Caregivers:
Are you loving yourself unconditionally?
(Expressing your genuine feelings can be a clue!)
February is typically the month focusing on relationships. And what relationship is more important than the one we have our entire life — with ourselves?
So check out how you are doing on these measures of good personal relationship with yourself:
- Loving yourself unconditionally.
- Loving yourself sets you free.
- Loving yourself makes it safe to be who you are.
- Loving yourself heals you in all ways: mentally,
physically, emotionally, psychically, and spiritually.
Feeling and expressing your genuine feelings can be a very challenging process after being raised in this culture. Without access to expressing your genuine feelings, you end up cutting yourself off from loving yourself.
Most of us experience a lifetime of outside authorities laying down rules about how we should behave and think in order to be a “good person,” according to society’s mores. As a culture, we even have an unspoken rule that no one is supposed to talk about what they are feeling. It all starts at home and continues in all our institutions — church, school, work.
When we are not free to express our genuine feelings and emotions, we disconnect from our true selves. This then disconnects us from the life force energies, severing the connection with the Beloved energy of all life. (This might be what you call Source, God, Goddess, All That Is.) By whatever name, you inherently know how to identify and experience this energy.
From an early age, we learn it’s safer to bury feelings and emotions, especially when we are confronted with the cultural norms imposed by parents, teachers, and other authority figures.
As we disconnect from our genuine feelings and emotional expression, we disconnect ourselves from our heart energy. This has resulted in generations of people who are filled with low self-esteem and endless negative mind chatter. We’ve internalized into our bodies all these unexpressed emotions that, over a lifetime, turn toxic within us and ultimately lead to dis-ease.
In daily life, this gets expressed as “not doing [anything] good enough,” never being enough or doing enough or doing it satisfactorily. The resulting low self-worth combined with a lifetime of “hoarding” these unexpressed emotions sets us up for illness throughout our lives. (I’ve talked before about the challenges we face with trapped, toxic emotions.) Especially if we reach our senior years, we so often succumb to the aging degenerative diseases: dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s etc.
So how do we feel our genuine feelings and emotions after we numbed then out? And how does this lead to loving ourselves more compassionately?
We come with a basic instinct to be ourselves and express our genuine feelings and emotions. To do so again, it’s practical to go back to a successful learning model.
How did you learn to walk?
Virtually every child succeeds in learning to walk. In spite of falling down repeatedly, we just got up and tried to walk again and again. Then we held onto the edge of a chair or table. And then, finally, we were able to walk.
We did not beat ourselves up for falling down in learning to walk. And our loved ones around us were always cheering us on, eager for us to take our first step. Revisit this model, because we know it’s one that works.
The process of connecting with our genuine feelings can be similar. As we connect with our feelings again (a connection we had as a child), we feel better and have increasing and genuine self-confidence.
Step by step, if we are deeply motivated, we have the ability to heal our child energy. We can feel our genuine feelings and express our emotions in life affirming communications. And it starts with affirming and acknowledging yourself in your self-talk.
Loving yourself comes out in how you talk to yourself. It’s the essence of life-affirming communications. All it takes is practice.
If you would like to gather with other family caregivers in a circle (either live or by phone) to practice life-affirming communications, please sign up on my home page at http://www.AuthorBettyLSmith.com to receive special invitations or contact me directly at healthandwellbeingclub(at)sonic(dot)net