TRANSCRIPT
I was often asked as a therapist, how do you love people who may not seem all that lovable or may not even think of themselves as being that lovable? The answer to me is pretty simple. It is really getting to know who they were as a child, getting in touch with their childhood experiences, listening to their story of what they went through when they were children.
What I have found is if you can get deep enough into a person to hear who they were as a child, what they went through as a child, what they suffered as a child, then everybody’s lovable. Underneath it, we’re all born perfect. We’re all born beautiful. We’re all born lovely, beautiful little babies and little toddlers. It’s when we get harmed and really screwed up and traumatized along the way that we gain defenses for how to deal with this awful, nasty, traumatizing world.
Some of these defenses can make people pretty unlovable. They can become nasty, they can become rude, they can become racist, they can become really horrible and cruel and violating of other people in ways that’s like, mmm, they’re not very lovable. But underneath it, when there’s still that needy, hurt, deserving, crying, lovely, wounded child, that’s where the lovability comes in.
And why this is also very hopeful for me is that I, over the years, have found parts of myself that are not very lovable. Certainly, there have been times in my life, a lot of my teen years, where I not only felt unlovable, but I didn’t love myself. I hated myself in a lot of ways, and I think it was because I was so wounded. This was those teen years, the culmination of all my wounds from earlier in childhood, where a lot of my life was just a big defense against those wounds.
I really lost touch with that little inner child in me, and I became some things that I really didn’t like. I did things that I really didn’t like. I harmed, and I really didn’t love myself. It took me into my early 20s to start to make sense of, oh my god, underneath all that was a beautiful little kid who actually is still there and always was there and was just so harmed.
I started loving myself, and when I started loving myself, I started grieving. I started to be able to cry for what I went through and cry for what I’d done, also as the result of what I went through. Then I really started loving myself again because there’s a little kid I really did love myself very, very, very much. A few years, yeah, I didn’t have it so much, but then it came back.
So I’ve learned that as a lesson for life. Also, having been through that process of having loved myself as a very little kid, then went through some years where I really didn’t love myself and even hated myself a lot, and then came back and started loving myself again and really started increasingly loving myself a lot more, I learned a pattern, and it’s held true with other people.
Yeah, but everybody, everybody is lovable. It’s just a question of getting in touch with that deeper, underneath side of them that was wounded and that just needs to cry, needs to grieve, and needs to get back in touch with who their perfect little baby was, who their perfect little self still is.
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