True Love Begins with Self-Love

“When true love is lost, life can bleed of all meaning. We are left blank, but the possibility of destiny remains. What we are meant for may yet be discovered. And…that journey to find our destiny may defeat even time itself.”
From the film Winter’s Tale (2014)

Life without love certainly does bleed of all meaning. I’ve often thought about the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians “If I have faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Life without love is pure nothingness. And this is why life is often so painful and devastating for people who suffer from codependency and other addictions.

Early in life, addicts lose all perspective of self-love. They thus completely lose their grounding in life. They lose the roots of who they are: Love itself. And they gradually become a living, breathing form of nothingness (the sense of being left blank). And in their nothingness, they look desperately outside themselves for validation, for love, for approval and for purpose.

It’s impossible for us to find these things outside of ourselves. And so for the addict, who has no sense of self-love and who cannot fill-up their inner-emptiness through grasping desperately for outside love, life begins to bleed all meaning. Lack of self-love leaves a void inside the addict that swells with hellish emotional numbness. This numbness devours the addict and prevents him/her from feeling the love of God, or a Higher Power. It also prevents them from truly feeling or accepting any outside love that does come their way. They have no inner-ability to validate the outside love as true and so they always doubt it and they find ways to reject it (for fear of being hurt) no matter how desperately they need it.

Although my self-love is greatly improved over the years through recovery, I still feel the void of never having felt loved by others, beginning with my parents. I don’t believe I have ever experienced a true love from outside myself. And this is probably because I have never experienced a true love from within myself, for myself, by myself. There is no way to experience the true love of another, even God, if I have not allowed myself to experience the true love of myself for myself.

If we feel like life is bleeding all meaning because we have continually failed at finding true love with another from outside of ourselves, it’s more than likely because we have failed at experiencing true love inside of ourselves for ourselves. This is why self-love is SO ESSENTIAL.

Life will stop bleeding meaning when we stop hating ourselves. Life will regain its meaning as we start loving ourselves. Begin the process today. If you want to experience true love it must begin with a true love that you work at developing for yourself. The more you accept and love yourself, the more you lessen your inner-numbness and the more you invite God inside of you. Thus, the more you begin to experience a fuller love inside of yourself and the more you are open to receiving love from outside of yourself.

Today, make the conscious choice to trade-in your nothingness for self-love and help your own life to stop bleeding meaning and to flicker with glimpses of hope for a beautiful, though not perfect, future.

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