Radical Love: Learning to Accept Yourself and Others

People inflict pain in order to share the pain that they’re feeling inside.

The danger of externalizing one’s self-worth is that you’ve given over control of how you feel about yourself to forces beyond your control.

Healing is an ongoing process, and it’s never done. From a motivational or an attitudinal standpoint, you come at yourself a lot differently if you’re trying to heal than if you’re wanting to fix. To the extent that you are applying more grace and more empathy and more love to yourself as you are navigating behavioral patterns in your life, you are healing more than fixing. Healing is acceptance—radical acceptance. It’s being patient with yourself and not berating yourself up over unmet expectations, either yours or other people’s, and not basing your worth on external validation.

The road to better mental health is a long and difficult one. You will stumble and fall. You will slip up in a thousand little ways, daily. You will fall backward into old, destructive patterns, again and again and again. And if you treat every one of those setbacks as a personal failure, you will never make it. The only way forward is to get back up, dust yourself off, and move forward again. The only way to do that is to accept yourself as less than perfect. And the only way to do that is to have grace.

Ultimately, society cannot function if we’re not using our gifts for the good of the whole. There’s a reason we are all these different hues of this spectrum. We’re all a part of the same light, but we each serve a different purpose. We’re all interconnected and linked to each other. We balance each other. We need each other. There is no right way to be. Not everyone can be The Reformer; not everyone can be The Helper; we are all complementing one another to make a better world.

Silence is one of the major contributing factors to people feeling inescapably stuck in their depression, their anxiety, their stress, their fear, their shame. If you’re suffering in silence, you’re not going to find a solution for it, because nobody knows. And we are not capable of getting ourselves out of a lot of these issues that we are facing, mentally and emotionally, particularly in today’s society, by ourselves. We need help. We need each other. We need commmunity. We need a tribe. We need family.

Self-love is putting on your oxygen mask before helping anybody else. When you struggle with loving yourself, then you really struggle with allowing someone else to love you because you don’t think you’re deserving of it. You don’t even know that you’re doing that, but you are. So love yourself and go use what you have to be a conduit of love and light and life, and know that if you do, when you are finally extinguished and your time here is through, you will have done your part in this snap of a finger that is your lifespan on this miracle of a fucking planet.

It’s absolutely necessary to build healthy boundaries with people who’ve hurt and abused you in life, but boundaries are only one part of it. You can build walls to keep out everyone who’s ever hurt you, but you’ll still be dying alone inside your own castle if you’re not doing the work, your work, to get healed.

But there’s also a healthy need to sit with your pain long enough to process it. Once you have, you can go, 'Okay, I’ve mourned it. I’ve seen the way it’s affecting me. I’ve learned the lessons I need to learn from it. I’ve made my peace with it, and now I can move on from it.

I believe God has created all of us to be conduits of love, conduits of light, conduits of life. If we can get through our own traumas and our own pains and injuries and find healing in that, it allows us to become stronger, more efficacious conduits.

That hole can only ever be filled by sharing your gifts with the world, fulfilling your purpose, and becoming your higher self - a person who is in communion with your community, your creator, and all of creation.

One of the most gut-wrenching decisions you have to make about helping someone is knowing when to stop helping them. Letting someone you love hit bottom is a difficult thing to do. It’s rough, because if you decide to let them go, there’s always the risk you might lose them forever.

You can hear something over and over and over again for years and not have it sink in and apply itself, but then you’ll hear it in some new context, or at a time when you’re finally open to it, and then it’ll suddenly snap into place.

Trauma is an incredible thing. It’s a powerful thing, and what’s amazing is the way it can ingrain behaviors in you, unhealthy behaviors that can last your whole life, and you don’t even recognize that they’re there.