Everyone Was Created to Be Victorious!

I attended a men’s Ala-Non meeting on Monday and one of the men said he believed alcoholism was rooted in self-contempt. I’ve always believed that all addictions are based in poor self-love. Of course, self-contempt is a leading cause of poor self-love. Self-contempt is more than a lack of self-acceptance. It’s self-bullying. It’s an expression of self-hatred. And certainly, there’s little to no self-love present when we are tearing ourselves apart with self-contempt.

Self-contempt is a process of playing prosecuting attorney, hanging judge and angry jury against our very selves. It’s total self-persecution and for many of us, it happens daily with no mercy or hint of self-forgiveness.

Our self-contempt may be behavior we learned as children from adults who also persecuted themselves, but from the time we became adults ourselves, we have been solely responsible for our own self-contempt. We can’t be blaming others for what we continually do to poison our own self-love.

True, much of our daily self-contempt runs through our subconscious minds. We may not be consciously aware of how ugly we are toward ourselves, but we FEEL it. And too often we also project it onto the people around us. In our heads, we assume people are judging us as harshly as we judge ourselves. Most likely, that’s not even possible. There aren’t many people in my life who have been nastier to me than I have been.

And what are the byproducts of self-contempt? Depression, feeling defeated, feeling guilty, feeling constantly condemned for every mistake or even every bad thought, feeling shame and feeling unworthy of proper human love— not to mention God’s love.

In the long run we feel trapped and perpetually miserable. And worse of all, we’ve done it to ourselves. No one has  truly persecuted me today, except me. I wasn’t created by God to be defeated by self or anyone, and neither were you.

We were all created to be victorious in this life: To be joyful, loved and loving, kind and merciful, productive and content, free of self-imposed guilt and shame, creative in our own unique ways, and ultimately, VICTORIOUS in living life to the blessed fullness that God always intended for us.

If we are not living victorious, we have no one to blame but ourselves, and we need to take responsibility for our own lives by doing what we can to triumph in this life, and by partnering with our Higher Power and others. The key to victory is in our hands. It always has been. We have to uncover it by moving past our self-contempt and by finding self-love.