Loving All My Parts

One of the most profound and difficult realizations on my journey home to myself was realizing that I could not fully love myself again if I didn’t love all of my parts. I loved my ability to play Cristifori’s Dream on the piano and my ability to draw an intricate graphite portrait of my daughter.   I loved my courage to travel to Japan when I was twelve years old without my immediate family; bouncing from one city to the next with family friends dropping me off at one train station and another group of friends picking me up at the next.  I loved that I could sit in a library for eight hours straight, completely immersed in fascinating subject matter, and be able to retain the information for future reference. I loved my determination, my desire to dream big, and my dedicated focus to achieving my goals.  However, amongst those things, there were a lot of parts of me that I wanted to just leave behind.   

Therapy helped me see that there were parts of me that I was trying to skip over. Parts, that at first, I didn't feel deserved love.

It was hard to love the nineteen-year-old version of myself that abandoned big dreams for the sake of fitting in.  It was hard to love my fourteen-year-old self who could not perform well enough to gain attention from her work-a-holic father.  It was hard to love the twelve-year-old version of myself who couldn’t seem to cover up enough; who was a temptation to the young men around her.  It was hard to love a body that I had been taught my entire life was disgusting, dirty, and evil.  

It was hard to love my twenty-five-year-old self who wasn’t strong enough to handle the stress of a particularly challenging year. She had an ill infant who was in and out of the hospital, diagnosed with failure to thrive.  She had to go without sleep for weeks on end, month after month, due to his screaming.  She suffered from severe shame from passing her two-year-old daughter around from neighbor to neighbor, sometimes not seeing her for days at a time, because there was no option to take care of her while at the hospital with her brother.  She tried to be a good military spouse and handle everything at home while her husband, having been deployed three weeks after their son was born, was off serving the county.  With so much distance, it was hard for her to stay connected with her husband. He found other ways of keeping himslef occupied. When she learned of his lies and dishonest behavior, her heart shattered. And that of course, was somehow her fault too. 

It was hard to love my twenty-six-year-old self who developed PTSD after the year from hell.  It was hard to love her through all the flashbacks and crippling anxiety and shear terror that accompanied her damaged brain. 

There were many, many other parts that I wanted to leave behind on my journey.  However, leaving those pieces behind meant I would never be whole again.  A puzzle is not complete until ALL the pieces are put back into place, even if some of those pieces aren’t pretty. 

The second profound realization came when I became aware of my struggle, fighting inside my own paradox.

I wanted to keep my hard-earned skill of holding deep empathy and compassion for others while completely severing myself from the moments that developed the skill.  I wanted to keep my patience and grit while cutting myself off from the difficult experiences that helped grow those traits.  I wanted to keep my knowledge around neuroscience, and the impact trauma has on the body on the brain, all while trying to ignore my own trauma that triggered my need to research and study that very thing in the first place. I wanted to keep all the things that I had learned by experiencing the most difficult moments of my life and then deny that those moments even existed. 

Life is hard.  Really hard.  Many of us want to focus on the good moments and leave the rest behind.  But living a full, authentic, plentiful life demands that we incorporate and love all our parts that participated in all of the moments. 

Let’s be clear here---love does not mean like.  I don’t like that I have PTSD and still suffer from its effects often.  I don’t like that parts of my life are profoundly different because I abandoned a childhood dream that still exists inside of me.  I don’t like that I have survived dishonesty, betrayal, and abandonment from people I deeply loved.  I don’t like that my children have been impacted in a painful way because “life happens” and at times, there was nothing I could do about it.  However, I have learned to deeply love those parts of me that did what they had to do to survive.  I have deep and profound gratitude for my twenty-five-year-old self who survived some horrific moments.  The internal strength that I love and admire about myself now, came directly from her! 

I have deep gratitude for my nineteen-year-old self who made a choice that, based on her knowledge and understanding of the world at the time, meant survival vs being cut-off and ultimately death.  I used to secretly hate her.  But sitting in meditation with her, I began to truly see who she was, her intentions, and that she made the best decision that she could at the time.  I felt enormous compassion for her and saw the value in her actions, believing that she was acting from a place of integrity, even if that place no longer holds integrity for me now. 

Maya Angelou’s wisdom is extremely applicable, “Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better.”

When we sit with our broken and wounded pieces of ourselves and give them space to speak, that is where the healing happens.  That space is messy, raw, vulnerable, and enormously uncomfortable at first.  But after you sit in the mess and allow for the truth to surface, an honest, more clear version of reality emerges and love begins to pour into that space. Love cleans up the mess.  Then this magical moment happens…you receive a gift that your broken and wounded parts created for you.  When you receive those gifts---those beautifully excruciating gifts that the previous exiled parts of you cultivated while in their darkest moments---those gifts are what give you the power to live that rich and authentic life, to have deep love and connection, to create beauty and joy within, and to leave a lasting impact without.  Those gifts are the very things that have the power to bring you home to yourself and once again become whole.  

Check out my upcoming course happening this Fall to learn more about coming home to yourself.