Leave Yourself Alone<\/p>\n
At the onset of the AIDS\u00a0epidemic in the nineteen eighties, I received a card from death and dying
advocate, Ondrea Levine. On the front, it says, \u201cTreasure Yourself.\u201d Inside it says,\u00a0\u201cLove is the optimum strategy for healing.\u201d I know this, I\u2019ve said it many\u00a0times, but I still find it difficult to see myself as a treasure, worthy of\u00a0love and respect from other people and most importantly, from me. That sentiment\u00a0doesn’t stay with me even though I look at the card every day.<\/p>\n
I often wonder why I\u2019m so\u00a0kind to other people and so mean to myself. What will it take to convince me\u00a0that I\u2019m okay? I was beating myself up one afternoon which is unfortunately a\u00a0common pastime. I can\u2019t remember why or what it was about, which is telling in\u00a0itself, but I must have done something very bad. Why else would I be so self-abusive?\u00a0I was scolding myself about making a mess of things, when I stopped a moment\u00a0and realized, \u201cIf someone else were treating me like this, I\u2019d call the police.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s so terrible about\u00a0me that I need to constantly rebuke myself? When I review my life, I don\u2019t see\u00a0any criminal behavior that deserves punishment. For the most part, I\u2019ve been a\u00a0loving person who shows up for her friends and encourages them when they need
it. I\u2019ve faced my trials with as much courage as I can muster. I\u2019ve made\u00a0mistakes, of course, but they were never deliberate and when I do something\u00a0hurtful out of ignorance, I apologize and learn the lesson.<\/p>\n
I was in a workshop with\u00a0Ms. Levine and her husband, Stephen, when he described healing as \u201ctouching\u00a0with love that which has been touched by fear.\u201d He asked us to stop hurting\u00a0ourselves because we were fine exactly as we are. That was a hard concept to
digest. We were over one hundred people and for two days, Stephen kept saying,\u00a0\u201cWhen are you going to have mercy on yourselves?\u201d When I looked around, it\u00a0appeared that everyone knew exactly what he was talking about, like I did. But\u00a0doing it was a whole different story.<\/p>\n
I don’t think that thrashing\u00a0ourselves is a human trait. I think it\u2019s a learned pattern that had been lodged\u00a0so deeply into our thinking for so long, it\u2019s hard to find the roots. We try to\u00a0figure out why it\u2019s there, but if we practice forgiveness instead of finding\u00a0fault, if we can just leave ourselves alone, the \u201cwhy\u201d of it doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0What matters is recognizing the hurtful behavior, finding compassion and softening
our attitude toward ourselves. Motivational speaker, Louise Hay, said, \u201cYou\u2019ve\u00a0been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn\u2019t worked. Try approving of\u00a0yourself and see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a writer, I interpret\u00a0that angry, demeaning voice as my inner critic, an ogre who whispers in my ear\u00a0and takes great pains to coerce me into feeling badly about myself and what I\u2019m\u00a0creating. He or she, depending on how you see it, is relentless about proving\u00a0that you are inadequate and always will be. A friend of mine was
inconsolable after he read William Styron\u2019s brilliant novel, Sophie\u2019s Choice. The story line, the characters, the dialogue and the politics were so authentic, he was too intimidated to pick up his own pen. When I suggested he use that book for inspiration to write his own, he said, \u201cWhy bother? Styron just did it perfectly. What\u2019s left to say? The last thing the world needs is one more bad book cluttering the marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n
He denied himself the\u00a0opportunity to use that book as a green light instead of a stop sign. In her Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling describes a prison called Azkaban that doesn\u2019t have doors or locks. It doesn’t need them. The jailers are what she calls \u201cDementors,\u201d foul wraith-like creatures that hover in the ethers, draining the prisoners of all hope and happiness, leaving them paralyzed with despair.<\/p>\n
Like the Dementors, the\u00a0voice that eats you alive has one main objective \u2013 to discourage you from doing\u00a0anything that will bring you pleasure or fulfillment. It\u2019s a punisher, but pain\u00a0doesn’t deserve punishment. It deserves compassion so you can find the gumption
to get up and start again. Maybe you\u2019ll succeed the next time and maybe you\u00a0won\u2019t. Either way, life will become a gentler place if you soothe yourself when\u00a0you fall down, pluck up your courage and lend yourself a helping hand. I heard\u00a0a wise woman say, \u201cWhen I lost my husband, we were living in a remote place\u00a0with no people around so I had to learn to hold my own hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
I believe that healing,\u00a0the thing that we took birth for, may take a lifetime commitment but it is\u00a0within our grasp. We don’t have to wait to begin. All we have to do is leave\u00a0ourselves alone and remember that we are absolutely fine, just the way we are. Then\u00a0the real work can begin.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leave Yourself Alone At the onset of the AIDS\u00a0epidemic in the nineteen eighties, I received a card from death and dyingadvocate, Ondrea Levine. On the front, it says, \u201cTreasure Yourself.\u201d Inside it says,\u00a0\u201cLove is the optimum strategy for healing.\u201d I know this, I\u2019ve said it many\u00a0times, but I still find it difficult to see myself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2168,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions\/2168"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}