action? Did they forbid you to have any friends but them?
If you were emotionally suffocated or had to serve as a surrogate spouse to one of your parents, you often feel overwhelmed by people's simple desire for contact, and you are very likely commitment phobic. Because of this you feel frustrated in your desire for love, knowing you need and want it, but heading for the hills each time it shows up because of your fear of emotional suffocation.
You find some way to blame yourself for the fact that love eludes you and it can be difficult for you to take the normal, or, in your case, the very tender and gentle steps toward love that could resolve your life theme.
Deprivation
Were you deprived? Did you grow up in poverty? Do without the basic necessities of life? Were you deprived of physical or emotional contact with one or both of your parents or siblings due to difficult circumstances? Did you grow up in a foster home? Were you emotionally deprived? Was your mother too busy or drunk or exhausted to give you any attention? Your father too busy reading the paper to ever talk to you?
If your life theme is deprivation, you tend to shortchange yourself. You “do without,” and feel that this is enough for you, that you don't deserve more, or better, while at the same time judging and criticizing yourself for not being able to improve your situation.
You may keep to yourself, not allowing yourself to receive from others, and then feel the reason you don't is that somehow you don't deserve it. You feel that you should provide better things for yourself while at the same time blaming yourself for not doing just that.
You and Your Life Theme
Take a minute to think about what you've just read. Do you understand your life theme now? Write down the general theme that most accurately describes your history. Then write about a few of the experiences that contributed to the creation of your life theme. For example:
My life theme is abandonment. I experienced it when my father left after my parents divorced and again when my mother died when I was twenty-three. I also experienced it when my dog, Toto, died and when Joe broke up with me.
My life theme is:
As you go along in this book and take steps to change the way you feel about yourself, notice how the behaviors that are most necessary for you to undertake on your own behalf are specifically related to your life theme.
Compensation and Your Theme
As we have seen, there are many events and experiences in your early childhood that combine to create your life theme. Your theme profoundly affects the way you feel about yourself. It also leads to the creation of a whole slew of behaviors you don't even realize you're developing. That's because one way or another, you start adjusting your behavior in response to your theme.
In psychological terms, this process is called compensation. Some children compensate for the fact that they're being treated imperfectly by trying to be better and better, by saying, in effect, I'll do everything my mother and father want—maybe that way they'll love me, maybe that way our life will improve. Now that Daddy's died, I'll take care of Mommy. If I'm really quiet, maybe Daddy will stop drinking. If I give them all my baby-sitting money, maybe we won't be so poor. If I do all the chores, maybe Mommy won't die of cancer. This is compensation in a positive direction. People who compensate in this way try to perfect their behavior in order to get loved, to resolve the painful issues that have contributed to their life theme.
But some children take another tack. They go along with the way they think their parents feel, and decide that their parents are right—they're not worth loving. In this kind of compensation, this child adopts a damaged and unloving view of himself. Instead of striving to gain parental approval, this child internalizes what he perceives to be his or her parents' view: They think I'm stupid, they're right, I'm not even going to try. That's right, there are too many children, I never should have been born. It's true, I'm not pretty, I'm a dog, I'll dye my hair green and mutilate my body. It's true, I do wreck everything they give me, I don't deserve a new bike. The problem with all this behavior, of course, is that it, too, is unloving. It often results in people giving up on themselves—acting out, becoming rebellious or self-destructive.
Whatever your form of adaptation, whether in a positive or a negative direction, instead of retaining the sense of yourself as whole and worthy of life and love, you have compensated for the fact that you were treated imperfectly. By trying to be better and better and better—or by giving up—you've learned very well how not to love yourself.
In this way your childhood, and especially your life theme, has set a pattern that can make it very difficult indeed for you to love yourself. But remarkably and wonderfully, this pattern can be changed. Let's see how.
FOUR
Learning to Love Yourself
The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.
—Albert Ellis
Loving yourself is the greatest work you will do in this life. In a sense it is your only work. But as we have already seen, the roots of your incapacity to love yourself are deep. Indeed, you wouldn't have picked up this book unless you felt you needed some help in learning to love yourself. Scientists tell us that habits make deep inroads in the circuitry of our brains, that it takes twenty-one days to start changing a habit and ninety days to engrain that change. It's difficult to reverse these complex brain patterns, and when it comes to redefining how we feel about ourselves, it can be especially difficult because many of these patterns have been encoded since infancy.
Because of the many ways we have learned how not to love ourselves, we have a good bit of work to do. We must learn to love ourselves in many places and many ways—in our relationships, in choosing our life's work, in doing our work, with our parents and children, among our friends and strangers, inside our own hearts, in the midst of all our see-sawy emotions, with respect to our bodies, and in how we choose to think about ourselves.
What It Means to Love Yourself
Imagine that everyone in the world is a hungry soul whose life has been imperfect. Like you, they had imperfect parents. Like you, tragedies and difficulties befell them. If you could hear each person's story, you would probably be moved to tears and want to reach out and embrace that person. You would want to tell them that in spite of everything they've gone through, they have great value.
You might also want to thank them for having the courage to move from where they came from to where they are now, expressing your admiration of their goodness and beauty and uniqueness. You would want to tell them that, indeed, certainly, in the eyes of God and also in your eyes, there's no question—they deserve to be loved.
Imagine that all these beautiful souls are standing before you, waiting for your blessing. When you look in your heart and ask yourself whether or not you can unabashedly give it, your heart spills over with generosity and laughter and love. You can't imagine anything easier or more natural than loving each person for exactly who he or she is.
Loving yourself means simply that you can imagine yourself at the head of the line of all these souls who are asking for your blessing, waiting for your approval. It means embracing yourself with the quiet heartfelt conviction of knowing that you're all right—that you're perfect—just
