Choose to Believe You Are Loveable!



In his book Loveability, Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears.

Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation. 

For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietly and to fade into the background wherever I was. It provided me with one of the few abilities I had to feel safe.

Certainly, I never felt understood or interesting. How interesting can a wallflower be? How understood can a person be who never speaks or reveals anything about him/herself for fear of being criticized? Fear kept the real me trapped inside the outer-shell of my body. I felt emotionally paralyzed and completely unable to let the real me out because my fear of being personally attacked and destroyed was so great.

As a result, I became incapable of expressing myself or of doing many things I would have liked to have done. I loved to sing and have a great voice, but the older I got, the more I suppressed that talent. I have a great dry sense of humor, but the older I got, the more I closed in on myself and refused to express that gift. I didn’t feel safe enough to let the real me surface and so I began to feel like I had nothing to offer the world.

The more I withdrew into myself, the more alone I felt and the more I came to believe that I just didn’t matter at all. Even when I would get enough courage to speak up and express myself, I was more often than not drowned-out by others. And being drowned-out simply reinforced my belief that nothing I had to offer mattered to anyone.

But recovery through Codependents Anonymous has taught me that I do matter because I am lovable—just as lovable as everyone else. Recovery has also allowed me to reconnect with my true self, to find my voice again. It’s allowed me to express myself, to recover my lost sense of humor and to stand up in front of a group of people unafraid to speak or to sing. It has taught me that I do matter—and that everyone matters.

Recovery has taught me that there’s nothing wrong with me beyond my patterns of thinking and the dysfunctional patterns of behavior that resulted from my messed-up thinking. It has allowed me to change my thinking about myself and thus to change my feelings, my patterns of behavior and my entire life—for the better.

If you are feeling unlovable, I highly recommend Robert Holden’s book, Loveability. And I highly recommend that you find a good support group that can nurture you through the recovery process: Codependents Anonymous. Adult Children of Alcoholics, Alcoholics Anonymous or Al-Anon. Decide today that you are indeed lovable and begin the journey toward believing it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No One Can Calm Your Codependent Crazies, But You

Image
Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas...
Read more

If The Eyes Had No Tears, The Soul Would Have No Rainbow

Image
I'm sitting in a Panera Bread in Los Angeles, eating my cinnamon scone and preparing to cut my trip here short. I'll have to return home tomorrow and then fly to Omaha, Nebraska for a funeral. A young father in his 30s died there last Friday, leaving behind a wife and three small children. There are always questions in these types of situations: Why? Why someone so young? Why someone who had a wife and kids? The "why" questions can be endless, and there's never a quantifiable answer.  I don't believe in "it was just his time" or that God called him home. There's too much cruelty to these pat answers and they make God seem like a beast. What purpose could there be behind such imagined acts of God? I see no redeeming purpose to seizing a young man from his young family. I do believe that life happens. When someone dies and there is no acceptable answer to "why," I believe it's simply the human condition. It's the way...
Read more

The Bride of Gingy

Last night I was watching Scared Shrekless . The first “horror” story in this Halloween movie is called “The Bride of Gingy.” And Gingy’s bride is nothing short of an overly-clingy codependent nightmare. If you are familiar with the Shrek movies, you know that Gingy is the gingerbread man. In “The Bride of Gingy,” Gingy goes to see the village baker because he is lonely and wants a sweetheart of his own. So the village baker agrees to make a gingerbread girl for Gingy. As the baker begins to mix-in the proper amount of sugar, according to his recipe, Gingy insists that the baker include 10 times more sugar than the recipe calls for using. He wants his bride to be truly sweet. Within a short time, Gingy meets his dream girl, Sugar. Suddenly we see them skipping hand in hand through flower-filled fields while the song “Happy Together” by The Turtles plays in the background. But “happily ever after” is not how this story ends. Next we see Gingy and Sugar together in his gin...
Read more

Where There Is Kindness, There Is Goodness

Image
Author’s Note: The next few meditations will be from a retreat I directed recently called The Good News According to Disney . If you aren’t familiar with the films that are referenced, I’d suggest to take time to see them and to look for the deeper meaning within them. Many people today still live by the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” They actually believe that they will be at peace if they achieve revenge or restitution for any mishap that has befallen them at the hands of another. They believe they will reclaim their personal power once they have achieved their revenge, but this is impossible. Disney’s Cinderella (2015) reveals the true secret to owning one’s personal power and to retaining it no matter what we experience in life: “Have courage and be kind.” On the surface this motto looks a bit simple and wimpy. But in reality, it holds great power. That power comes from the heart of a person, or in this case Ella, who sees the world not a...
Read more