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-->© 2014 David's Harp and Pen
Mood: Secure
DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional…or, at least I hope so. If people really are dropping like flies around Nicholas Sparks, someone needs to call the cops.
Recently, for
reasons unclear to me at the time, I felt a pressing need to watch all of the movies
of Nicholas Sparks, author of perennial favorites such as “The Notebook.” For those unfamiliar with his work, his
stories strongly resemble Mark Schultz songs and episodes of “24”: gutwrenchingly sad, and in the end,
there will be a body count. If I
remember correctly, “The Lucky One” had a higher death toll than the last
installment of “Die Hard.” If you
are reading this and you have never seen a Nicholas Sparks movie, you can save
your time, because they are exactly like Shakespeare’s tragedies - in the end,
everybody dies.
I don’t mean to
sound negative, though. I think
everyone should familiarize themselves with Mister Sparks’ repertoire because
his films teach an important life lesson:
if you treat others well, don’t compromise your standards, and if you wait
long enough, you will eventually find the love of your life who will bring you
the greatest joy and fulfillment you have ever known…only to have that person
snatched from you via an incurable disease or natural disaster two weeks later.
Just kidding…sort
of. Though I am not a fan of
romantic comedies or romantic dramas, I found the schmaltzfests of the Sultan
of Star-Crossed Lovers consistently entertaining and endearing. However, when I watched “Nights in
Rodanthe,” I got a lot more than just a good cry.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Jill Torrelson, one
of the secondary characters in the story, died during an operation to remove a hemangioma,
a benign cyst, from her face (she had a fatal allergic reaction to the
anesthesia). In a critical scene, Paul
Flanner, the male protagonist, went to talk to Jill’s widower Robert who had
the following to say about his late wife:
“Her eyes were dark
brown and soft, like she’d never hurt a soul, and she wouldn’t, neither. I knew Jill since we was in
school. That thing on her face,
she always had it. I didn’t care
about it. I never even saw it, but
she wanted it off. I’d find her in
the bathroom crying, looking at it.
She’d be saying, ‘I want to be pretty for you.’ It broke my heart when she’d say that,
because she was pretty. She was
so…but, that’s what she wanted.
She wanted the operation, and in our whole life, I don’t remember her
asking for anything. So, I said
yes…She had all the love and kindness in the world right inside her.”
I want to talk about
a disease that is running rampant today which seems to affect women
mostly. This plague upon the land
is called Toxic Self-Loathing. It
is the practice of not seeing or actively degrading worth in ourselves because
of our perceived lack of external or internal beauty (for those unfamiliar with
the disease, click here). Contrary to what we
think, it is not harmless, it is not “cute,” it is not representative of Godly
humility, nor is it something that goes away on its own in time. It is a disease, and, if left
unchecked, has devastating consequences.
What Toxic
Self-Loathing Does to Us
The aforementioned
scene in “Nights in Rodanthe” opened my eyes to something important: Toxic Self-Loathing is deadly. I never would’ve thought before that a
little insecurity could be lethal, like it was in the case of Mrs. Torrelson,
but often it does kill the one infected, though not in the dramatic and abrupt fashion
seen in the movie. Think about
it: the woman who hates herself
will often give herself to abusive men, and many of those women end up dead at
the hands of their abusers.
Another woman who can’t see physical beauty in herself will starve
herself in an attempt to attain a physical ideal which, in the digital age of
airbrushing, isn’t even real. Yet
another woman, believing she can’t be or do any better, might turn herself over
to self-destructive behaviors such as alcoholism or drug abuse.
Every time we knock
ourselves for reasons other than the conviction of the Holy Spirit, every time
we call God a liar by telling ourselves we are not fearfully and wonderfully
made, we are drinking poison into our spirits, pure and simple. And if we think we are no good, we will
behave in such fashion.
Mrs. Torrelson,
despite all the reassurances from her husband, could not believe that she was
beautiful unless she got rid of that cyst. Her lack of belief in her own value literally cost her her
life. However, her Toxic
Self-Loathing didn’t rob just her.
What Toxic
Self-Loathing Does to Others
I have a good guy
friend I will call the Shadow Boxer.
One night on the phone he told me about his ex-wife. She was very insecure and suffered from
congenital Toxic Self-Loathing. He
said, “She was physically beautiful, intelligent, and had an engaging
personality. But she never liked
herself. She thought she was ugly,
for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom. At first it was flattering, because she needed me so badly,
but over time it became draining. It
was like a constant drip, drip, drip energy drain. I felt like I had to carry
her all the time. The weight became unbearable, and I started to rebel. At some point, I gave up trying to
convince her that she was beautiful, because it never worked.”
The story did not
have a happy ending. For all he
did to love her well, after a short time she left him for another man without
much of an explanation, causing my friend a world of longstanding hurt.
I couldn’t get the
conversation out of my head for many days following. Shortly thereafter, I conducted one of my famous Facebook
opinion polls. I asked, “Which is
harder for you to handle: a person
who is conceited and thinks he’s perfect and doesn’t make any mistakes, or the person
who is rabidly insecure and always putting themselves down?” Overwhelmingly, my friends answered the
latter, to my shock. They said
it’s easier to bring a haughty person down than to lift an insecure person up,
and most said that being around a self-hating person is draining.
The conversation
with Shadow Boxer and the surprising results of my social media survey were
hard to hear, but I needed to hear it.
A lot of women need to hear it.
So many of us become emotional black holes, so incapable of believing we
are beautiful, valuable, and deserving of love that all the validation we
receive is like pouring water down the drain.
Toxic Self-Loathing
is not only a danger to us but a danger to those who love us. Shadow Boxer’s ex-wife didn’t believe she
was worthy of love, so she left (and thereby hurt) a good man to be with a bad
man. It is not uncommon for
someone who questions her own value to leave a healthy person for an unhealthy
one, which often causes the healthy person to wonder what was so terrible about
him that his woman left him for an axe murderer. A woman who marries and stays with an abuser because she
thinks she doesn’t deserve any better sets the example for her daughters that
they deserve to be abused, too. I
have also talked to a number of women who said they learned to berate
themselves and their physical appearance because they had a mother who
denigrated her own figure on a regular basis. After all, if Mommy is ugly, and I come from her, then I
must be ugly, too, right?
So, in other words,
and I don’t know how else to say this, our not feeling good enough, in one way
or another, makes those who try to love us feel not good enough, too. Therefore, unless we do something about
it, Toxic Self-Loathing is not only in danger of killing us, but infecting
those around us. Just ask Mister
Torrelson what it was like every time he tried to reassure his wife she was
beautiful.
(For the record,
it’s not just women who suffer from Toxic Self-Loathing. However, men usually berate themselves
over their perceived lack of accomplishments and the mark they’ve made on the
world, whereas with women it’s usually about their appearance or loveability.
I have a good guy
friend who for many years constantly beat himself up because he felt he wasn’t
where he needed to be in life and would never be good or strong enough to
achieve anything. Every time I
tried to encourage him, he would tell me I didn’t know what I was talking
about. This is a man who started
several extremely successful and profitable businesses and has also received
numerous well-known accolades in the music world! To hear him speak of himself as an utter failure, no matter
what I said to the contrary, left me devastatingly sad .)
The Solution
Now that we’ve
clearly defined the problem, what is the solution? Telling ourselves or others to stop the Toxic Self-Loathing
doesn’t work. No one gets into the
habit of hating herself overnight, so she won’t break the habit overnight
either. (For those who doubt the
ineffectiveness of just telling someone to stop thinking negative thoughts,
watch this.)
Jesus said the
second greatest commandment was to love our neighbors as ourselves. That says to me that there is a kind of
selflove that is not only healthy, appropriate, and
beneficial, but also natural. I
don’t think anyone comes into the world thinking they are ugly and
worthless. I think we all start
out with a good self-concept, because apparently a good self-concept will allow
us to see others in a positive light.
Therefore, the question is when is it that we begin to hate
ourselves? It is usually a
traumatic event or a series of messages from people whose approval we seek
early on that begins to plant those seeds of doubt about our own worth inside
of us.
Many of us think all
kinds of crazy things about ourselves:
we’re not pretty enough, we will never be successful, we will always
screw up the good things in our lives, we will sabotage whatever relationships
we have so it’s best not to get close to anyone, and the list goes on and
on. What I have discovered,
however, is that there is usually one or a few foundational lies from which the
Redwood Forest of Self-Hatred sprouts.
As with a tree, the most effective way to destroy those lies is to burn the
root. Kill the root, and the fruit
has no choice but to follow. The
hard part often is finding that root.
I had a terminal
case of Toxic Self-Loathing from the time I was eight years old until March of 2013. Lie upon lie that I believed about
myself compounded, and the weight of them almost killed me. I got desperate and asked God to show
me when and why I started to believe I had no value. He showed me what that root was. It was a lie, a message given to me by someone I both loved
and trusted. It was also deeply
rooted around my heart, and it wasn’t going to give up that ground without a
fight.
I am not going to
say that following that revelation I never had an insecure thought about myself. However, two things happened. First of all, I stopped seeing that lie
as a part of me and recognized for the first time that it was a tool from the
Enemy to keep me from receiving love from God and His people. Second, with that big lie exposed, a
ton of lesser but still debilitating lies I had believed about myself for years
lost their control over me, too. God
showing me the source of my problem was one of the tools necessary to fix
it. I had a lot of work on my part
(and still do) to see myself as the beloved child of God that God says I
am. However, the war against Toxic
Self-Loathing, for me, has become winnable and and my victory permanent.
Reader, you are
beautiful and you have value. God
says so, and He wants to heal you of your Toxic Self-Loathing. After all, He loves you too much to let
you become Mister Sparks’ next casualty. *grin*
The End
MILK!!!!!!!
