. Being cautious and putting school first, I waited several months before deciding to accept his advances to even go on a date with him. We dated for about a year. He seemed to be the man of my dreams and he wanted to get married and have the family I had always dreamed about. I thought that God had sent him, and I adjusted my plans to finish school first to include this man in my life. I didn’t want my past experiences to make me jaded and punish this man for someone else’s wrongdoings, so despite the sickness in my stomach, I agreed to loan him my money. A little at a time, he ended up “borrowing” every last dime I had to my name and then racked up thousands of dollars in debt on my credit cards. But I felt like I would be a bad wife, and even “jinxing” our future relationship, if I didn’t fight my misgivings about allowing him access to my finances…so I did. At this point, he’d given me no reason not to trust him. Don’t get me wrong, a couple of problems had arisen during our engagement, but he had assured me that they were nothing to worry about because we worked through them in a way that seemed normal and healthy at the time…or so he had led me to believe. But on our wedding night, the truth began to unfold and within a matter of 5 short weeks, I had become his victim unwittingly. From emotional abuse, to the constant, endless lies, his casual and twisted sex addiction and pornography addiction, multiple affairs, financial abuse through fraud, theft, and allowing me no access to our money to pay off debt he’d incurred in my name…I found some very dark things and began to “see behind the curtain.” It turned out that this man, the man I had grown to love and trust, who’d gone to church with me regularly and prayed with me literally every single night, was absolutely not the man that he presents to the world. And seeing behind his mask was terrifying to put it lightly. It was by far much scarier than the physical abuse of my first marriage. I hadn’t yet realized that my husband was a clinical narcissist and sociopath, so I confronted him with the phone records, emails, proof of accounts to sex hook up sites online, and receipts that proved his infidelities and lies and he acted like it wasn’t sitting in my hand right in front of him. He coolly, without any emotion, denied the truth that I had hard evidence of his abuse and lies right in my hand in front of him- he lied to me about it again without batting an eye. It was at that very moment that I realized that he had not just made a mistake and lied once or twice, but that this man was a pathological liar and it frightened me that he was able to do it with such ease. A chill went down my spine as I made this realization. I had married someone I didn’t truly know who they were…this person before me lacked any moral compass, character, honesty, or empathy….all the things that make a person human. There was no conscience or remorse, which I didn’t understand at that time because I had yet to learn about how a person with narcissistic personality disorder thinks or operates. If I had known, I would have understood how dangerous it was for me to let him know that I had found out all his dark secrets and knew who he really was. Lucky for me, this helped him to “decide” that he was “never” in love with me. After I told him that I couldn’t respect someone who was so dishonest and that I no longer thought he had just been making mistakes when he lied to me, but that he had a character defect, he immediately informed me that he not only “never loved” me, but that literally “everything” he had “ever told” me “was a lie” and he “was only playing a role.” From that point on, he became more and more abusive in far less insidious ways. His gloves had come off. I was lucky in many ways, but I sure didn’t feel lucky. In fact, at the time I questioned if God was punishing me for something…I tried going to confession in hopes that the abuse would stop. I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. I had believed that if I was a good wife, not only through my actions toward him, but spiritually and on every level, that God would bless our marriage…and I begged him to save it. But even the church, when I turned to them for help, advised me to leave him, saying “this is just another form of abuse” and “we cannot support it.” They urged me to file for divorce and said they would support me through that (they even ended up paying for the filing fees and got me an attorney), but as far as they were concerned our marriage had never taken place because my husband had never taken his vows seriously, never acted married, and he was refusing to stop his abusive behavior the one time we had met with someone for counseling- in fact, my husband had become aggressive with the priest. My plan for a happy and safe life wasn’t just falling apart, it was being ripped apart and there was nothing I could do to stop it. He kept promising to pay back the money he’d “borrowed” since I had absolutely no income as a full-time student and he had a six-figure income, but he eventually told me he didn’t plan on actually returning any of my money to me “because [I] knew this could happen when I married him.” I certainly did not know that he would destroy everything I had worked so hard for or that he would betray me and abuse me so callously or I never would have married him in the first place. I believed him every time he promised to do just the opposite of that before we got married- to love, honor, and cherish me forever…and I didn’t think divorce would be so casually accepted as an option to him since he had professed to be such a devout Catholic and proclaimed to be so against divorce, among other things (he also fed me the same kind of bull about adultery, pornography, etc). I believed he was being honest because I was being honest with him, but he saw that as me being “naive” and, therefore, “deserving of the outcome.” It was my fault for not knowing that people could be so evil without feeling bad about it at all. In fact, he even went as far as to tell me that “This happens all the time. One person falls in love with someone who just doesn’t love them back.” I couldn’t believe how twisted this was since he had so aggressively pursued me and convinced me to fall in love with him because he “was so in love with me” …or so he had said. He acted like none of that ever happened and I was some stranger off the street that just had a crush on him. He took no responsibility for his actions at all and repeatedly blamed me for his treating me so abusively…it was always my fault for not knowing better. The abuse continued to escalate each day until my family and church intervened and basically forced me to leave for my own safety. I didn’t want to go because I was still so disillusioned and, while I didn’t know it yet, I was incapable of protecting myself from him. The abuse only escalated after I left, and it’s left me with PTSD and a myriad of health problems. Now, here is the important part: “Even when you think you have your life all mapped out, things happen that shape your destiny in ways you might never have imagined.” This is something I read that Deepak Chopra said and it really hit home with me. You remember when I was talking about how I thought God would bless me? He was…you see, my grandmother used to always say that everything is a gift from God- sometimes we just don’t like the wrapping paper. And that’s what was happening to me. God had a much greater plan for my life than I had “mapped” out for myself, and he could see the big picture down the road a ways…things I couldn’t yet see. Some of those things have yet to be, but some have been revealed to me already, and of the things that have become visible to me I am so grateful. This devastating and tragic event has shaped me into an even better person with even greater empathy for others. Knowing so much pain has allowed me to grow as a person- the person I am “destined” to be. Seeing such evil in another person has led to a religious transformation for me from mind to heart if you can understand what I mean, and for which I am so thankful. And last, but not least, this experience changed the career path I heading down. I have always wanted to go into counseling, but I felt it was not the logical or responsible thing financially for me to do. When I first returned to school, I was almost 30 and felt that it was important to spend as little time possible in school and graduate with a degree that would allow me to make as much money as possible so that I could reach that initial plan of financial independence and “safety,” so I had been working on my nursing degree. But my calling has always been to help others in a different way, and this event made it only impossible to deny that I must go into counseling and help other women who go through similar things. I want to open a non-profit organization one day to do fundraising for individuals who fall prey to the kind of abuse I did…to offer counseling and legal services…and spiritual healing through weekend retreats where these women can forget about their PTSD and maybe have a moment of joy in the middle of their pain. I will offer yoga and meditation classes, transitional housing, and a work program after initial healing work to empower other women. In the last year, in what very little spare time I have, I have offered support, resoures, education, daily inspiration, and preliminary safety planning to women (and a few men, too) in over 30 countries. It’s been very rewarding and healing for me. I have plans to change the world on a global level with regard to all kinds of abuse, from domestic violence like I’ve experienced, to human and sex trafficking, and even animal abuse. It took me going through this much pain to become motivated enough to risk everything to go after this path, because it’s a longer road with a much riskier financial outcome at the end… but make no mistake- it’s my destiny. And it took this happening to me to shape me into a person that knows what this feels like so that I can be there for others who survive abuse, to be able to show them we can all be triumphant over such abuse, and to INSPIRE me enough to find the COURAGE to start a place where we can all come together to do just that. So you see, I thought I had my life all planned out…but I could have never reached my destination without the proper inspiration that came from the unplanned events!