"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!)

IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOVE and HATE YOUR SEXUALLY ABUSIVE FATHER?

Something was said today in one of my Facebook groups that got me really thinking about this question. We were discussing how some victims of incest, or any childhood sexual abuse. do manage to "get over it" enough to move onto productive, fulfilling lives and others never "get over it" at all. They live out their lives, if you can call it "living", in non-stop agony, self-recriminations, and self-hatred.

The topic had come up in relation to the slower-than-hoped-for sales of my second book, "Learning to Love Myself".  I thought victim/survivors would embrace a book that shows a positive outcome after sexual abuse. My first book, "No Tears for my Father" literally flew off the shelves, but this second book, which is actually a much pleasanter read about rebirth and recovery is being passed by. Don't victims want to heal? Don't victims want to believe a happy life is possible after all? Is all they were looking for in that first book was reassurance they weren't alone or validation for their feelings?

This got me thinking about my own father. Why was my memoir of incest titled "No Tears for my Father". Was the word "father" in the title accurate? I hated the man who abused me. He had no right! But he was my father. And because he was my father, despite what he did to me, I couldn't 100% hate him. 

This is one of the greatest ironies and agonies of incest between father/daughter or as it does happen, mother/son. There is that bond, the loyalty to the family, that transcends all the horrid aspects of sexual abuse by a parent. The victim, the child, loathes what is being done to him or her, can't understand it, wishes it would stop, but deep down, they still love the parent who once hugged them, loved them, cared for them, gave them life. Even in my own case, when my father wasn't doing the deed, he would talk with me, care about me, counsel me. At times, he seemed to show me more love than my mother did. In hindsight, looking at it now over the great distance of 46 years, I know that in my case, and I speak here only of my case, my father did love me. It was a bad love for me, but he genuinely loved, and was in love with me. Yes, it sounds yukky and it was wrong. But it's the only excuse or reason I can give for his behaviour. 

So, that brings me back to the title question: is it possible to love and hate your sexually abusive father? Yes, because we don't actually hate the person; we hate the situation, and we transfer the hatred of that situation onto the person. Perhaps that's why people stay in abusive relationships of all kinds: they still love the person; they hate the situation, and until they find the strength, as I ultimately did, to get out of that situation, they also hate themselves. And at the same time, we are so overwhelmed with guilt, not just over what happened to us, but guilt over both loving/hating that person, it makes it all that much harder to heal.

Learning to love ourselves after getting out of a situation like incest or child sexual abuse is probably the hardest part of recovery. It's harder than facing the flashbacks; harder than the horrid nightmares; harder than the feelings of shame and fear of telling others the ugly truth. But if we can find the courage, hopefully through therapy or the love of another person, to face all those things, we can finally reach the state I did in my book, "Learning to Love Myself". 

I hope those of you reading this post will one day decide it's time to read a book about the other side of child sexual abuse that relates the rebirth and self-discovery of the beautiful human beings we all are, children who once endured so much pain, but came out on top to love themselves and others again.

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