The Journey of Self Love
Ugh.... As a child, I loved the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty and was really hoping a man would rescue me from having to learn to love myself unconditionally this lifetime.
Note: THANK YOU for the outpour of encouragement! Thank you to everyone who liked, read, left a comment, subscribed, and joined as a paid subscriber (gasp!!!!!) to this substack.
I was not sure how it would be received. The goal of this needle in a haystack of substacks is not to retire me from my day job. It is to practice being creative and raw. It is to practice becoming a writer. Being less evasive and healing the shame I have felt for so much of my life through storytelling and writing.
So thank you for the encouragement and echo of my humble existence. I am truly appreciative.
Ok…let’s get back to it
I had a whole other post I was working on, but Facebook reminded me of something I posted in 2018 and so here we are…
I am texting with a dear friend last night. We are talking about wanting romantic partners who would would rescue us. She used the word savior. I tell her about my favorite Disney movie growing up.
Sleeping Beauty. That is the one where the princess falls asleep under an evil curse of a mean witch. Only a kiss from Prince Charming will restore her life and existence. She is locked away in a hidden tower so how will the Prince find her?! Will she be cursed to sleep the rest of eternity? Or will some miracle happen where the Prince finds her and knows to kiss her and then she rises from the spell?? Well, it is Disney, you probably know what happens.
I can remember watching this movie as a 3 or 4 year old. I had a babysitter who had this VHS. I would sit mesmerized in front of the television awaiting the part of the movie where the handsome prince found her and kissed her which instantly changed her life. Out of her slumber, she was restored to her majestic role as princess. It just took one kiss from a handsome prince. He just needed to find the princess - that was all. Just one man…
My little psyche really ran it. I latched on to this possibility. Life was already giving hectic and chaotic from age 3. I have compassion for that 3 or 4 year old and why she would latch to this story. I have compassion for the little child in me who could not make sense of the chaos, violence and behavior of the adults around her. She needed to have an alternative narrative to her surroundings to survive. Was not the worse narrative. I mean falling asleep and waiting for a man to restore me to my life is very seductive.
But this narrative required a man to be the main character in my life always. Required me to relinquish main character energy and demote myself to support cast so the Prince could come swoop in. This narrative would require me to be in the backseat of my own dating, sex, and romantic lives and wait for a driver to get in the metaphorical car before we went anywhere. This narrative required me giving up some of my agency. This narrative would require me to make my worth based on what man chose me.
This is the narrative of forgetting that it is my responsibility to choose myself…over and over again.
In this narrative, I could either be the princess who lived happily ever after or the cursed victim. Hmmm. Well I prefer to blame someone, so I will choose the cursed victim and continue in blame cycle until I get the miracle I want. (Side effects of blame: not being in touch with your power, loads of resent, avoiding feelings, unable to grieve, atrophies compassion, and LOTS of suffering). I chose blame for a long time. I still choose it a lot. Learning to have compassion for that part of me. I am doing my best.
Most of my life, I have been searching (unsuccessfully) for a man to validate my existence. And that has meant I have chosen to in relationships out of desperation for that validation. Most humans are looking for some validation of their belonging. Some looking for it through job titles, money, family. My validation of choice was (maybe still is) rooted in men.
Back to that time capsule from March 2018:
I now take full responsibility for loving myself.I forgive myself for believing I didn’t deserve my own love.
I often tell the couples who I see in my private practice that I witness them trying to outsource their own personal work to their spouse/partner/mate. I see a couple come in and wants the other person to make them feel less insecure about their body or their life choices. Then sometimes the other person in the couple will try. Try to give compliments and do the things that their partner fantasizes will make them feel better. But it never works. Maybe for a short amount of time, the partner wanting validation will be soothed. But they will keep playing it out. It will ultimately be the responsibility of the person who feels insecure to learn to love and soothe that part. It’s not their partner’s job. Nor is their partner qualified to do it. There are certain lessons in life we just have to walk through. No one else will fix it (spoiler alert: there is nothing to fix, only to love). No one else can soothe it. No one can better than ourselves.
Incoming Vent: Ok I probably sound like a very single woman who has been navigating life most of her life single! Well I am! I am aware lots of my partnered, married & divorced friends would disagree or question this: Shirley, in a partnership you are supposed to soothe your partner and not want to see them suffer. Ok I hear you…but this is the SINGLE woman’s guide to dating, not the happily partnered woman’s guide - please write your own substack. I am tired of supposedly happily partnered women dis-creditting my observations because I don’t have a partner or husband. This is another reason why this substack exists. Because somehow the intelligence of single women is judged as obsolete. Single heterosexual women would rather take advice from a gay or straight man than a single woman. FUCK THAT! This substack is not about advice giving but it is about seeing the wisdom and medicine that comes through the single modern woman’s experience. Vent Over.
Much of what I desired in a man was rooted in what my inner girlchild never got from her father - unconditional love, emotional reliability, strength, financial abundance and assurance of safety. Everything society says a father is supposed to do [note: I have found thinking anything or anyone is supposed to do/be anything for me is a paved road to suffering]. The biological father I chose was physically absent and unable to do those things and the stepfather was emotionally absent. I often thought that their inability to be the fantasy father I wanted was their fault. I spent a lot of money on therapy blaming my biological father (who has been dead for 13 years yet somehow the cause for my singleness - ha!) for why my prince never kissed me out of my sleep. Blaming him and my mother seemed way more accessible than grieving the thing I wanted and didn’t get.
Nonetheless I continued to be drawn to unavailable men. I was really wanting to be the sleeping princess. I did not want to take responsibility.
Man after man. Unavailable. Not looking for relationship. Ghosting. Great sex, but scared to get closer. Empty promises. Inconsistent. Over and over again. A rollercoaster of unavailable men (10/10 does NOT suggest!)
Me: Dear God, please send me a prince charming like the one from Sleeping Beauty to kiss me and wake me up from this horrible nightmare of being myself and being on my journey. Please please please! It is all that I want!!! Please!!!
God: Request Denied.
(By the way, God is me and my soul)
Ugh. I really wanted Prince Charming though! I thought I did. But turns out I had become addicted to unavailable men. My internal nervous system was just as complicit with being in an energetic dance with these unavailable men as the unavailable men were.
I was addicted to the thrill of working on trying to get an unavailable man to love me. I was in the trauma cycle of still working out my inner child’s inability to understand why her father would disappear. Why he would not be the safe, loving, strong and protective man she wanted. Why he would be violent and inconsistent. This is a lot for any young psyche to hold. So trauma held it for me. And I continued to wrestle against feeling the pain and grief of my inner child by manifesting distractions of my childhood wounds as an adult.
I was attracted to the men who seemed the most distant and least interesting. Some part of me would delight in watching the seemingly most unavailable men crack a brief warm smile at me. I would get giddy getting a text from them. And I would feel so special when they made time for me. I felt so accomplished getting a lick of attention.
I was completely regressing into being a child.
I was in full fantasy mode.
Full Sleeping Beauty mode.
I would be heartbroken when they took days to respond. My day would crumble when they cancelled our plans. And I would question my whole life and its worth when they told me they didn’t think we should keep seeing each other.
Full Sleeping Beauty mode.
Or emotional dwarfing as my therapist called it.
Didn’t know this was where this substack was headed, but here we are…
Definitely guilty of thinking I can experience “love” from someone in early stages of dating while I’m in heightened sympathetic nervous system state, when what I’m actually feeling is a cocktail of my own hormones and stories my ego wants to be true.
Wow! So many thoughts! You’re literally speaking to me and have voice to so many of my experiences. Thank you for this medicine 🙏🏽