What’s Feeding It?
Part of the mission of this blog is to be transparent and honest. In prior blogs, I’ve been honest about dealing with the spirit of rejection, low self-esteem, jealousy, perfectionism and more. However, during a therapy trip, I learned that it is possible to know something but not really know it. In my post, “Don’t Be Scared of the Quiet,” I talked about how I started going to therapy in 2022 and mentioned that I realized I was dealing with the disbelief of I didn’t feel lovable. Fast-forward to 2024, I found myself in therapy because of my inability to be adaptable in certain situations. I found it hard to embrace change in situations I didn’t want to change. After a while, I realized that my resistance to change stemmed from this idea that if it doesn’t go the way I planned, then, I’m not worthy of love.
My therapist asked me to go back to the first feeling of not feeling loved and the situation being out of my control. I was transported back to the four-year-old me who listened in horror as a family member joked that they didn’t love me anymore.
In this moment, the realization that people could decide at a whim they didn’t see you as worthy, lovable and/or valuable became a real fear for me. I think from the combination of my spiritual maturity and from my first therapy experience, I was able to easily see how the enemy came in that moment and skewed my perception for most of my life.
From that point on, I didn’t hear accomplishments as something to achieve, I viewed it as a way to keep people to love me. If I was the perfect student, the perfect girl/woman, the perfect girlfriend and the perfect friend, people wouldn’t leave me. I again realized the devil didn’t have to do much to get me to self-destruct because that limiting belief did enough on its own. All it took was sending me a few counterfeits and a bomb detonated.
Therapy helped me to see that the multitude of events I thought proved I was unlovable was just the opposite – some of these events proved I was the most loved and considered person. If you think about it, there really is two ways to look at a glass that holds half of the amount of liquid it could: half-empty or half-full. Because of the negative belief the enemy fed me when I was little, it caused me to look at my half-full life as half-empty. I spent so much time trying to refill my cup only to fill it with acid that slowly burned away at me from the inside.
During therapy, I realized the idea that I’m not lovable sparked and watered a myriad of the other issues I’ve had to deal with, including perfectionism, low self-esteem, etc. I’m overcoming this idea that I’m not loved, but I can say, with the help of therapy, I am able to process my emotions down to this negative belief and process myself through it.
I realized that oftentimes, the anger, the jealousy, the comparison and all the other sins/issues we are aware of are fed by a core negative belief that the enemy fed us. Discovering mine has been a much-needed light in years of walking in darkness.
