Tag Archives: self deprecation

January 13, 2019

627. Self-Devaluation and The Body

By Marlen

 

When reading the words ‘self-devaluation’ I interpreted it only as having the usually termed ‘low self-esteem’ instead of realizing that there is an expanded meaning to it which appears in various ways in which we might exist in guilt, shame, regret, a belief of having failed in something, losing something or someone and essentially anything that makes us feel ‘less than’ ourselves, no matter how subtle it may be.

To me it is revealing because I had created this idea that I don’t have self-esteem issues, nor self-acceptance issues, because I have mostly seen these as superficial aspects like embracing your looks or the amount of judgments you have on yourself about your body or certain personality characteristics. However upon relating it to a certain diagnose in relation to my body and reading more about it, I realize that I have been having self-devaluation issues that I didn’t deal with properly, I swept them aside causing a series of physical conditions that I am currently facing and assisting myself and my body to get to a point of stability and heal, which I realize it won’t also be an ‘instant process’ but realizing: whatever it takes.

Part of my focus point this year is healing and the words that emerge in me are ‘to let go’ of the patterns of self-depreciation that I have been harboring. These have to do with a sense of shame, guilt, culpability and failure for the most part. They all relate to what I have in a way also defined as my ‘Achilles heel’ so to speak, that part where I’ve found the most points to learn and face and expand on, but also some of my greatest woes, falls and source of guilt and shame.  

As I wrote and faced the points that I wrote about in my past two blogs, I realized that I was in fact going through a rather stressful situation that detonated more symptoms in my body that I then rushed to deal with. Over a few visits to different doctors and alternative means of healing and therapies, I have been realizing how I have created this to myself and my body and what aspects led me to experience what I am going through. There was a fear of it being something that I couldn’t overcome or would have to go through painful processes to deal with, and that then detonated more fear that made the inner conflict aggravate and so stressing my body more. In essence, it hasn’t been an easy time for me for various reasons, but I realize that I am the only one that can sort it out since I created the relationship to the ‘stressors’ so to speak.

What I saw is that this has been ‘in the making’ for many years, even if I can usually tell the story and relate it back to the last three or four years in my life; it has in fact been something that I have been ‘hanging’ around within me since I can remember and yes, it has to do with relationships, the perceived failures and mistakes in them, the failed commitments or faults committed in relationships and even the yearnings or infatuations of the past around them. I’ve turned these into a series of regrets that I’ve held onto as a second layer definition of ‘who I am,’ which I’m sure are causing me to create other projected conflicts where there are none, such as for example experiencing jealousy in my relationship when there is nothing to actually worry or be jealous about. It all has to do with my own relationship to my worth as a person in relationships and as such, the way that I’ve ‘held’ the people that once were in my life within me.

By saying that, I can see shame, guilt and a general feeling of having failed. Even if currently I am in a supportive relationship, I consider that if I don’t deal with these aspects, it can eventually ‘spill out’ onto it because I am the one that has held on to these self-definitions of ‘who I am’ in relation to my past and relationships, which essentially means that I haven’t yet self-forgiven me, I haven’t genuinely let go of the old in order for me to genuinely be here and empty to grow and expand on who I am as a person and yes in a relationship as well.

Upon the discussions I have had with the various people that have assisted me with this point, the common advice is to let go, to throw the garbage out instead of holding it in. The point is that I’ve been aware of this at a knowledge level but, I haven’t actually let go of it, because its existence in me was justified in a very twisted way.

In a way, I perceived that I had to suffer or avenge for all the ‘wrongdoings’ in my relationships, that I had to take on others’ possible pain or suffering I could have caused upon my own body, to essentially be ‘unwell’ even if in reality I certainly have a supportive and generally stable life in order to be ‘on par’ with what I believe others have to go through due to my actions. It is auto aggression as one of them told me, it is self-inflicted and I called it self-flagellation as well, because in my mind there is a perceived notion of justice or ‘making up for’ the perceived pain I believe I caused on others. This means I kept myself pointing my finger at myself and that caused a lot of subtle yet continuous stress and guilt, shame that eventually blow up to become something bigger to deal with.

This pattern right here is just a part of myself that was masked as something ‘benign’ in a twisted manner within me. Perhaps some people might relate to it, and I’ve played this out in my life before in various ways where I believed I had to suffer, like a martyr of sorts to ‘wash the sins away’ so to speak. That’s the kind of pattern that I am dealing with and this wasn’t existing in a conscious manner within me, but at a deeper level that I became aware of through talking and discussing about this with various healing assistants, which were both regular medicine and alternative means like body alignment, homeopathy, acupuncture and doing some further research online in the German New Medicine documents which I’ve found through a fellow Destonian sharing about her process with certain diagnose in relation to her health.

What emerged in me recently is a deep sense of sadness and regret for not having listened to my body before. I felt the symptoms all the way but still, associated it in a lazy manner to all sorts of other things and not really investigating further. I would go to get the medicines to just stop the pains and symptoms, but would not investigate further. It essentially had to get to a more latent point where I got fed up of having to be constantly worrying about it – yet not doing something practically supportive for my body – and reaching a low point this past month in order to then decide that it was time to genuinely reach out for help and ‘sort it out’.

This is a pattern of negligence towards myself, my life and my body. I can also see how in my mind I worried more about everything and everyone else instead of looking at what I was in fact causing to my own body. This is the most painful part of it and it still makes me sad, to see to what extent I placed attention on all sorts of ideas, perceptions, fears, beliefs, projections and imaginations about ‘all that I did’ or ‘didn’t do’ in the past, and not realizing how drop by drop I created this whole conflict until it got to a more evident point for me to finally realize: ok this is not about ‘sorting the physical symptoms out’ only, but about Understanding how I created it in my body, what it is associated with and how I can now work with those aspects at an internal/mind level as I go through the various therapies and support that I am now taking in for my body. Being sad or emotional about it is not the way, I understand that, but I have also embraced the momentary crying that this realization brings, because as with anything related to shame, guilt, etc. We can use these emotions to realize something, to deeply be ‘affected’ by it so that we can remind ourselves of how to prevent this from happening again in the future. It is part of the manifested consequences that yes, I can be grateful for because it’s showing me my creation, how else could I do this if I didn’t have a part of physical matter letting me know ‘hey you’re causing yourself harm!’ otherwise? Sure it’s not nice or pretty to face this, but at least I can have an idea of what I am dealing with to sort it out within me.

I can only forgive myself for causing such distress to my body in being negligent about what I was doing to it based on my internal conflicts and participation in thoughts that I considered were meaningless. The fact is that I justified all of it as a form of recognition of my mistakes, as if I had to constantly ‘hang it around me’ as some form of anti-triumph, a reminder of what I’ve done so that I could ‘make up for’ the perceived pain or suffering I believe I caused or that others have ‘caused on me’ in the past.

The thoughts emerged right now of: ‘But I am in this process, how the hell did I get to that point? Didn’t I know better than this?’ And this is something that some of these I’ll call them healing supporters enabled me to see, which is how hard I can be on myself and how there is this idea that I cannot fail, make mistakes or ‘be human’ in that sense, and so I have taken it to heart to realize that I have in fact made mistakes and that I can only embrace them, learn from them and let go of the ‘feeling bad’ about it. And yes a second thought comes ‘but you had heard that before! Why didn’t you act on that to change it’ – And here’s where I have to embrace the repetition of mistakes, yes I’ve done that before, yes I had heard that about me before. I can only truly learn this time around.

And the reality is that all around I’ve had the tools to support me, I’ve had the people that are there that I can reach out to, my partner that knows the whole story and constantly reminds me of shared responsibility as well in all that I created and faced and that I have the means to support myself physically as well, but I ignored it to the level where I could not ignore it anymore, and it’s also for the best and I’m learning to not react upon getting to know what is wrong currently in my body, but to understand as a symptom that can be sorted through as well both internally and externally.

I’m learning that diseases, illness or any physical problem are there to be a wakeup call to realize: hey I am going through this process of distress or alteration here, you have to become aware of it and do something about it.

My commitment to do something about it is to continue working on my own patterns of ‘self-deprecation’ that are related to the points I associated above, but even more so if I believed I had written them out before, it’s about me working now on living words that can assist me to genuinely let go, which are related to understanding, embracing mistakes, realizing the shared responsibility in them all, to remind myself of the fact that I have in fact grown from those perceived ‘mistakes’ and have enabled me to be who I am and where I am at the moment, that they don’t have to define me and my current reality, even if I am facing some of the consequences.

One of the points I am starting to implement is to smile, physically smile whenever the same thoughts, projections or remembrances come to me and to now see what I’ve gone through so that I could be where I am today, to see what I have learned within me and how it gives me an opportunity to face aspects of me that yes, I might not be proud of, but also to learn to see aspects I had yet to face and change, to become aware of and develop.

I’ve also judged myself for having ‘repeated’ mistakes as I see them, but I will also take one perspective that one of the healing supporters told me which is to even consider that there are no mistakes as such, because of how mistakes have become such a bag of emotions and instead, I can simply see them as paths that weren’t leading me to where I had to be and that’s it.  – Sometimes we come to face and confront things that exist within ourselves in ways that may not be the ‘smoothest’ of ways, but those rough paths are also part of what we need to face to strengthen ourselves, to kind of finally expose our ‘Achilles’ Heel’ (lol I keep writing Achilles’ heal) or the part that wasn’t yet strengthened through exposure to the ‘problems’ to then be exposed and work with the resolution of it in a way that is more related to Understanding how I created the problem or conflict and in doing so, get to identify the patterns, the words, the emotions that I lived and how it ended up causing the problems that unfortunately, the body takes the brunt of.

In any case, because what I am facing generally relates to the sense of having done something bad, wrong, failed in the realm of relationships in the past, I can only say that if there are judgments, a sense of culpability, a sense of failure or loss within past relationships or  in relation to something or someone in one’s life that one feels made one to be at a ‘loss’ point, it is then to investigate where and how we have defined ourselves in relation to those situations, events or people in our life. And to be able to forgive ourselves for it, to release, to let go and sometimes to take the best of them to integrate it in our lives as part of who we are and what we learned from them, because I’ve ultimately realized it’s not about the people I have been worrying about in reality, it’s about me and the relationship I created, the words I lived in such situations that caused a sense of wrongdoing, of sadness and of general failure even if I didn’t name it as such before. The experience and what it caused in me indicate such perception of being ‘at a loss’ in one way or another – and that simply has to go because it is not even part of my current physical reality. It only remains as part of ‘who I am’ in my mind, in my thoughts, in my memories and how I relate to them.

So, I’ll continue writing on my side the details of this which are quite personal and as such I won’t publish, because I realize that my sharing here is not about exposing myself to others, but about being able to share what I’ve realized such as seeing what I’ve caused to my own body due to ignoring physical and mental symptoms of aspects that I had to sort out, yet I justified them in all kinds of twisted ways which got me to brush them aside and only ‘cope’ with them but not truly facing them and ‘taking them on’ as in investigating them, going deeper into them until my body showed me: there is something you truly need to sort out here.

Needless to say, it’s been a rough time for various reasons, but I know many others that are having it as well and at a world level it seems we all are in for a rough ride in various aspects, so I can only say: let’s brace ourselves for it and live these points the best that we can. For me my health is a priority right now because I cannot be ‘best for anything’ if I am not the best for myself first. It is sad that I have to come to this conclusion through consequence, but I also need to stop judging myself for it, because I am still here and my body is here with me assisting me to heal as well and me assisting it to heal.

As one of the healing supporters told me, at times we have to be a bit ‘selfish’ not in the egotistical way, but genuinely in looking after ourselves, even more so when having imposed on me this idea that I have to be the one that is always there for others. I also realize that I am the only one that can make any of these tools and means of support effective by having the courage to confront these points in my life, in my memories and go dealing with them as they emerge through my writing and taking on the physical support required for it as well.

This is where writing, listening to self-support on Eqafe.com becomes a way of assisting me to remind myself of things that I may have ignored for some time, that I have ‘known’ at a knowledge level or as things swirling around in my mind, and that I then can listen back and take it into consideration for the points I’m facing.

Best is to stop being hard on myself, because I truly made of something a lot bigger than what it is in the sense of the extent of inner conflict I’ve allowed myself to live with because of it. Though, as it is also explained in some recordings, getting to see deeper aspects comes up at some point in our lives and process which indicate moments where we can then take the points on, work with them. So in that sense, I can trust myself that this is here for me to face it because I can at this point do so.

Without having intent to sound too afflicted based on what I share here, I genuinely want to heal myself from this and that comes through understanding, self forgiving and letting go. I keep having dreams where I am holding on to something while traveling and this something that I keep holding on to creates a form of worry and concern and going out of ‘the way’ to go back to fetch it apparently. I believe this thing I am ‘wanting to go back to fetch’ are all of these past experiences as memories that I believe I still ‘need’ to take with me, like holding on to these definitions, when in fact to me traveling means a moving on, I have to move on and let go of whatever I believe I need to hold on to. A genuine release is needed, so that’s what I’ll be working on and in general taking it easier on myself and my body.

I share this as a cautionary tale, but I also need to let go of wanting to prevent others from going through similar stuff. I now embrace whatever each one has to face and realize that I can only be responsible for me and focus on myself, while sharing and assisting then becomes an outflow of that self-care and self-processing.

Thanks for reading.

 

Suggested Eqafe.com recordings:

Nurturing the Growth of Change – Life Review

Fear, Falling & Failure – Life Review

The Beginning Equals the End – Life Review

 

 Breakthrough

 

Join in if you want to start walking your own process of defining your Self-Honesty

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