Self Love: How to deal with wounding
Love Series
I love all things self love and to my mind there is so much more to realising self love than just being nice to ourselves.
Over the years and as I have dived deeper into self love practices it has become clear to me that many people confuse love and care…
Here are some of my quick hacks on super easy ways to get the ball rolling & why self care is fundamentally important if we are to move into loving practices…
Self Care 101
To truly step into love and healing – we need to step into self care. The truth is that one does not survive without the other. Or to put it bluntly if you are not caring for yourself, then loving yourself will be a tricky nut to crack.
Self care is not tricky to bring into our lives, it just takes a little thought and maybe some routine. When we re-wire our lives and put in healthy practices, we are more able to step into new ways of being.
Self care at optimal can help us to make life changes, it can help us to approach life with a more level head and can enable us to function at a higher percentage.
Self Love 101
How wounded are we? It’s a big question, right? Probably one that most of us cannot answer! The reason for this is because it is tough to look deep inside, tough to say that we are not fulfilling ourselves. After all, who wants to admit that they are the real problem in their lives?
At the beginning I always teach/coach on how we speak to ourselves, the tone of voice we use, the way that we speak to, respond to others, & how hard we are on ourselves. Once we have worked on these areas, we can move forward.
Now a few house rules about self love – there are many areas and to my mind self love is the pinnacle that is closely joined by that which is divine. It is the major rule – to know real self love is to know thy self.
Now let’s look at the next area of how to move ourselves deeper into love healing. Step two is to look into Wounding, we need to look into how we see ourselves.
Stage two asks you how worthy you feel, do you feel as you deserve to be here, do you think that you are good enough? Often wounding is hidden, we do not realise the wounds that we hold and the upsets that we have stored during childhood. We hide them at a young age to protect ourselves and they materialise in experiences outside of ourselves.
Your world view, your upsets are beacons to help you to heal within. In truth dealing with self worth and wounding is healing pathway that works better when there is someone to support an individual. However it can be carried out independently. The independent pathway requires deep inner reflection and facing up to the areas within that are unhealed.
It can be tough to analyse ourselves this way, I know, I did it and what could have taken months with support can sometimes take years alone. In my case it did, although I must be honest my personal situations of the time could have been making it harder.
Stage two steps into love
I trained years ago as a Reiki Master – during my training I devised a gentle inner landscape method to heal my inner child. It was experimental back then; I was just grazing the tip of the iceberg, falling into the spaces of deep reflection to get to know myself.
That was seventeen years ago. Since then I have used this practice to heal inner issues within myself, in line with self love knowledge and understanding to clear attitudes and behaviours that no longer serve me.
To step independently into worth is to be honest with yourself about how you feel about what you are doing, how you feel about how much money you earn, how you feel about the life you have? Now these questions are trackers, they are to awaken you to any wounded areas within. Areas, where you are upset about what you have not achieved, are the areas that may contain inner wounding.
[I can’t do inner healing work for you here – however if you are interested in checking in with your landscape and want a little assistance, let me know. You can e-mail me at theselfloveselfcareystem@gmail.com ]
I use inner wounding in reference to self worth, do you really feel as if you deserve to earn the seven figure salary, do you believe that you can have a brilliant life. Worth can hold us back in many ways and often they are internal value systems that we do not realise are holding us back.
So you might have the wonderful life, the super cool boyfriend, the house the car, the money. Yet, deep inside, you’re a ticking time bomb; there is still a part of you that just feels angry despite everything in your world looking so good. This is lack of feeling worthy, there is something deep inside telling you that you do not deserve what you have, because you are not good enough. Of course this is not true, however the belief is so trapped within you that it is difficult to ignore.
Let’s give you an example –
I have always wanted to help people – I knew it was something that would fulfil me and that I would be able to offer people true space to unpick areas in their life that are not working.
However, as the years have ticked by I have actively shied away from this in all ways. I did this because my inner coding, the messages that I was sending myself, kept on telling me that I was unworthy. Let’s just say it as it is, I did not think that I was good enough. My self worth was at an all time low, guided by the ebb and flow of life and my usual knee jerk reactions, I was constantly letting my fears, my issues around worth and limited beliefs stop me.
Tapping into love helped me to remove all of this by recognising where I was actively sabotaging myself. The wounding that had affected my worth came in different colours, tastes and flavours and it did not always wear the same costume, however it was always basically the same thing. Through self reflection and understanding what had wounded me in my childhood I was able to start shining a little brighter.
What taps into self worth
Other areas that tap into worth are how we take criticism, if we are able to speak up about things we like and dislike, and are we able to stand up for ourselves because we know that we are worth it.
Heidi Scrimgoer in her Critical thinking article in Psychologies May issue, says that ‘I’ve had several encounters where I have cracked under criticism, questioning my motives and my self worth.’
I am with Heidi on this, when we are unable to deal with criticism, it says something about how worthy we feel we are. My other half often says to me why are you so bothered what other people think about you? My answer used to be because I am … Yet, now I know it was because I wanted to please everyone all the time. I dealt with this with a great deal of journaling, putting myself first and then just plain tuning into caring less about other people’s opinion.
However, what if your inner wounding brings up thinking that is more like Heidi’s, thinking? Heidi also mentions later in the article that her unworthiness wrapped in a limiting belief went back to ‘…If my work is wrong, then it might as well not exist. And if I am wrong, then I might as well not exist.’
I use this quote from Heidi because I believe that many of us have limiting beliefs like this that affect how worthy we feel. I used to believe this too; deep inside in my core, I always wondered why I was here and often felt that there was nothing valid that I brought to the table.
Tapping into self love by getting to understand areas in my life where I felt less worthy helped me to heal a lot of my self worth issues, I have still got work to do and it can be an upward struggle, yet I am determined to heal the places within me that are acheing. Once we check in with our life areas, we are able to see which spaces hold our unworthiness quotient.
For myself a great deal of lack of self worth revolved around relationships, money and career. Yep, the big ones folks!
The truth is to really clear and move with love through these areas, we need to face up with where we are sabotaging our inner needs and drives. What are we doing that is stopping us from feeling good enough, worthy enough to be our whole selves?
Now when we look deeply at worth, it is truly about navigating the inner wounding that you have stored inside. To move through the worth section of self love, one needs to capture their wounded areas when they arise. As in what areas of my worth are dominating my decisions right now?
Areas I worked on
Here are my examples and the areas in my life that I have worked on to create better outcomes.
Speaking up is scary for me. People that know me would say I am a chatterbox. That as may be yet, the thing is I am not saying the things that matter. In all truth I have never felt worthy of speaking up. Why because everyone was always telling me that I talked too much, or I spoke to quiet, or fill in the blank, it has pretty much gone like this all my life. Often due to this constant pointing out of how I verbalise, I have culled what I say and most of what I talk is rubbish, as I do not want to share too much with people that judge me.
In order to heal this I have had to get strong inside, to believe that I am worthy and that I do have a right to be heard. As often within my self worth wounding I would think that my opinion & my feelings did not matter.
I no longer feel upset when people joke about my chattiness (well mostly, sometimes I do want to say, leave off!!) and I am more able now to say what I feel and think. Yes, it has taken some work, sometimes it takes me a few days to think about what I want to say. Or I decide that it is not worth it because I am worth more than that. For me self worth is wrapped in loving myself enough to not put myself in positions that minimise me or belittle me.
In some ways what I would say is that I have re-parented myself. Yep, this is because our core wounding tends to come from childhood experiences. It is for each one of us to get in touch with the little boy or girl inside us. No matter how fantastic our parents or primary care givers were, there is always a chance that wounding exists and that self worth needs to be up scaled.
In a nutshell wounding and low worth tap into shame, we feel shame, we were shamed. It is often a type of trauma that leads to this, the big ones are abuse, loss of parents & siblings. Yet, there are others such as being bullied. Also parenting can come into this, frequent criticism, high expectations, not being shown love. The bottom line is that we need parents/carers and significant adults in our life to be there for us and to accept us as we are. Often the criticism of the way we are, or the way we want to view the world can lead to heavy belief systems that create low self worth.
What we can do ...
In a gentle way lets say it is now time for you, me, all of us to stop doing things to please others, things to make ourselves liked by people. You know dimming your light so that people like you more. To raise self worth you need to be totally sound with who you are. You need to love who you are and be your primary cheer leader.
Yes worth is entwined with self esteem, however I would say just to be gentle, let’s crack one nut at a time. Let’s heal one area at a time and allow the body, mind and soul to integrate.
How do we get to where we want to be? How do we know where we are really feeling unworthy? If it hurts, you probably feel unworthy. When people kept saying that I talked too much, or I talked too loud, or I talked to quiet; I got upset. I thought that I was bad & that they were right. Maybe this was bad part of me that I needed to cull? Self awareness has shown me that this is not the case. My voice, my chat is my greatest gift, it allows me, to be Me.
If I am honest lovelies, there is probably always work to do! We are human after all and being human means living with a multitude of emotions and drives. Self love can guide us by helping us to create worthiness, to see ourselves in a better light and to know that others are not right about us. Or to just know, that their opinion no longer matters.
Real answers come from tapping into who you are in all its entirety. I know I have said this before and I am going to say it again I love journaling, writing out why I don’t feel worthy, checking in with why the feelings of hurt and pain are coming up for me. If this can work for you give it a go.
If not how about talking it out with a kind friend that always has your back. Or seeing a professional and asking them if they can assist you with getting to know your inner child.
Self worth is an important part of you being the best you, you can be and without it you are going to flounder.
Before you tap into wounding, I want you to then tap into self love stage one, how you speak to yourself the tone of voice you use etc. Inner wounding needs to be spoken to with the new loving voice that you have created. You are talking to the child in you, or to make it easier, you when you were three years old. Treat little you with love, they are soft, vulnerable and easily hurt.
It is to use gentle understanding to say to them ‘hey I know you felt as if everyone thought you were…. However, I love you, you are good enough, you are worthy to me & I love you.’ This may feel funny at first, in time you will feel stronger, more able to say this to yourself and more able to step slowly upwards on the SL journey.
It is time to let go of hiding who you really are, it is time to be your authentic self. This is not about other people liking you, it is about you liking yourself.
