To be honest, I don't really think I am very lovable. I have been a dork my whole life. I was the genius kid that skipped 2 grades and people laughed at. My Dad was a generally loving father who would suddenly whip me until I had bruises and welts if I failed to do what I was supposed to do (99% of the time because I actually forgot!). So I kept my nose in my books and got my "love" by getting straight A's. I always wanted to be lovable, but I just can't seem to get it right.
OK - now we are getting somewhere. That's where you start.
(((((Tina))))) - you are me!!!!! Well ... I'm not a genius, but the rest ... yeah ....
Gorgeous girl, you now have the really hard work to do of healing that little girl inside of you who was terrified of your father’s abuse. (I know you just blinked then and said to yourself – oh, it wasn’t abuse, he loved me, he just didn’t know how else to manage me – but he did abuse you. HE was an abusive man and he damaged you.) You have to, with the help of a good therapist who you trust, heal that little girl who wasn’t safe and never learned to love herself.
You are making the same excuses for the men in your life that you are making for your father. Worse than that, you are finding these men and thinking that if you love them enough, they’ll love you and then you’ll be OK. It won’t happen that way girlfriend.
This is really complex stuff. The little girl in you is in horrible pain – and you are repeating the patterns over and over again in an attempt to fill up that emptiness inside of you where the love-of-self lives.
I suspect you also live in your masculine energy for most of the time – masculine energy is outward energy. It’s the achievement, the providing for your family, the initiative, the drive. Feminine energy is the soft receiving love that women can draw on to strengthen themselves when everything else goes to sh!t. Women like us have had to over compensate with our masculine, achieving energy – because when we look inside of us, it’s empty, there’s nothing there (and that’s terrifying). We’ve been so busy achieving and providing and doing (because we were taught that’s what you have to do to be loved) … that we haven’t learned to love ourselves.
The good news is, when you get it, you can fix it. The most difficult part of this journey for me was accepting that me, super achiever extrodiannaire – always ahead of my peers – always young for my cohort - was actually significantly less emotionally mature than most other women my age.
This isn’t about your husband Tina. This is about you. You’ve made some big steps here in the past couple of days … how are you feeling?
