ABANDONED EMOTIONALLY

Growing up in a home where my emotional needs were not met by my father and too much smothering needs were given by my mother gave me mixed signals. I struggle with believing that I have self worth. Receiving and giving love is hard for me.

The devotional below shares how growing up in our homes around people who could not meet our emotional needs could of affected our belief system about who we really are today.

In my zeal to people please, I have put a lot of pressure on myself. Giving off a fakeyness that was not the real me in order to be accepted. Never liking who I was. Had to be someone else in my mind's eye to be accepted.

Except for my childhood friends, my relationships later on in life were not meaningful. No depth to them. I used people to get my emotional needs met. I was not deep. I was not real. I did not know how to be. I was an out right liar in who I was. All I was out to get was me feeling good at a price that I had to pretend I was someone else than myself. Being the real me was not good enough. Did not care about other people's needs. I was hurting so bad inside to be loved.

With that being said, you can guess where my relationships went. If they were one sided, then they were not relationships and one by one in my life, I saw them disappear. Expecting them not to last. Silently sabotaging them. Blaming myself all the way. Rejection, abandonment, guilt, condemnation all ensued. I believed I was this awful person. Even sinking deeper into my self loathing.

The author shares in the devotional how God can help us overcome our critical self-beating mind sets. That we are capable of love and being loved. It is not easy to turn around something that has been ingrained in our spirit for so many years negatively and turn it around positively. But it can be done with God's help and trusting people to help and share along the way.

I especially like the opening statement:

Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay.

Do you ever find yourself thinking: How could anyone possibly love me? For many of us, this is a deeply ingrained belief that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thinking we are unlovable can sabotage our relationships with co-workers, friends, family members, and other loved ones. This belief can cause us to choose, or stay in, relationships that are less than we deserve because we don't believe we deserve better. We may become desperate and cling as if a particular person was our last chance at love. We may become defensive and push people away. We may withdraw or constantly overreact.

While growing up, many of us did not receive the unconditional love we deserved. Many of us were abandoned or neglected by important people in our life. We may have concluded that the reason we weren't loved was because we were unlovable. Blaming ourselves is an understandable reaction, but an inappropriate one. If others couldn't love us, or love us in ways that worked, that's not our fault. In recovery, we're learning to separate ourselves from the behavior of others. And we're learning to take responsibility for our healing, regardless of the people around us.

Just as we may have believed that we're unlovable, we can become skilled at practicing the belief that we are lovable. This new belief will improve the quality of our relationships. It will improve our most important relationship: our relationship with our self. We will be able to let others love us and become open to the love and friendship we deserve.

Today, God, help me be aware of and release any self-defeating beliefs I have about being unlovable. Help me begin, today, to tell myself that I am lovable. Help me practice this belief until it gets into my core and manifests itself in my relationships.

From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©1990, Hazelden Foundation.