Return Home to the Truth of Who You Are

Here’s a truth: You can’t heal if you’re still punishing yourself.

I recently listened to a podcast with Sarah Jakes Roberts, a businesswoman, bestselling author and media personality, in this interview she talks about how often we try to run from or separate parts of ourselves we either dislike and/or the parts of our past filled with shame, regret, wreckage and hope to become someone different.

I began considering the ways I have neglected to accept ALL parts of who I am -- the mistakes, the failures, the successes and the less attractive/lesser known characteristics that I try to keep hidden or secret, even from myself-- and accept that it’s all part of a master craft. The human mind is a beautiful and complex system when it comes to protecting its owner, we file things away and yet somehow from the back of the filing cabinet they still show up and take the lead in every single relationship we enter. By avoiding my anger, running away from it and covering it with silence, I call it healed and yet I continue to judge harshly, run out of patience quickly and isolate when my control over it is slipping. How can I ever learn to trust others and let them fully see me if I keep running away from the parts of myself I don’t like? I don’t even trust myself to sit and stay with me. And just as they say you can’t fully love anyone else until you love yourself, I’m realizing now, the same applies to trust.

“It is the greatest gift you can give yourself to let love flood the place where you once felt an emptiness.” - Sarah Jakes Roberts

How, then, do I turn to my anger and have a conversation with it? How do I offer this part of myself compassion instead of repeatedly hitting myself over the head with insults and blame? And why do I feel like I have to do this so often? I thought I forgave my mother, worked through that wounding. I have had the opportunity to have face-to-face conversations with my father and I told him the truth of my hurt and the pain I carried for so many years (something I didn’t get a chance to do with my mother before she died, so I kind of marked it as a 2-for-1 deal).

In all honesty, I have worked really hard to forgive myself for drinking so heavily for the first 6 years of my oldest kiddo’s life, but the terrorizing feelings of failure are like trying to pluck out shotgun shrapnel from the canvas of my skin with a pair of tweezers.

I know for sure the goal of life is not to run the race and cross the finish line: HEALED! And yet I keep treating it as if it’s a straight and narrow line. Healing is an ongoing process and old wounds often repackage themselves as the season’s change. In fact, I would really love to know who does PR for trauma, because the rebranding is dynamite. I buy the Fresh New Look line every time, with some disillusion that what’s inside has been updated and renewed too, only to find out it’s the same old shit. Anyway…

I’ll probably never reach enlightenment, the same way I’ll never be a fully healed and perfectly-adjusted human-- if you’ve gone through what I went through as a child, you most likely know we did what we had to do to survive. But I can make a better effort to stop punishing myself. Stop punishing myself for not losing the baby weight, I can stop punishing myself for losing my temper and yelling at my kid when they’re late for the bus. I can stop punishing myself for all those years of using the only tool at my disposal for coping with heartache, fear, discontentment and feelings of unworthiness. I can try to stop punishing myself by repeating the same hateful words of mother or the hateful words of judgement from my former drinking “friends” after they caught wind of how bad I’d gone down the road.

No matter how far away from the last drink I get I can’t separate myself from who I was six years ago-- nor should I try. Just by owning my past doesn’t mean it’s defining me either! I can be that AND also more! I am more valuable because my past mistakes helped convert me into a stronger, more resilient, wiser and more courageous woman today. I can be the woman who lost her child in a CPS case for a year AND also the resurrected woman who fought back and regained custody and has maintained sobriety. And also an entrepreneur, business owner, wife, author and teacher. Returning home to the truth of who I am includes the mess but it also includes the grace and my own power. So often we ruminate on our mistakes instead of saying, ‘Yes, those were my mistakes. I made them and in return they have made me.’

To return home requires me to expand myself to love myself and offer more compassion to myself than I have ever imagined possible. That’s most definitely the hard part. How do you do something you’ve never done? Something so far off the imagination, it might not even be a real? I suppose that’s the loving kindness practice of it. I just have to keep sitting down and attempting to stretch my arms wide enough to catch all the pieces I have learned to hate and push away about myself and when the pain from stretching gets too intense, I’ll take a break. Make another attempt the next day.

Replacing the punishment with acceptance and embracing the past with love and tenderness has to be done incrementally. I think it’s just a series of meditations building trust so you sit with yourself and say ‘I see you. I hear you. I love you and I’m not going anywhere. You are my home’