If you were guaranteed success and money was taken care of, what would you do with your life?
Many of us had dreams when we were younger and for whatever reason they were dashed by the time we became adults.
We were either told, you can’t become a princess because they only exist in fairy tales or you were told to be realistic because you aren’t tall enough, skilled enough or thin enough to become “that”.
Do you remember being a kid and saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me?” Now that I teach life recovery classes on a daily basis to people who are overcoming addictions, abuse or negative cycles of life, I realize that whoever wrote that was trying real hard to do the “Positive Self-talk” or they were trying to strengthen their child because of the horrible parenting they had done. Whatever the reason, if we are really honest with yourselves the words of, “you can’t do that”, “that will never work”, or “you’re not good enough”, still haunt us today and we may find ourselves stuck on this cycle of letting life happen.
I teach every week in the darkest corners of the United States, in our jails and prisons. I know what hopeless looks like. I know what oppression feels like. I also know what it is to be locked up inside my own prison filled with doubt and self-sabotage.
To know me, you would never guess I deal with the feeling of being worthless. I am full of self-confidence bec
ause I am a survivor. I have survived being abused as a teen by my stepfather. I overcame the feelings of abandonment by my father. I survived being neglected by the church, because I didn’t know all the hidden rules and I didn’t fit in, which just added to my feeling of worthlessness. I even overcame feelings of neglect as my husband worked 3 jobs and the emotional trauma of marital infidelity from both my husband and I. And just when I thought God was finished, I became the survivor of a gang attack in 2011 which has produced PTSD.
To be a survivor, you can have all the confidence in the world. But self-esteem is an estimate of yourself, and if you have been beat down by words and events, you start to believe this as truth about yourself.
This year my husband and I read a book called “One Word that will change your life” by Jon Gordon, Dan Britton and Jimmy Page. My word this year is “Worthy”. I started 2016 by repeating that “I am worthy of: (and then I would journal what I was worthy of), after a couple of weeks I realized that in order to overcome the “less than feelings of unworthiness” I needed to start taking a serious look at who I was internally and ask myself “Do I even love myself?”
Old habits are hard to break and one of my biggest habits is self-sabotage. The definition of sabotage is deliberate destruction. So if you put the word “self” in front of that you get “deliberate self-destruction”. When you couple self-sabotage and low self-esteem with a high self-confidence you find in a survivor, the results can actually be disastrous.
I have around me a support system that I can call on when my days don’t go so great. The challenge for many is that they look so put together on the outside, that they can’t be honest with what’s going on inside and all the while they are dying for someone to say “it’s okay, you do not have to be all put together for me”.
Please don’t go another day without reaching out to someone if you are that person dying inside. For more information about The 180 Program that we use everyday please click here.
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