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  It’s time to take a breath and close your eyes and tell yourself:

  “I deserve to treat myself better. I deserve to behave in a way that is indicative of a healthy spirit and a whole sense of well-being. I deserve an opportunity to do better. I deserve an opportunity to repair the damage I have inflicted as a direct result of my own pain. I deserve to hold myself accountable as a measure of my wellness and my growth of spirit. I deserve to love myself fully and to love others with humility and vulnerability.”

  Being prideful is unhealthy. It is unhealthy, not because you are harmful necessarily to other people (which is a reason that it is not a good marker of self), but because it is a roadblock to your spiritual growth. You are here for a reason. You have a purpose while you are here on this earth. Align yourself with what that purpose is. Express kindness for yourself first. Express compassion for yourself. Express empathy for what you have experienced and for what others have done to you and have not made right. Know that your pride is not who you are and that you do not have to carry it any longer. Know that if you step into a social gathering and you trip and fall and know that if everyone stands around and points and laughs at you, that reflects their character and not yours. That reflects their lack of empathy, not yours. That reflects their shallowness and lack of compassion and is not an expression of your value and worthiness. You have a right to make mistakes. You have a right to not be perfect all the time. You have a right to hold space for the errors that you make in this life and to make accountable those errors that have hurt others. You do not have to carry the weight of pride around your neck like a noose. You do not have to feel humiliation when you make a mistake. You deserve to look in the mirror and express love and understanding and kindness for yourself when other people have failed to do so.

  When we complete an inventory of how we have harmed other people and we categorically act in a way that is of the intent to correct that harm our soul shines. Our heart melds together as though it were never broken to begin with. When we make amends for what we have done to other people without the expectation of forgiveness we have done everything that we can. We have made amends regardless of whether they are accepted by those we have harmed. There is nothing else that we can do besides to change our behavior in the future. In order to receive love, we must first believe that we deserve it and we must first give it to ourselves. The greatest love of all must come from within, first and foremost. If we do not believe that we deserve good things, we will not receive them. In order to believe, we must first repair what we have damaged. In order to repair, we must acknowledge that the pain we feel is not an indication of our value.

  It takes practice. It is not something that will happen overnight. Flipping your internal channel to a more positive and loving dynamic is the first step to evolving into the loving and kind and compassionate spiritual being that I know you want to be and that I know you are.

  (See the chapters on accountability and worthiness for additional support in this topic.)

  Chapter Eleven

  Cultural influence

  Cultural influences deeply affect how we behave and grooms us on what we do or do not tolerate in our day to day lives.

  Whether we realize it or not we are all exposed to cultural influences in some shape, form, or fashion at some, or more than one point, in our lives. I was born and raised in rural Alabama. If I had to generalize my social and communal cultural exposure and influences, it would be Southern Baptist, football, and racism. It wouldn’t be until many years later, during my active duty service time in the Air Force, where I realized that I have been deeply affected by sexist cultural ideas, as well. All these influences affect how we see ourselves, how we see our self-worth, as well as what we assume other people say about us. Society tells women, for instance, be nice, cross your legs, and smile. For whatever reason, it seems like women are a commodity for the validation and encouragement of the men around them. I didn’t even realize that I felt obligated to make the people around me feel better about themselves. My cultural influences ran so deep, that I felt guilty if I did not ensure that those around me were always comfortable. On a subconscious level, I would grapple with the anxiety-provoking situation of allowing other people to treat me poorly as a consequence of not being rude, often leaving the situations feeling discouraged and devalued. I was not empowered to feel OK with standing up for myself and enforcing my own personal boundaries. Through my clinical experiences with clients, I have seen this is a prevalent trend with women.

  “Don’t be rude!” “Be nice.” Culture dictates that the worst thing in the world a woman can be, is a bitch. There are all kinds of euphemisms at the ready in social media and on TV and radio, that often isolate this concept using terms such as “resting bitch face.”

  Why is resting bitch face a thing? Why does it carry a tone of negativity to have a face that is indicative of bitchiness? Why does this have to be negative and why does it have to be attributed to just women?

  The cultural implications of grooming women to believe that their worth is wrapped up in how they make other people feel, is a major factor that causes chronic depression and anxiety in women.

  When people are not given the tools and the skills and the empowerment necessary for self-actualization, the result is a long-standing chronic issue of negative self-worth.

  These cultural influences are not just isolated with women, however. Men are told, as little boys, to be strong and to fix things and to know things. Don’t ask for help and don’t show vulnerability, because that means you’re weak. Men must face incredible odds as they grow up in deciphering what it means to be a man, based upon the cultural influences that they are groomed with.

  You might be surprised to learn men are affected by cultural influences just as much as women.

  In Western culture, it is considered poor form for men to express vulnerability, tearfulness, or anything remotely feminine. It is interpreted as an expression of emotional weakness, which is predominately frowned upon, universally in the West. It is as though being feminine is seen as a negative context. Speaking generally, western culture dictates that men must always be strong. If a man were to express anything personal or to outwardly express his deepest emotions, he would simply be judged as not being worthy or masculine. Little boys are groomed to play rough, learn a trade, fix a car, shoot a gun, and to never ask for help. There is truth in the fact men don’t ask for directions. It’s simply because culture has implicated them as being weak if they do so. When we take away the cultural influences that are negative and shame inducing, we can cultivate a newness and an openness in our lives with love and longing and growth. When we do not adhere these social norms and the cultural grooming, we hold space for ourselves to determine our own sensibilities and our own value systems. We become accountable for what we think, based upon what is important to us as individuals and not to society. It is absolutely a process and not something that comes freely and easily for most people, but it can happen! A big part of cultural cognitive rebalancing is to compare different cultures and understanding the nuances that make them valuable to the cultures they represent. For example, in many Middle Eastern cultures, it is considered quite normal, and sometimes expected, for men to hold hands while having a conversation. When we think about that in the lens of western dynamics, it seems a bit off putting and almost homosexual, which is, again, counterintuitive toward the western culture dynamic of heteronormative viewpoints which magnify the worthiness of the straight male and minimize, and often demonizes, the worth of women, femininity, and homosexuality.

  It’s just a game. Western culture is an idea and nothing more about what it means to be a woman or a man. It’s when those ideals run counter to the interpersonal value system of an individual is when you have distress. When these cultural value systems place value for a mindset or dogma over the value system of a different dynamic, that is the root of social dysfunction.

  I t
ruly believe when we as a society, collectively, gather and hold ourselves accountable for conducting our own interpersonal investigations on what we appreciate and what we value, only then will we be able to disassemble the institutionalized grooming construct of what is and is not appropriate behavior, culturally speaking.

  It’s hard to turn your back on a cultural ideal that dictates what you should or should not believe, because the cultural ideal eliminates the need to engage in critical thinking on your behalf.

  It makes it easier to heft the weight of responsibility of independent thought towards a universally accepted ideal, no matter how wrong it may be or what group or groups of people may be adversely affected.

  If someone hands me an idea and says this is the way things should work then as a human being I might naturally want to adopt that ideal as a measure of not having to do any additional work on my own. Dogma has a way of providing the “answers” for people.

  Culture is not always a bad, fear-based construct. Often, it is a representation of heritage and history for a group of people to maintain throughout time to ensure that the legacy of their people is not forgotten. Have you ever traveled to a different country and noticed different symbols, art, architecture, and especially the food they eat as being a marker of their pride in their heritage? This is a demonstration of culture based in love for their people. When culture is used to control society, that is a fear-based concept and, like all things, must be taken into consideration for everyone.

  Ultimately, your schoolteacher was right. You just need to do your homework.

  You do not necessarily have to disagree with the cultural influences that you were groomed with, but you won’t know that until you actually take the time to identify your own value system and how that lines up with the cultural influences in your world.

  Chapter Twelve

  Love

  One thing is absolutely for certain. It is critical for us to experience love as human beings. When we are born into this world and are not given an opportunity to experience love in a healthy and non-shameful dynamic, we simply have no ability to understand how it is supposed to feel. We must have the demonstration in our lives and when we don’t, we are not able to meet our potential as a loving person participating in the human experience.

  I have often said you never fully understand vulnerability until you have a child. The truth is also, that you do not fully understand love until you have a child. Before I go any further, I do want to say that people who do not have children absolutely experience love. People who don’t have children can experience profound and deeply rewarding love of self as well as in relationships with others. I am relating my own personal experience, as I did not fully grasp the weight of what love truly meant until I had a baby.

  My son was conceived during a relationship with someone I thought that I was in love with. All my life and my entire world at understanding what it meant to be here and who I was as a person, was completely obliterated the moment I gave birth. My understanding of love continued to evolve as the days, weeks, and months went on. I was his sole caregiver, as his birth father was uninterested in raising a child. The responsibility was not lost on me and the gravity of how important it was to not fail him was huge beyond measure. As someone who experienced the consistency of feeling emotionally neglected as a child, it was not lost on me that I felt an incredible responsibility to not fail my son in the ways that I felt I had been failed.

  Moreover, looking at him and realizing that even though I felt broken, less than, and unworthy as a person, I began to realize that this tiny child did not share my beliefs. His eyes and his smile would light up a room and he demonstrated this when he saw me. When I would walk into daycare to pick him up, his beautiful cherub face, framed by his blonde locks of hair, would explode in a jubilant grin. He did this as a baby, and it continued throughout toddlerhood and preschool on into kindergarten. I could not fail him. It simply was not an option. His happiness in seeing me was validation that I had to be doing something right as his mother. He consistently demonstrated unconditional love for me and, looking back, I realize that he was teaching me what it meant to love someone. I was also learning how to love unconditionally. We were teaching each other.

  Through this experience, it was unavoidable to make the assertion that I had to take better care of myself for my son. It was always for him. When he was little, it was not on my radar to take care of myself simply because I deserve to take care of myself. It was such a foreign concept at the time, because it had never been consistently demonstrated by anyone in my life. From that perspective, everything I did was for my son because I love him.

  I didn’t know that I could love myself.

  I didn’t know I should love myself. All I knew at the time was that this little guy depended on me for everything and I was able to either repeat my past or create a new future for him by giving him everything I never had in the way of encouragement and support. Oh, I was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I made mistakes. I got tired and I allowed my exhaustion to color my tone of voice and demonstrate irritation in dealing with him from time to time, as most parents do. I never really identified what kind of discipline I wanted to use or how to implement appropriate discipline. I had no clue how to discipline a two-year-old. I didn’t know what the appropriate ways were to change poor behavior. All I had to go on were my own experiences with my dysfunctional and abusive childhood. Throughout all of this though, the recurring theme was love. It was suffocating for me at times, because I loved him so much that I would struggle at work with worry, anxiety, and concern about whether he was being mistreated by his caregivers at daycare. I was on a very tight income and was paying for childcare on my own, despite struggling to secure some type of financial support from his birth father. He was not always afforded the most ideal childcare situations while I was working. I remember the first day I started a new job when he was only six weeks old and he was just barely old enough to start going to daycare. The only daycare that had room for him was a 30-mile round-trip out of my way on my way to work. I remember the first day of dropping off my newborn baby to a group of ladies who were kind and reassuring that he would be just fine, and they would take great care of him. I cried in the car all the way to my first day on the job. It was as though there was a rubber band connected between his little tiny heart and mine and the further I drove the tighter and tighter that rubber band got and it pulled and tugged at my heart in ways that made me scared I would fall apart at work. I simply could not come unglued on my first day of the job I had just secured, and I needed so desperately to take care of the both of us. I wanted to be with my baby. My breasts ached to nurse him, but I did not have a breast pump and, due to my work schedule and lack of additional support, chose to bottle feed him because it just wasn’t working with my schedule.

  So, I made the drive and ultimately, overtime, found a new daycare that was on the way to my work and that provided an enormous reprieve on the significant amount of anxiety I was dealing with daily.

  I missed my baby during my workdays.

  The connection I felt to my child during my workday when I was away from him was a feeling that, to this day, I struggle to describe.

  If I had such a hard time finding love and compassion for myself, how is it I found a seemingly bottomless chasm of love for a child that I bore? Logic dictates that if you don’t love yourself, how can you love a child you brought into the world?

  This is a question that I always felt was pressing and one that I investigated on a routine basis. This was a part of my evolution of understanding that my need for love and my need for healing and growth ultimately started with the understanding that I deserve just as much as my baby does. In fact, it was from this experience of being a mother that drove me into identifying compassion for myself with the realization that I should take care of myself because my son deserves it and because I deserve it.

  It i
s irrelevant whether you have children to the fact that you deserve love. It is also irrelevant to the fact as to whether you feel lovable. The truth is, that in order to heal from anything, love must be the key component. Love is the result of doing all this work in finding yourself. You have to turn the light switch on to make the room brighter. You have the power to illuminate your life with self-love. No one else can truly love you until you understand your own worth. Your wellbeing is internal and other people recognize this, whether its intentional on their part or not. When you realize what you’re worth it is impossible to tolerate less than what you deserve. When you hold space for yourself and grace for your errors, you express a kindness and compassion for yourself that is undeniable. Throughout this lifelong journey, you learn how to let go of those old schemas and ways of thinking. You let go of the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors exhibited to you by caregivers. You send negative and toxic energy back to where it came from, replacing this vacancy with love and gratitude.

  You also get to heal and, therefore, open yourself up to love. All positive emotions come from the basic emotion of love.

  I love you.

  Love is a verb. Love is an action. Love is intentional.

  We value love as though it is this scarce, fragile thing. Love is scarce only because we choose to be selective with who we express love to. Love is fragile only because we treat it that way. In fact, love is the strongest emotion there is. It is anything but fragile and that’s why it scares us. We want and need love so desperately in our lives, that we ration the amount that we express to others. What we don’t realize is that everyone else is doing the same thing. We withhold love as currency, as a measure of control in relationships. What happens is that when we do that, love simply dies. If love is not expressed openly and without reservation, then it ceases to exist as it is no longer love. That is why in abusive, gaslighting relationships many things are called love, but they really aren’t. Control, approval, validation, and manipulation is all masked under the veil of “love”, but it’s just the manifestation of fear-based thinking by individuals who cannot conceive of love in its authentic form, so they counterfeit it with people who are equally desperate. The same goes for familial relationships between parent / child, etc. Love is often counterfeit and sold under a variety of monikers to entice the broken to acquiesce to the desires of the abuser.