"Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all" if we are to be happy

One of the saddest, most heartbreaking things about being a victim of child sexual abuse (#incest) is that most of us grow up hating ourselves. Despite every effort, sometimes for years, to find something  we like about ourselves, let alone love about ourselves, we continue to find fault with ourselves. Why? Most likely because our abusers' voices keep screaming at us, reminding us we are worthless, unloveable unless we do what they want us to do. So we did it, even though it felt wrong, bad, but each time we gave in to them, we hated what was happening and hated ourselves for succumbing, being too weak to stand up to them. Then, if no-one knew what was going on and we didn't have therapy as a child or even as young adults to turn our thinking around, we grew into adulthood, middle age and even old age, if not hating ourselves, then at least, not loving ourselves either. 
When that happens, so many of us wonder why we fall in love with the wrong person and get hurt time and again. The reason is simple: we don't value ourselves enough. We don't consider ourselves worthy of love. So we sell out to what seems like the best of the worst choices. 
But you know, we don't have to do that. We can stop that from being our pattern by turning off those voices in our heads and replacing them with kinder, loving voices, the ones long ago buried inside us when we were children. Except, sadly, for those abused as infants, most young children actually really like themselves - a lot! It's narcissistic and it's perfectly natural. As young children, we want what we want and feel we should have it. Of course, parents will ultimately teach us that we can't always have what we want and that it's not acceptable to be narcissistic and think of ourselves before all others. And that's quite okay because as we get older, we understand why what they are saying is right and necessary. But abuse victims haven't had time, in many cases, to follow that more natural route to good self-love. Their journey to healthy self-love has been rudely blocked. They are plunged into self-loathing instead of brought gently from narcissism to healthy self-love. 
So now, how do we get ourselves back on track? We must begin by drinking deeply and often from the cup of self-love. I'm not talking about being selfish or narcissistic. I'm saying if a challenge comes our way, if an opportunity to move forward in our careers or personal life presents itself, we have to tell ourselves "Yes, I can do this" instead of "No, I can't". Every "NO" is disbelief in ourselves. It deepens our insecurity, feeds our negativity about ourselves and moves us further from healthy self-love. And why is self-love so important? Because without loving ourselves, we can't fully love others. We need to deems ourselves worthy of their love. By taking on more and more chances to prove our worth to ourselves, the more we are saying "Yes, I can" and "Yes, I'm okay" and "Yes, I'm loveable". It's that profound truth that Whitney Houston sung to us that "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all". And that love is vital to happiness. 
That's what I did for the 40 plus years after I finally got away from my abuser, my father. Every time I heard his voice telling me I couldn't do this or have that, I replaced his voice with my own child's voice that said "yes, I can do this and yes, I can have that." And I added one more thing: "And you're not going to stop me!" I became a bit narcissistic again I suppose. But I needed to go there first before I could finally love myself as I had the right to love myself all along. 
I hope you'll watch my video above. It's based on the journey to self-love that I recounted in my second memoir "Learning to Love Myself". Everyone praised me for speaking out from under incest in my first book, "No Tears for my Father" but this second book is just as important, maybe even more so because of the hope it offers victims that we can have a better tomorrow. On this Valentine's Day, 2015, I wish you love. 
SPECIAL OFFER: Visit my website store at http://www.vigaboland.com/store and order your copy, printed or digital format of "LEARNING TO LOVE MYSELF" before February 17, 2015 and save 20% on your purchase when you type "tearsofjoy" into the coupon box on checkout. (no quotation marks!)

CAN ANYTHING GOOD, POSITIVE, EVER COME FROM #ABUSE?

I know most will answer the question "Can anything good, positive, ever come from abuse?" with a loud "NO!" And that response is most expected. But as I move toward the end of another year of my life, and another year further away from my past, I can look at that question from various angles, the most important one being from the perspective of a survivor instead of a victim. And when I look at it this way, and reflect on what has happened in the 40 plus years since I got away from my abuser, I see mostly positives. In fact, I see many positives.

When, as I wrote in my first book, "No Tears for my Father", (which has incidentally now won a Gold Medal) that my father refused to let me cry when I fell off my bike and scraped my knee because he told me I had to "get tough", I hated how he ignored my pain. But I did get tough ... tough enough that when the time came to get away from him, though afraid, I had developed the toughness I needed to cope with the next forty years of my life. I needed that toughness to survive the loss of a job I'd worked so hard to get. I detailed this in the chapter titled, "When Good things go bad" in my latest book, "Learning to Love Myself". Once again I was facing emotional and mental abuse, but the now ingrained toughness pulled me up and out of a sinkhole that threatened to set me back to the days of my childhood abuse.

Another positive thing that came from my childhood abuse was the compassion and caring I have for others who suffer. After speaking with so many survivors of abuse who have set up blogs, written books, run groups for victims, I know I'm far from alone. Having suffered as much as we did, we do not dismiss or ignore those victims who hang their heads in shame and think no-one will believe their stories. We do .. because we've been there ... and we know how horrible it feels to live and feel that way. I feel 100% sure that if life had always been easy for me, if I hadn't known such suffering, I could never feel the compassion and the need to help others that I do today.

As a result of the abuse, I also learned to rely on myself. I learned that when the world turned its back on me, when it seemed God had deserted me, there was still one person I could turn to: myself. As I struggled to understand why I had been the victim of abuse ... and there will never be a good reason for that ... I also came to understand that if anyone could change the situation I was in, it was me. You see, life is about choices. As I have written in my poem above, I can choose to live in darkness, in pain, or I can choose to take control of my life and turn it around. As long as I listen to the voices that brought me down, as long as I ate the garbage those voices fed me and believed it, I was a victim. But just as surely as someone can feed us garbage, we can refuse to eat it. We are what we believe. We can feed ourselves good food, good thoughts, as surely as we can feed ourselves bad ones. It's up to us to choose the foods that nourish, not poison you.

When we do that, something miraculous happens: with each little step in a positive direction, we begin to regain our self-esteem; we begin to see we are good ... we were never bad. We begin to like ourselves and if we stick at it long enough, keep on challenging ourselves to get better and better, sooner or later we come to love ourselves. And only when we love ourselves can we truly love others.

That is the primary message of my book, "Learning to Love Myself", written by a victim of child sexual abuse who became not just a survivor but a thriver, one who embraces life, never gave up on herself, and found happiness because she deserved it ... just as you who are reading this now do.

Do not read this post thinking I could ever condone any form of abuse. I most certainly do not. I deplore abuse. But, if you have been a victim of abuse, I can assure you that you too can become a survivor/thriver. Avail yourself of the help others offer; if you can afford therapy, take it. If you can't, read books like "The Courage to Heal". Subscribe to blogs like mine or Darlene Ouimet's excellent blog, Emerging from Broken. Immerse yourself in books written by survivors; read motivational books. The market is full of them, many written by people like you who have suffered enormously but found a way to turn bad into good. And do one more thing for yourself daily: journal your thoughts, good and bad. Remember, when you commit your pain to the page, you rob it of its power over you. It will no longer control you; instead you control it as you write it onto a page.  Above all, choose to be your own best friend. You have a friend in YOU.

I wish you all a happy holiday season, whatever it is you will celebrate, and may 2015 be a year of making your own choices.

Your friend,

Viga Boland
http://www.vigaboland.com