I AM Personally Empowered If I Choose to Be!

Codependency robs us of our personal power. When we are shamed as children into believing that we aren’t good enough, we begin the process of giving our personal power away to others. We make others who are “good enough” into our false higher powers, and we mistakenly think that only they can rescue us from our lovelessness. As a result, we lose all sense of ownership over our lives and we fail to develop proper boundaries with others.

As soon as our focus centers on pleasing people to gain approval, we give all of our personal power away to others. We also give them complete power over our feelings about ourselves. If they offer us crumbs of approval we may feel some value or self-worth. But if they withhold their approval, or worse yet, slap us with disapproval, we may feel like we are worthless and completely unlovable.

Personal empowerment is all about learning to take responsibility for loving ourselves. It’s about making the conscious choice to declare “I am lovable.” And it’s about beginning the process of erasing all of the old bad tapes within our subconscious minds that have kept us from loving ourselves.

In his book I AM, Howard Falco talks about the many damaging I AM statements that play through our subconscious minds. He says that people fail at loving themselves because their minds are programmed for self-loathing. He goes on to say that the role of our ego is to validate what we believe about ourselves, and so we become what we believe.

If we repeatedly say to ourselves “I am fat and undeserving of love,” our subconscious minds will capture these thoughts and we will come to believe that being overweight makes us unlovable. It will then become the job of our ego to prove what we now believe about ourselves. And so our ego will make us do things to prove that we are unlovable because we are overweight.

Every time someone tries to connect with us in loving ways, we will find ways to keep them at a distance. Eventually, they will abandon us and then we will feel justified in proclaiming “See. Just like I thought. He/she left me because I’m fat and unlovable.”

The good news is that we can take our power back from our egos by replacing our negative I AM statements with positive ones. The more we proclaim “I AM Lovable,” the more we will regulate the belief into the power of our subconscious mind. It will then be the job of our ego to ensure that we do things to prove that we are indeed lovable!

The more lovable we feel, the easier it is to set proper boundaries with people. We will no longer feel the need to please or caretake others to gain their approval and we will learn to say “NO”-- without feeling guilty-- when people are trying to manipulate us into caretaking them.

Even better, the more we like and love ourselves, the more we will attract all of the right people into our lives. People who don’t like hearing “NO” from us will fade from our lives, but the people who learn to respect us for saying “NO” and taking proper care of ourselves, will come to appreciate and like us even more.