The ability to love others begins with the ability to love yourself. Dealing with the painful *ish that life serves you can present challenge after challenge but you must remain connected to the love that is within yourself. Spreading love like wildflowers is great but what happens when the smoke of residual love starts shooting from your life like a car choking on fumes? You can not give someone something that you do not have.
For a long time, I walked around life tip-toeing on the issue of loving myself. I was an orphan and everything that I did was through the eyes of a hurt little girl who lost both parents. The light in my eyes turned dim and I felt as though I had to be all things to all people to make it in the world. In the process of being all things to all people, I realized that at the end of the day, I would always come up short and feel bankrupt -emotionally, spiritually, and financially.
The ones that I thought I could depend on disappointed me everytime and I learned the language of compensation, making the whole world pay for their mistake and my ultimate shortage of feeling causing me to have a conditional love for myself.
I’ll say it again…….You can not give someone what you do not have. You can’t dish out heaps of love to other when you are struggling to love yourself. Love is a word that is fickle and must endure through many situations to stand the test of time. Love has always been the foundation of what we do and who we are; but many have lost the connection to love due to the presence of pain.
Pain can cause the sensititvity of love to be hard as rocks and unable to translate into any hope for the future. Love is a powerful emotion. For you to love others, you must connect with the love you have for yourself. It has always been there, yet many people are disconnected from loving yourself due to layers of fat, addictive habits, abused relationships, words that scar, and situations that don’t have a silver lining.
Remember this:
Love is love and is so strong it can melt the hearts of the hurt with one encounter, turning the conditional into unconditional.
Think about the following question?
What parts of your authentic self did you have to hide or camouflage in your childhood?
At the heart of each of us is an authentic self that is waiting to love and be loved. Getting to the heart of the issues that consume us and stop us from moving forward in life is essential for us to keep the progression strong for loving ourselves. Getting to the heart of the issues that are consuming us is the only way to ensure that we will not slip out of like with ourselves and enter into a state of perpetual blaming and self-infliction leading to a a cycle of abuse. There is no need to hide those sections of yourself that make you who you are because they are deeply rooted and must surface for the essenceof you to be expressed.
God has placed an authentic expression in each of us. He wants us to love ourselves on purpose so that we are free to love others unconditionally.
Gheesh……..I really enjoyed writing this piece and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Please feel free to share your story of loving on purpose in the comment section below.
With love,
Danita
Danita Ogandaga, MSW 