The Wellness Edition No.60 // Self Destruction
Today I decided to do a design a little different from what I normally do. Something geographical and minimal instead of going for flowers, botanicals or a collage.
I came to a lot of realisations this week. My week had been rough and I noticed that since this breakup lots of bad self-destructive habits sneaked into my life. If I learned them so quickly I ask myself if I can also unlearn them as quickly?
Breakups are tough but the toughest ones are when you realise that you spent 4 years with a covert narcissist who actually sucked the life out of you just to discard you once there is a random stranger showering him in attention. Realising that the man you thought you knew has a lot in common with absent parent, a care-giver who should have supported you with love, care, trust but instead degraded and devalued you by any chance he had. You were never good enough, smart enough, ambitious enough, skinny enough, your language skills were never good enough, you were not eloquent enough, not thankful enough…I guess the list goes on forever, but you get what I am trying to say here. Whatever you did it was never good enough and being devalued by somebody who walked out of your life so early and did not even spent much time with you, that is quite a big deal then. So when narcissistic degrading is all that you knew from the care-giver of the opposite gender, it is not a big surprise that you are looking for that in your relationships and fall in love with men who share the same character traits and cater you the negative beliefs you have about yourself.
I am honest here, if people treat me bad I start treating myself bad as well and it has reached it’s peak now. I am done with it, I have to get back to treating myself with love, care, trust and respect. That is how I want to be treated by others but in order to get treated in a loving and respectful way by others I have to treat myself that way, and here I failed completely since the end of July. I realised that I have been holding on the feelings of pain, sorrow, rejection and abandonment. And that is something I have to let go of because in general I am better than I was a few weeks ago but at certain times I completely fall back into the cycle of diving into the pain, rejecting myself and just behaving in a self-destructive way. I have to decide now to choose again. To choose self-love over loathing myself in self-hate. I have to choose to accept myself instead of rejecting myself - just because someone else rejects me once again should not have the consequence that I reject myself over and over again.
I think all of this goes back to unhealthy patterns and beliefs learned in early childhood. I behave that way because I just did not know any better before. But now through a lot of reading I know that you can choose to love yourself and to change your unhealthy beliefs. Instead of diving into the vicious cycle at night of fear, self-destruction, self-hate I have to actively choose to do things that actually benefit my wellbeing instead of harming it. That could be reading, drawing, illustrating, writing…whatever brings me joy instead of doing whatever only brings me further down in the bad habit spiral.
So from today on I choose again, I choose a way of living that actually supports me instead of bringing me down. I choose to have healthy boundaries and not to get involved with toxic people anymore. I choose to let go of unhealthy patterns and beliefs from the past that only degrade and devalue me. I choose to treat myself with love, care, trust and respect - I choose to treat myself like I want to be treated by other people.
Relationships and people teach us lessons and apparently my lesson from this past relationship was to finally deal with the narcissistic abuse that I have been dealing with since my early childhood. In my head I knew it before but I could not feel it emotionally. Now I feel it and it is causing me a miserable pain, pain that I was trying to escape in the most unhealthy and self-destructive ways. I swear to the Universe that this is over now and that I choose myself instead now instead of continuing the route of pain and self-harm.
