Self-Respect

I like me. I hope you do too. It’d be kinda sad if you don’t, but I’ll still like me all the same.

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In this post, I’d like to talk about self-respect, and I’d like to use my life as a kind of case study.

I’ve lived almost my entire life, save for maybe the first 18 months or so, believing I’m bad and unworthy of love and acceptance. That was up until I began my life’s most urgent and important work, that being to heal my oldest wounds.

I’ve discovered that my oldest wounds are underlying much of my stunted self-development, and that discovery caused a surge in improvement in my self-respect, and is the first thing I figured out that must be healed. And so, I’ve begun that process.

Grab a coattail if you want… you’re welcome to ride along with me on this… but hang on, it might be a ride to remember! Maybe not for you, but certainly for me!

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I’ve had the very good fortune to have had some great relationships with truly beautiful women (it seems I only date beautiful women.) Each one started with lots of shared love, great sex, and happy times, and ended with no surviving traces of any of it. For me it was relationship failure after relationship failure, all without me having any understanding of why, or what I did or didn’t do that created or contributed to their endings.

It’s clear to me now that throughout my life I did not have enough self-respect to stand up for myself, to make choices that are good for me.. and not just for other people, including my mom, dad, family, friends, or co-workers. I was raised to be a people pleaser, and the consequences and ramifications of that haven’t been the least bit good for me, that’s terribly clear now. The biggest question in my mind is why…, why didn’t I have enough self-respect in the first place? What went wrong?

I’ve asked myself many times why I allowed people to be disrespectful toward me, but never seemed to gain useful insights. I discovered Dr. Gabor Mate’s book The Myth of Normal, and Dr. Jonise Webb’s book Running on Empty (both available on Amazon). Combined, these two books worked to unlock that stubborn door to insight for me, and I whole heartedly recommend them both. While reading them, I learned that it’s been my poor self-respect that had me enter and stay in some relationships, why I lost the ones I felt the most hopeful about, and why each one went the way of the dodo bird. And, as it turned out, my poor self-respect was present in my relationships with friends and co-workers too, and worked out in much the same way. It’s been a real problem for me throughout my entire life, starting when I was about 18 months old when a life altering wound was created in me, one which was left unhealed, and has become a top priority for me to heal, which I can see is work that’ll last the rest of my life, as it does for everybody. I’m cool with that because my life has been improving ever since.

I’ve learned what went wrong in the development of self-respect in me, and it was this: Since I was around 18 months old, I tolerated physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, and violence at the hands of people who professed to love me.  I endured frienemies, unhealthy for me partners, and nasty people because I remembered that one time or that one day or that one phase of our relationship they that they treated me nicely, and I hung on to that feeling of belonging.

And there’s the thing nobody wants to loose… belonging. The threat of being excluded or socially excommunicated has become a weapon in our society, which when wielded boils down to it’s most basic truth: we are all culturally expected to think, say, and do as we’re supposed to, and if you can’t or won’t or forget to… then belonging mustn’t be important enough to you, so obviously you don’t belong here so beat it kid, you’re not welcome here, whatever “here” is.

Let me tell you a family story… it goes like this: when I was a toddler, my parents struggled with potty training me because I would cleverly hide behind a door and poop in my diaper instead of the potty, as toddlers are apt to do. One day, my dad found me hiding behind a door pooping in my diaper, and with my mom standing behind him, he angrily held that poopy diaper an inch from my face while loudly threatening to shove it right into my face if I ever did that again. And guess what… it worked, the threat of that punishment was enough to make me never do that again, ever. But that’s not the end of it. As would be ordinarily expected to happen, that event created a trauma in me that I did not have the language or brain growth to process. Being a family story simply reinforced the trauma each time it got retold, which my mother gleefully did to all of my girlfriends throughout my life.

From that day on, when something looked remotely like that original trauma, I’d fine tune and reinforce my way of coping with it using the wisdom, understanding and brain capacity I had at that time. Sure enough, fine tuning became an unconscious automatic response. That way of coping never went away or got improved, it just got more and more unconscious, and more and more embed into my way of dealing with trauma generally. I’m grateful that original trauma is now in my conscious awareness, making it at last possible for me to heal it. Which I’m busy doing.

I’ve learned that self-respect is kinda like a beehive: all the bees look alike, they all act alike, and they all mirror the bee behaviour they see in the other bees passing on information too. This particular bee had a low sense of self-respect, and as a result, my beehive bee friends followed my lead, and together we created an unhealthy beehive, resulting the death of the beehive.

I’m not ok with the unhealthy ways us bees had been relating to one another, so I went looking for what a healthy beehive (relationship) looks like. It looks like this:

• Talking openly and honestly with each other
• Listening to each other
• Valuing each other’s feelings and needs
• Compromising
• Speaking kindly to and about each other
• Giving each other space
• Supporting each other’s interests, hobbies, careers, etc.
• Building each other up
• Honoring each other’s boundaries, no matter what

LoveIsRespect.org

I asked myself how well I embody each of those points, and I can honestly say not all of them, and not that great either. How could I say I embody them well? I couldn’t because I needed more self-respect to value my partner’s feelings wants and needs without self-respect. I’m much less impacted by other people’s disrespect toward me because I have a much stronger sense of self-respect, which makes it possible to find and explore healthy relationships. I can still be surprised by disrespect on occasion, but I try to keep the balance of self-respect and respect for others mostly in balance, but with self-respect being the priority.

As I’ve been growing, I realized that I don’t really know what my relationship wants and needs even are, so I took the time to articulate them. Some of them I’ve wanted my entire adult life, but did not have the courage to openly ‘own’, some of them conflict with cultural ‘norms’ and those ones I’ve had most of my adult life too, but worked hard at keeping them well hidden. With this list in mind, I can look for them, rather than for what other people want and need.

The hopefulness I repressed for the first 50 years of my life has at last risen to the surface, and just because of that, I’m stronger, and more respectful of myself. I guess another really useful point to the list is that people can learn a little more of the simple truth about who I am, what makes me tick, what I want more of, and what I won’t accept living without anymore:

• self respect, first and foremost
• honesty, kindness, and kind honesty
• directness
• open acceptance and affection
• women
• freedom when it comes with full acceptance of responsibility
• open sexual acceptance
• open human connections
• shared skin
• basic human decency
• social nudity
• the power of vulnerability
• openness and willingness
• wise and creative minds
• the flow of energy throughout my body
• puffing on pot while I ponder these things
• not forgetting any of these as I live the rest of my life

And there’s a nice surprise too… I’ve found that there’s a kind of peace in slowly and steady growth in being comfort with openly being me, all because of the improvement in my self-respect. It feels good, and I want more of it that.

Now you know quite a lot about me and my way of life.

I invite you to join me in becoming more and more our selves, bravely if necessary.