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A Journey to Self-Love
by Kristen Moeller, MS
“I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence. But it comes from within. It is there all the time.” - Anna Freud
Why, in the most important relationship we will ever have, do we behave so cruelly? I am talking about the relationship we have with ourselves. We say things to ourselves that we would never say to our partners, our best friends, our children, our co-workers or anyone else for that matter. Most of the time, our negative internal monologue is so habitual, we don’t even notice it. It becomes the white noise on the TV sets of our mind.
I recently participated in an exercise in which a group of people took turns asking one another, “Who do you say I am?” The responses to this question were beautiful, inspiring and generous, even when they came from people who didn’t know each other. The exercise went like this:
Mary asks, “Jeanette, who do you say I am?”
Jeanette responds, “You are love, beauty, wisdom, strength and courage.”
I reflected on how different the answers would be if we were to ask ourselves the same question. Now imagine that Mary asked and answered the question out loud for herself: “Who I say I am is…well…I am a pretty good person…most of the time.” If the exercise were purely an internal monologue, it would most likely be along the lines of, “I am always late, I am not smart enough, I am not a good enough daughter…”
You get the drift. This really is how we are in our relationship with ourselves.
It has been said that the journey within is the most important journey of all. Many of us are following a path, searching for meaning, for something bigger. Although this may be a worthwhile endeavor, are we searching at the expense of finding? We incessantly seek and convince ourselves that the next big thing will finally give us the answer that will make everything right. We remain seduced by a distant destination, sailing with one eye always on the horizon, forgetting the destination might just be a mirage.
Our lucrative and enormous self-help industry actually depends upon our endless seeking of enlightenment. Type “self-help” into the search function at Amazon.com and you will find more than 172,000 book titles alone. Often, we read these books without taking the necessary action and without ever creating the transformation we pursue.
Many of us are actually addicted to the quest for self-improvement. We never quite settle in. We keep going and going, peeling back more and more layers of the proverbial onion, hoping that one day we will find the truth about life and ourselves. One day we will arrive and everything will make sense. We will be okay; we will be “fixed.”
Not only do we perpetually seek but we act as though we have all the time in the world to get there. In truth, we live in a physical body and in a physical world—and our clocks are ticking. The tragedy is that many of us live our entire lives without fulfilling our dreams.
We seem to have a basic dissatisfaction with what is. We want things, people, places, and ourselves—in short, our lives—to be different than they are. In her book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert describes the human condition as “the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”
On top of all of this, in this era of abundance and instant information, we are told we can have it all and that anything is possible. For those with an already shaky sense of self, the inability to assimilate all this opportunity can leave us feeling insufficient. We wonder how we can possibly do it all. We see that we can’t and the obvious answer to this dilemma is that there is something wrong with us. We are not enough. We tell ourselves we cannot handle all the abundance—so why even try? It appears to us that others have an easy time taking what they want from the stream of life. We compare ourselves, and once again, come up short. We let the internal negative tapes run, always in the background, because after all, they are the truth.
How did we get to be this way?
Small things can set us off—tiny incidents that matter to no one else but loom large in our minds. We latch onto them, magnify them and they become indelible, forming who we become. Even though these events may have occurred long ago, we get messages, learn lessons and make decisions that impact our feelings, thinking and behavior. When we make these formative decisions, we are not always aware that we alter the course of our lives.
Looking back on my early life, I can clearly see how I allowed external events to shape and define me. With each life challenge, I made a decision about myself, building a perception that later led to my self-defeating behavior.
One of these early pivotal moments occurred for me in the third grade as my class took turns reading aloud. When it was my turn, my proud moment, I began reading enthusiastically, but faltered at the point in the book where it said, “Chicago is known as the Windy City.” I plowed onward, reading, “Chick-a-go is known…” The entire room erupted in laughter, and my face burned red hot. I plopped down in complete humiliation.
At that moment I made a critical decision: I am not smart enough and I will never feel that embarrassed again! From that day forward, even if I was sure I knew the answer, I would remain silent anyway. This behavior followed me throughout my life, even in graduate school when I earned straight As. An upset third-grader was running my life!
I use this example to illustrate how seemingly insignificant these life-altering events can be. More significant episodes occurred for me as well and I continued to gather evidence for everything I wasn’t. My parents divorce—I wasn’t a good enough daughter. The sudden death of my aunt—I wasn’t safe; life is scary and unpredictable. Moving back and forth between my parents homes—I wasn’t loyal; I have to love one parent more than the other, then switch back. Changing schools and not fitting in—clear proof that something was wrong with me and I wasn’t good enough.
Mark Epstein writes in his book, Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change, “When awareness is hijacked early in life by the need to react to or manage environmental insufficiencies, this hijacking leaves holes in a person’s sense of self.”
We then develop ways of interacting with the world—protective mechanisms that serve us initially, but later keep us trapped. Our self-image suffers and feelings of self-doubt and of not being good enough become entrenched.
We all have different ways to compensate for what we believe we lack. For instance, some people might become power-hungry leaders to compensate for having no friends or being teased in school. Others might excel in the financial world to compensate for childhood poverty. Still others stay in unfulfilling relationships to compensate for feeling unlovable after having their hearts broken when they were young.
I focused on my appearance and weight—something I thought I could control.
Our society places an enormous emphasis on appearance. False images of perfection are reinforced everywhere—on television, in film, in print. We measure ourselves and our lives against these unrealistic ideals. We compare how we feel on the inside to how others look on the outside. Some of us take this to extremes and into the murky world of unattainable perfection. Growing up in a culture that celebrates a cookie-cutter approach to thinness and beauty, it’s easy to see why many young girls later develop eating disorders.
Males suffer from eating disorders as well. Some want to lose weight while others compulsively attempt to gain weight and be stronger. Boys (and men) arguably have a more difficult time due to the stereotypical belief that eating disorders are a “female” issue.
The National Eating Disorder Association (www.nationaleatingdisorders.org) offers startling statistics that paint a dismal reality. Over one half of teenage girls and nearly one third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives. These behaviors stem from beliefs formed at an early age. 42 percent of first through third grade girls want to be thinner and 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat. It’s not surprising, considering that the average American woman is 5’4” tall and weighs 140 pounds, while the average American model is 5’11” tall and weighs 117 pounds—this is thinner than 98 percent of American women. Our culture’s unrealistic standards of beauty lead to 25 percent of American men and 45 percent of American women being on diets on any given day. In this country, we spend over $40 billion on dieting and diet-related products each year.
If you saw a picture of me as a junior in high school, you would see a pretty, slender, blond haired, blue eyed girl. However, that is not what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I thought that my thighs curved out where they should curve in. I felt that my nose was too big and lips too small. Standing sideways in the mirror, I couldn’t tell if my feet were too big or my legs too short, something I first noticed at age 10, but by 17, I was sure that something wasn’t right. All this external focus covered up the deep internal insecurities that I had no idea how to address.
After relentlessly comparing myself to others who seemed to have it together, my illogical conclusion was that I needed to lose weight. I started dieting. There wasn’t a lot of weight to lose on my already slender frame and my classmates noticed and commented. They said, “Have you lost weight?” but I heard, “You look great!”
Later that year, I got the flu. I threw up for three days straight. Exhausted and dehydrated, I stepped on the scale after the vomiting subsided, delighted to see how much weight had melted away. I thought, “Look at that! Five pounds magically disappeared!” Something shifted for me.
I began vomiting my food whenever I felt slightly uncomfortable with what I had eaten. I believed I could handle it, but it wasn’t long before I realized it had me. I couldn’t stop. I grew increasingly frail and thin. For five years, I was caught in the vicious cycle of bulimia.
During my final months of college, I grew desperate. I hated myself and my life. There was a buzz of excitement among my friends and classmates as they prepared to begin their new careers. I was terrified! I thought to myself, What now? I can’t do anything! I felt hopeless. As the big day approached, it seemed as if a black hole was coming to swallow me forever.
Painfully aware of my despair, my parents stepped in and proposed a treatment center. I was finally ready. My life changed forever on the day I said “yes” to recovery. That was September 25, 1989. When I made that choice, I began the journey back to myself.
Imagine that once upon a time you knew you were perfect.
At some point you forgot.
You started trying to get somewhere.
Something happened and you decided you weren’t enough.
You started looking outside yourself for the answers.
You forgot you already had all of the answers.
You lost sight of your power.
You lost sight of your dreams or told yourself that you didn’t have any.
You started playing small.
You stopped living your life fully. You kept searching but never finding.
You settled for an ordinary life.
You thought that was all you deserved.
At the moment of crisis, when we realize we are stuck, or shut down in some way, we have an opportunity to begin a new way of being. By practicing awareness, we can regain a sense of self and recreate our lives and who we are.
What if, instead of changing how we are, how we look, or what we do, we start by changing our perspective? What if we could see ourselves and the world differently? What if we chose growth for its own sake—from the joy of the discovery—and not from a sense of lack? What if we could love ourselves just the way we are and just the way we are not?
Something else is possible for us—and for the world.
Kristen Moeller, MS, is an author, coach, speaker and radio show host specializing in empowering people to live extraordinary lives. Her first book, Waiting for Jack, will be released in the spring of 2009. When she is not actively making a difference in the world, she thrives in the beauty of Colorado, where she lives in a magical, solar-powered house on the side of a mountain with two large dogs, an ornery cat and her best friend and husband of 13 years. Visit her website at www.waitingforjack.com.