For years, I stayed emotionally on pause. Today I’m hitting play and learning that I matter too.
Learning to Hit Play
When I was a child, I saw things like a child. I spoke, thought, and reasoned like a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 1 Corinthians 13:11
I read something in my devotional the other day that stuck with me. It said, “It was time to stop waiting for others to take care of me. The only person who can love me the way I want to be loved all the time is me.” That hit me on many different levels. My first thought was, I’m not a victim. When I sit around waiting for someone else to take care of me, notice what I need, tell me what to do, or make everything okay, I fall back and feel like a child again. The problem is that a lot of my emotional and psychological development was stunted when I was a child. It was like somebody hit the pause button, and it stayed there until I entered recovery as an adult, started doing step work with my sponsor, and finally hit play.
I’m learning in recovery how to self-parent. For me, that means taking responsibility for myself and my actions. It means protecting myself when I am in an unsafe situation, either by speaking up or removing myself. It means taking care of my health, going to the doctor when I need to, eating better, spending money on things I legitimately need, and expressing my wants and needs without feeling guilty for having them. I no longer wait for someone else to tell me what to do. I no longer sacrifice my own needs because I’m trying to please everyone else. Self-care is not selfishness. It is looking after the person God has entrusted me to care for. Me! I have taken care of others for so long, it is time for me to take care of me too.
It also means learning to love myself. Before recovery, if I am being honest, I hated myself. I hated how weak and vulnerable I was as a child. I hated that I let people walk all over me and take advantage of me. Yet I kept coming back for more because, deep inside, I believed I was not good enough. As I got older, I compensated with pride and arrogance. It was an attempt to convince other people, and myself, that I was strong and that I was good enough. It was all a facade. A counterfeit. I was doing the best I could with what I had, but it never worked. Then, early in recovery, I met the woman who would become my wife. One day she made sure she had my full attention and said, “You deserve to be loved and loved in the way you need it.” I started to weep. I had never heard anything like that before. Something broke inside me, but in a good way. It was like someone flipped on a light switch. I suddenly understood something I had never even considered before: I deserved to be loved just as much as anyone else.
Walking that out has not always been easy. Understanding it was. Once that switch was flipped, I started seeing things I had never seen before. I began learning that I am responsible for loving and caring for myself too. That does not mean I do not need other people or that their love does not matter. It does! It means I no longer make someone else responsible for proving that I have value. I can express what I need. I can receive love. I can give love. And I can treat myself like someone who matters. This is the gift of recovery for me.
Reflection
Where in my life do I still fall back and feel like a child?
