Your Voice Mail Box is Full

I've touched upon this before, the idea that you cannot give compassion to others if you do not first extend compassion to yourself.  I want to reach deeper into that concept and explore it further.

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend about self-loathing.  It's not something we are born with.  It's not a natural state of being or gene that is embedded in our DNA.  It's not a desired emotional response to the thought of who we are and our purpose here in this life.

We all have things about ourselves that we'd like to change.  Perhaps to shed a couple of pounds or to get rid of those pesky gray hairs.  Botox gets rid of the wrinkles, collagen plumps up the lips, a nip here, a tuck there and we're back to our youthful look.

Maybe we're not as assertive as we want to be, or worry too much, or don't laugh as much as we think we should.

Is that self-loathing to want to change one's appearance by surgical intervention?  Not necessarily.

Self-loathing is much stronger than the mere dissatisfaction with one's appearance or alter one's emotional state.  Self-loathing is the destructive force that causes us to inflict our bodies and our minds with scars.  It's within the person who has had so much plastic surgery that their face is no longer their own.  It's within the person who is so riddled with stress that disease has infested their body.  Self-loathing is within the person who has an eating disorder because their self image is distorted when looking in the mirror.  Self-loathing is within the person who grasps onto anger and gives disease the fodder it needs to breed internally.



It's so cliche to say that self love is the most important love one must practice before they can extend it to those around them.  But that doesn't make it any less true.  We should not become desensitized to its importance just because it sounds corny.

Self-loathing is a protective response.  We protect our psyche be adopting the messages we were sent at a time when our self-image was forming.  We have to believe what the authority figures said about who were are when we relied upon them to sustain our life.  Even if we rebelled against the notion and knew, on a fundamental level that they were wrong, the message can stick in our minds on a subconscious level.

Those messages become recorded on the mental voicemail box of our minds to be replayed over and over and over.  

I know this to be true because it has been my experience.  The messages I was sent were pretty awful and so I adopted that view of myself because I had to.  It's taken me decades to rewire the circuits in my brain to kick self-loathing to the curb.  And there is still work to go.  The greatest source of inspiration for me are my children.  I did not want to instill within them that feeling of self-loathing.  I wanted to let them know that they are pure joy and inspiration for me.  Extending myself to them in a positive way allowed me to learn how to be more compassionate with myself.

The result for me is that I now see within others that feeling of self-loathing.  While my compassion is great for those who suffer in this way, I know I cannot save them from their internal struggles.  For some, I cannot even convince them that it's there.  But I hold them close in my prayers and know that I am doing all that I can to help them see that they are a gift to the world.

So, when you interact with your children, remember that they will one day become an adult and as an adult, they will carry with them the messages that you sent when they were forming their self-image.  What message do you want for your children to replay in their minds as adults?