It’s Not The Fall That Hurts, It’s When You Hit The Ground
This is a post about self-love — and when you are finished reading (it’s brief), I hope the title makes sense. So much sense that you make unconditional self-love your highest priority. Because until it is, not only can we not reach our capabilities and heights, we can’t help others reach theirs. But first, about that fall and the ground.
Here is a thought experiment: Imagine if you believed everyone on the planet loved you, but also that you had absolutely zero love for yourself. None at all. What would life be like? How would each day feel? Now flip that thought upside down, you believe no one loves you but you have complete, absolute love for yourself. Unconditional and never wavering. Every single minute of every single day. Think on that for a minute or two. Which would be better?
The second, and it isn’t even close. If you loved yourself completely, fully, you wouldn’t need external and conditional anything. You’d have it already. Now, of course, neither of these extremes are true. First and foremost, people love you! And we do need connectivity even when we love ourselves. I do not want to diminish that.
But the problem is that so many of us do not actually have self-love. Or if we do it is ephemeral, easily removed. This very much includes me at times in my life. And it includes you. Intellectually we can tell ourselves we believe in ourselves, we love ourselves, but we all have an incredibly powerful subconscious belief system that can easily override our intellect. It can be horrifically nefarious, too, because the belief system is subconscious — we often don’t even realize what our inner narrative is telling us until it is too late. Until we hit the ground.
Here is a fact. Every single person reading this has a form of trauma in their lives. There is a scale of course; there are severe traumas and those that are less severe. Uppercase and/or lowercase Ts is one way of thinking about it. But anything significantly less than nurturing to a child is abandonment to that child. And thus we all have a subconscious part of our childhood when we have felt abandoned. Which means we all have a belief system, again on a scale, that we are not worthy of love. That we are unlovable.
The falling is our subconscious. It’s there, but we don’t know it. So it isn’t quite hurting us. But what happens when we hit the ground? Extreme, almost unbearable suffering. Another thing we have or will at some point all feel. The kind where your biological system goes haywire and you feel like you can’t breathe. Like you might not be able to bear it. That is the ground — it might be being fired from a job, having someone you love leave you, or doing something against your principles for reasons you may not even understand. It may be a hundred different triggers, but it is all rooted in that same belief system. That we might not be lovable. Which means we do not have self-love in that moment.
I’ve hit that ground hard. But I am not hitting it anymore. Why is that? What is the parachute? A few things. First, trauma is never what happened to us, but what happened to us on the inside due to what happened to us. Which means, happily, you can revisit and reverse it. I looked at my triggers, and I admitted first that they existed and then the underlying causes of them. Write them down if it helps, or talk to someone you trust dearly about them. Why does something upset you? What are you currently upset about? Then dig deeper. What is behind it? Compare how you feel versus when you have felt at your best. I love that comparison because it not only works for me; it works scientifically. There is a form of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) through which you find that safe, happy place and then look at the unsafe place. The effectiveness of EMDR can be amazing for some. But you don’t have to do it — you just need to be curious. What causes the fall? What are the root causes of why being talked down to, or being in an argument, or having someone falsely accuse you of something — or whatever it may be — triggers something inside of you? Because deep inside there is usually one cause for almost all of us. Our minds CRAVE safety over all else. There is no less safe place than not feeling loved. And no more safe place than loving oneself.