Learning to love and accept yourself can be your first step toward healing

By David McElroy · August 8, 2016

“I’m really messed up, aren’t I?”

As my friend said these words to me, her big blue eyes looked at me searchingly. It felt as though half of her needed me to confirm this terrible thing she knew, but the other half needed me to tell her she was really OK.

Laura had just spent the last half hour confessing her sins and trying to understand why she was doing things she didn’t consciously want to do. She was confused. She was angry with herself. And she was hurting.

She has a boyfriend who she assures me is wonderful. (I haven’t met him, so I can’t say.) He’s perfect in every way, she says, both as a man and as someone who she would hope to marry. She admits that he doesn’t understand her (and never will) and that he makes her uncomfortable at times, but he still checks all the “husband material” check boxes in her mind.

What she doesn’t understand is why she’s pushing him away — and she doesn’t understand why she cheated on him.

Laura comes from a messed-up family — one parent absent and uncaring and the other parent a constant drug abuser. The narrative that her past taught her is that no one is really going to love her just for being herself. What’s more, not getting her emotional needs met made her feel as though she’s a bad person, because only a bad and flawed person could be so unloved.

She feels a tremendous amount of stress to hide that she’s “bad” — and nobody would ever think to call her this based on her sweet and wholesome public life — because she thinks her only chance to be loved is to hide how terrible she really is inside.

Unfortunately, I see similar patterns quite often.

When I talk with many of the people I love — and they tell me their secrets and fears — I find the demons they carry from childhood programming almost always survive and thrive in their minds as harsh and condemning judges telling them they’re not worthy of being loved and that they’re bad people.

There’s no telling how much better the world would be if people could believe they deserve to be loved and that they owe it to themselves to leave the judgment behind.

Laura doesn’t feel worthy of the boyfriend who loves her. She wants his attention. She wants him to want her. She wants to believe that someone so good could care about her — because that attention makes her feel slightly more alive for a moment — but she ultimately doesn’t believe she’s good enough.

So she goes through a pattern. She seeks the attention and affection of a good man who can love her and make her feel alive, but once she has his love, she feels unworthy — and feels as though he’s bound to abandon her anyway — so she pushes him away and even cheats in order to prove her narrative is true — that she will be abandoned and that she’s a bad person.

It’s a nasty cycle that leaves her feeling worthless.

She thinks her problem right now is what to do about this relationship. Should she confess to the boyfriend? Should she ignore him and let him dump her? What if this is the man she’s “supposed to marry” and she never finds anyone like him again?

I told her she’s asking the wrong questions.

Until you deal with root causes — basic “programming,” if you will — the same problems will keep surfacing in your life in different guises, even if it’s sometimes hard to notice it’s the same problem.

Laura’s problem isn’t the boyfriend. The man might be a great guy, but there’s no emotional connection and she knows there never will be. The problem isn’t even the cheating, which she feels guilty about, because she knows it’s wrong.

The problem is that Laura doesn’t love herself. She doesn’t accept herself. She doesn’t think she’s worthy of anyone else loving her. She believes that she is a bad person who will continue to push away anyone in her life who is good.

Until Laura changes her beliefs about herself, nothing else will matter.

I doubt this boyfriend will be around for the long term. (I doubt he should be, but that’s not the point.) Until she believes she is worthy of love and until she believes she is a decent person who deserves love and belonging, nothing will change.

I’m not a trained therapist who can help Laura make these changes, but I do know — from my own experiences — that as long as you don’t change your own beliefs about yourself, you’re going to continue getting the same old negative results.

Changing your life frequently starts with loving yourself and accepting yourself. That can be the most difficult change of your life.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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