How to understand, create, and cultivate self-love as a trauma survivor | Advice from your CPTSD Coach
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How to understand, create, and cultivate self-love as a trauma survivor | Advice from your CPTSD Coach
When I think about the idea of self-love, it feels like it's no longer a struggle. And that was a really powerful thing to be able to say, especially when like me, you probably come from a background of trauma and trying to figure out how self-love can actually be attained. I think you have to start by asking yourself some really important questions. And those are: When I think about the words self-love what feelings or emotions come up. What is something I’ve been told about self-love that is not true. What are five positive beliefs that I have about myself? What is the fear that I have about loving myself? What would it feel like to love myself without judgment or criticism? And you could ask yourself millions of more questions about it, but ultimately what it comes down to is are you putting yourself in a position where you are allowing yourself to believe that you are capable of love? And often we struggle with this because our level of worthiness and trust and self-belief and the ability to cultivate all of those things is torn down by the trauma that we experienced in our youth.
How do I love myself as a trauma and CPTSD Survivor?
One of the things that I run into is the question of how do I love myself. And recently I was working with a client and they asked me, I understand this concept of love, but I cannot feel the emotion of it. So how do I love myself? The question is really simple. How do I love myself? It's not that difficult of a question, but the answer, my friend is the short term is that you go, okay, what do I need to do now in the micro to create the change in the macro and what I mean by that as what are the short term things that we can implement to our life today that can set us up for success in the future? What does it mean to create a pathway of self-love? I think it first starts with self-talk and I come back to this often and I want you to take into consideration that self-talk is the catalyst for everything that's going to happen in your life. When you break down and look out self-talk. If we are the story that we tell ourselves, then it would hold true that if we are negative, then our understanding of who we are would be negative. You have to first interrupt that process of negative self-talk before you can ever step into this idea of self-love. And what I mean by that is do you have to, in these moments that you say something bad about yourself, you immediately have to flip that script and you have to say something good about yourself. And not only that, but in time, you will start to believe it. One of the worst things that you can do is beat yourself up about little things that don't matter. So often we put ourselves in this position of, Oh, I broke a dish. I spilled the milk. I was late to work. My girlfriend was upset at me because I left the towel on the sink. My boyfriend is mad at me because I burned dinner. And then what happens after that? We take these ideas and perceptions of other people. And we distilled them down into this place that cultivate our belief from an outside source and that's extrinsic, right? And so you have these moments occur and suddenly the conversation that you're having with yourself is I'm stupid, I'm unworthy, I'm incapable. Nobody loves me. Why do I deserve love? That is nonsense. You have got to stop doing that shit immediately. Why? Because that is setting you up for complete and utter failure. You are setting yourself up for failure. And so in these moments of I am loathing or negative or don't believe in myself, we have to put ourselves in a position to believe in ourselves. Now, obviously that sounds easier said than done. And trust me, I get it because for the majority of my life, negative self-talk was my identity. I had no idea who I was and thus, I was a reflection of everyone else's thought and an opinion of me. That's how I ended up being borderline alcoholic and smoking two packs a day and being morbidly obese and cheating on my partners and lying to my friends and my family and setting myself up for ultimate failure, because I did not believe that I was capable.
How to use positive self-talk as a trauma survivor
It's going to take a lot of work to go through this place of adapting and adopting positive self-talk in your life, but it can start in a really simple instance. And that's by being present and noticing when you are doing it, we all have these moments where we immediately go, Oh, you're stupid. You're dumb. You're ignorant. Why did you do that? Of course, no one loves you. You cannot allow yourself to do that. This comes back to the concept of setting personal boundaries. And what I mean by that is you have to put yourself in a position where you refuse to talk to yourself like that. So many of us talk to ourselves and ways that we would never let another human being talk to us. We say things to ourselves that are so cold and callous and cruel and mean that A, we would never say it to another human and B, We allow other people to say it to us, right? And because of the past allowances that has led us to where we are, we have now deemed it acceptable to talk to ourselves like that. And so step one, again, is you have to be able to break down this idea that you are worthy of respecting yourself enough to not be mean to yourself. I know it's this really spacey concept that sounds foreign and uncomfortable. And once you start doing it, this thing is going to happen where you're going to step into imposter syndrome. I think this is just naturally par for the course. And what I mean by imposter syndrome is you're suddenly going to find yourself questioning the authenticity of the person that you are becoming. Because the person that you're becoming as brand new, you've never been in this place where you are having a dialogue around positivity in your own life. Up to this point, you've only been super mean to yourself. And so of course, it's like a stranger walking into your house and you're like, who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want from me?
And not only that, but you're going to have the reflection of the people around you as well saying, Oh, you're different. Something about you is changed. You don't seem like the person that I thought you were and people will start to notice as you develop self-love that your boundaries, we talk about this, your boundaries are going to start to come into play. And that is going to put people in a really uncomfortable situation, especially those that are used to stepping all over you, especially those that have gotten their way with you, have worked you over, who have made you feel less than, because one day you're going to say this is no longer representative of the person that I am. And I expect you to respect me because I respect myself. And sometimes that boundary leads to this place that you are also going to remove that person from your life. Now, I think you have to take inventory of that. You have to understand if that's the right decision, is this a family member? Is it a spouse? Is it even your own children? There are a lot of factors and considerations that have to be made before you take someone out of your life.
Why boundaries are a part of self-love
When I was 18, I made the decision to tell my mother, she was never allowed to talk to me again. And my high school graduation was one of the last times that I had saw her, up until the day that she died. And I set that boundary because I recognized that the only way I was going to have any kind of future was to remove her toxicity from my life, along with my stepfather and as a teen, that was a really hard decision to make and even reflecting on it now, it's a really hard decision that I had to make, but it was in line with my boundaries. Now, at this point, I did not yet understand the cultivate self-love, that would be years down the road, but it was a reflection of the boundaries that I knew I had to put in place for my own salvation. And so, as you're stepping into this idea of self and boundaries and dealing with imposter syndrome, what you have to take away from this is that this idea of being an imposter is only in your head and the same way that negative self-talk is only in your head. You have to come to this place where you acknowledge that you are changing and, in that acknowledgement, you have acceptance that you no longer have to be the person that you used to be, even though it's excessively uncomfortable and it feels strange and it makes you cringe. And it makes you question the authenticity who you are, because you're introducing this whole new concept of self, not only to you, but to the world. And the other part of this that I think is really important when you are cultivating self-love is that you have to distill this really keen sense of acceptability for the flaws that you have. And what I mean by that is we often beat ourselves up for our flaws instead of just accepting them. And there are people who will tell you work on your flaws to become better. There are people will tell you, work on your strengths to become better. I say that the biggest thing that you have to do is just accept that you're not a perfect person, that you're going to make mistakes, that you should not beat yourself up for those mistakes, and that you will learn in time through the, just the pace of life. You are a different person now than you were yesterday. Think about any great thing that you've ever accomplished. It took time. It took you coming to this place of understanding before it ever truly made sense.
A you step into this idea in time, the third key and the most important part of this is patients. I have a theory and I don't think this theory can be proved because I don't know that there's a real, tangible measurement for it, but I have a theory that goes something like this. It takes us as long to get healthy as it did for us to get hurt. And so when I reflect upon my past and my childhood and into my early twenties, for 26 years, my life was chaos. My life was pain, my life was not anything like it is now. And because of that, and that moment happening at 26 where I started to head in this new direction of health and healing. I've recognized that the idea of health, despite all the things I do and being a coach and being a mentor and going to all of the courses and therapy and having my own coach and all those things leads me to this idea that it's going to take me 26 years to get healthy. It is going to take as long to get healthy as it did to go through trauma. And because of that, you have to understand that you're going to have to distill just an immense amount of patients in your life, because without patients, without this idea and this foundational concept that you can with time, it will never happen.
Understanding Patience in your trauma healing journey
We live in a society and I think as a people in general, that we want change right now. We want fast food. We want fast calls. We want fast respect. We want fast everything. But realistically it takes time. It takes time to respect yourself. It takes time to nourish yourself. It takes time to grow, and I think the biggest thing is like the 1% rule, what can you do today to become 1% better than you were yesterday and better of course is a measurement for you against you and one else. And you have to take into consideration that as you step further into this, you'll care less and less and less about other people's thoughts and opinions of you. Because by cultivating self-love that you will create worthiness and happiness and structure and boundaries and put yourself in a position to be successful. And so as you step into this, and as you start to cultivate self-love you come back to ask these questions. What is it that self-love means to me? What are the beliefs that I have? How do I show up for myself? How do I be a person that loves myself? What does loving myself really mean? And how do I change through daily habits and practice and growth and interaction and listening to podcasts like this and coaching and therapy and all of the things, how do I create a long-term viable change in my life?
It is through patience and understanding, and the willingness to acknowledge that you, my friend are worthy of love.
I really appreciate you. I know this topic can be a little heavy for a lot of us.I'm here to support you. If you haven't checked it out, please read, Think Unbroken it's available on paperback and Kindle. You can check out other episodes of the podcast, as well as follow me on Instagram at MichaelUnbroken. Please do me a favor. If you find this content valuable, please share it. Just copy and paste this link, put it on your Facebook, email it to five friends, text it to a buddy who might need it, help me grow this. I really appreciate it. And as you know, this is something that I do for not only me, but for you, because I believe that is through community and through working together that we really create change. And I believe that it is important that if you have knowledge and expertise, that you share that with the world, because ultimately that's the only way the world becomes a better place. So please share this, please like follow, subscribe to all those things.
Until next time my friend Be Unbroken, I’ll see you.
Michael