The woman you see in this picture is a woman who has fought to overcome so many adversities. My DNA and upbringing left me with a lot to contend with: anger, violence, alcoholism, abandonment and a deep lack of self love. For the last 5 years, Iâve worked deeply to tackle many of those things – successfully I might add – with the help of a therapist.
He helped me understand where my patterns came from and that while Iâve never dealt with any drug or substance abuse myself, living with one or two alcoholics has a lasting impact. He helped me learn how to deal with emotions that often felt so overwhelming and out of my control. How to react calmly when rage is all I ever felt coursing through my veins every time I felt cast aside and unloved. He has been invaluable to my life.
But, while he helped me understand patterns, he ultimately wouldnât do the actual *work* for me. The work on growing to love myself, the work of re-parenting myself and knowing that even with physical and emotional abandonment, I was loveable. That those things werenât a reflection of me but rather of parents who were parenting from a wounded place. That work would be mine and mine alone. Not my therapistsâ, not my ex husbandâs, not my soon to be ex wifeâs, not friendsâ, not acquaintancesâ, nobodyâs but mine alone.
Honestly, it took being treated in a way that my rational brain recognized as unacceptable even when all my emotional brain wanted to do was cry and bemoan the unfairness of it all. It was that constant crying about how unfair it all was that kept me in situations where I wasnât being honored and shown love and consideration and kindness. They couldnât because of their own issues sure. But more than that, they couldnât because I wasnât being any of those things to myself. I was self harming, threatening suicide even when I wasnât actively suicidal (which I have been in the past), crying about everything and was just about that âwoe-is-meâ life.
I had to wake up to the next level of my healing journey. And that started the day I walked out on a marriage that was just a year old and a woman I thought was my forever love. I thank the universe/God/Goddess/Spirit for bringing this opportunity to heal my way. I donât quite appreciate the method but without this level of pain; I donât think I would have had the ability to tackle my healing. Thatâs because it is hardïżŒÂ work to tackle your ego. Learning it, itâs patterns, itâs attempts to protect you like it learned to do from infancy.
Re-parenting yourself is hard work. Unlearning decades of socialized and conditioned behavior and thought patterns is hard. Diversifying from long-held beliefs about who you are as a person as implanted in you by your earliest caregivers is hard shit. It takes showing up for yourself every single day. Day in and day out. Therapy is just once a week and is a stellar place to start and perhaps even stay for a long while but eventually, youâd need to do daily work on your own to level up in your growth process. This work doesnât ever stop. This is life and living. The work is life and for life.
@the.holistic.psychologist has been paramount in this next level of growth for me. Check her out on IG and YouTube because she has immensely beneficial content on how to do work of healing yourself on a daily basis. She talks about a lot of the concepts I mention in this post about self, ego, reparenting, wounded inner child and more.
Ultimately, my desire through this transition in my life is to come to a place of being at peace from deep within. Love of self that is not interested in external validations. Learn how to implement boundaries in my life as well as to respect other peoples boundaries. Boundaries is a topic for another day because honey, it is so so hard to learn how to implement boundaries when youâve always associated your best qualities to the fact that youâre an over giver. Who am I when I begin to say NO?! Whereâs the generous, loving Christabel then? That is after all a quality that Iâve always loved about myself. Through the self harm and violent outbursts and bullshit…I was always the loving generous Christabel. Separating from that identity is going to be…interesting to say the least. But, I must.
Letâs chat again soon!
XO, Christabel.