WHAT DO YOU SEE

I have thought about this post for 2 weeks now.  I decided when I started this blog again I wanted to share as a therapeutic tool for myself.  A tool to help others through similarity in experiences.  In doing that I want to be careful to not offend and be as honest as possible.  To be as honest as possible sometimes can cause hurt and that hurt is a personal hurt if you are truly realizing your mistakes and wanting change.  That is to say a lot of the time if we are being dishonest it is with ourselves.  This dishonesty typically causes other hurt as well but specifically for this blog I want to talk about how that dishonesty with oneself effects your self image.  I wanted to share a little bit of what I have gone through to help repair that self image.

A person close to me has told me more than once “We think we are better actors than we really are.”  Being willing to face those parts of yourself that we don’t like in an effort to be a better person takes nerve.  No one likes to think negatively of themselves or that they could do things to hurt others.  It takes hard work to really unload those dark parts of yourself so that you can be better in the future and not repeat the mistakes of the past.

That being said one of the biggest things that has really effected me is my therapy and its ability to change my self image.  Therapy gets a bad rap in my opinion.  It is almost as if saying you go to therapy means that something is wrong with you.  In my opinion, what could be bad about having someone listen to all your “crap” without judgement and sometimes without rebuttal.  I mean you get to sit with someone, just unload all your burdens, happiness, thoughts, concerns…whatever it may be and no one judges you for what you say.  There is no worry about hurting this person or what they will think of you.  Just open up and be honest.  Its truly empowering and eye opening if you embrace it.

For me therapy started like I assume it does for most in the middle of turmoil.  I have said “I wish I had started it sooner and maybe things that happened wouldn’t have”.  The truth is though if I had I wouldn’t be where I am now.  I have had to repair a broken self image that built up in  through my own actions over the last 20 years.  I don’t really know where the turning point specifically was for my story just yet.  I believe if my therapist doesn’t already have the plan to get there we are building the plan.  I just know that for a very long time no matter what happiness was around me, I was not happy with myself.  I made terrible choices that reinforced how bad my self image was and lead me farther away from who I want to be as a person.  The “rap” sheet is longer than I am proud of and something I can only hope to make right someday down the line.  I didn’t take care of myself mentally.  I allowed myself to think negatively about myself in all situations in life.  I didn’t appreciate the great parts of life that had happened to me.  The hardest part for me was breaking through that defeated self image I had of myself.  It took time, specially a year and a half of therapy now, to break through that self image.  It took admitting things to myself that I did not like, embracing the things that I did like and learning to love myself.  No matter if there were people who loved me and truly believed in me in my life, my self image was broken.

I have now created tools that I use daily to help remind myself that I don’t want to feel that way about myself anymore.  I learned the tools in therapy and they have all helped me greatly improve my self image.  It is something we all struggle with and the solution may sound simple but it is a hard thing to do.  We are our own biggest competition.  I have found though if I take care of myself mentally other areas of life come easier.  When I falter mentally the other areas falter as well.  I have had to face many things I do not like about myself and admit to myself terrible things from my past.  I have also been able to recognize situations for what they really were.  I have been able to really decide what I want from my life.  I have been able to learn what will make me happy.

I have 3 amazing kids and have some amazing people in my life.  I have to be the best version of me though or that doesn’t matter though.  Without that version of me I affect so many others negatively and that is not what I want from my life.  I for the first time in a long time value myself and that is something I only learned through therapy and the hard mental work.  The goals have changed and the outcomes will change as well.  I can control that and will continue to improve my self image through therapy and the tools it has taught me.  It does not make me less.  It does not make me a weaker man or a bad person.  I have been told numerous times its the actions not the words.  If you think you can’t take action because of what you would have to face you are wrong.  I urge anyone who thinks they are stuck in a pattern that can’t be broken to know that you are in control of that pattern.  It may be a huge mountain of “suck” to climb but you can do it.  I was at the bottom of a very steep mountain, my legs are tired from the steep climb but my view right now is one of the best I have ever had.

Here is a link to a helpful site

https://www.goodtherapy.org/

I say the word lens and most people think of a lens in a pair of glasses, on a camera, or in a telescope.  A lens is used to allow us to see different things in the world.  People have come in contact with one of these devices at some point in their life.  What isn’t thought about is the lens we view ourselves with.  Created in the mind, there are numerous reasons why and how they develop.  I did not study this, I am not the expert but I was given homework to discuss how I was able to crack one of my lenses from one pretty smart person.  Being the competitive type how could I possibly say no to this.  First thing you may or may not be asking is “homework?”  No I am not in school.  Not in the physically enrolled sense of the word but in the never stop learning sense of the word…school is always in session.  So I thought lets discuss this personal matter and see where it leads.  Now obviously the goal of this isn’t to hurt anyone else so certain details I won’t be sharing.  I am going to try to the best of my ability explain how cracking my lens has completely changed how I view myself and in turn how that has changed my life.

To the homework at hand, the topic was “how did I crack my not good enough lens”.  So after a great weekend with my oldest 2 kiddos, I decided make a cup of coffee and lets get these thoughts down.

Lets start with the issue which was my lens.  In my mind over the years my behaviors had created a lens or way that I saw myself and others in my life.  I had created a belief that I was never going to be good enough.  I had numerous times failed at different things, large or small, it didn’t matter but each failure reinforced in my mind that I would never be good enough.  People fail its absolutely normal, the problem for me was it kept adding to the not good enough view of myself each time I failed or felt like I failed.  At some point the failures created what became a normal to me or an expected outcome so to speak.  No matter what I said I wanted to do or set out to do I had already convinced myself I would mess up.  At some point there would be something I couldn’t handle, a failure, a pressure, a road bump and I would revert to seeing myself through this lens.  I would repeat previous behaviors that caused me to be someone I ended up not liking.

The other side of this lens was it also affected how I viewed everyone else.  No matter who I met, they always had it better or were better than me.  I gave away the power in almost every relationship I had because I automatically believed I wasn’t good enough in any relationship I started.  In my mind I had always had it worse than anyone I met…literally anyone.  This is a terrible way to start a relationship and led to me making terrible decisions in my relationships that hurt, deceived and left damage I may never be able to repair.  For me this is the worst part of this lens I had created.

I had never been able to handle situations differently and was determined to prove that I was right about not being good enough each time and at great cost.  Without the ability to see myself with a different lens it was a continuous cycle with the same negative outcome.  I could go for a while at different points without any major feelings of not being good enough.  Inevitably though there would be a trigger that led me to seeing myself this way again.  The pattern would then be repeated and I had proven to myself that I was indeed not good enough in my mind.  The truth was that I really had just made a decision that caused harm to either myself or people I cared about.  I hadn’t reached out for help, or tried to handle what happened to me differently.  If had been able to crack my lens sooner, I would have been able to handle what happened to me differently.  Instead I deceived, manipulated or lied to fix a certain outcome which would then again prove to myself I wasn’t good enough when it was discovered.  I created a lens convincing myself I was never going to be good enough and then let behaviors reinforce that lens.

So the moment things changed for me.  Well strangely enough it took more destruction for me to have this moment of clarity.  A few months ago I had been doing anything I could to avoid really looking at myself and trying to fix myself.  The details aren’t important, I don’t want to hurt anyone or cause any issues.  What happened is at my lowest point I had someone say to me “What do you want?  What do you really want out of life?  What is it that is going to make you happy?”.  Seems pretty simple actually but I had never really thought about what I wanted.  Sure I lied to people and gave examples throughout the years of what I thought would impress them.  I have had numerous conversations with people laying out life plans, detailing what I thought they wanted to hear from me or what I thought would make me fit in with them.  Some of it were things I wanted but didn’t think I would ever really achieve.  The truth was I had never really considered what would actually make me happy because I didn’t believe I was good enough to make it happen.  So facing stress, lots of serious consequences from terrible decisions I had made I decided to break myself down and thought about what I needed to be happy.  Again this probably sounds really simple but what I hadn’t done to this point was crack that view of myself so it wasn’t a simple thing.  I wasn’t happy with myself and didn’t like what I found.  The bad choices had piled on, I couldn’t see digging out of it and honestly just thought at some point I would make an ultimate bad choice.  This is where it gets hard…I had to retrain my thought process about myself.  Despite the bad choices I had made and the trouble it caused, I had to start telling myself that I was in fact good enough and deserved to be happy.  I had to realize that even if I lost everything, the outcome didn’t determine how I felt about myself I did.  I determined how I handled whatever would happen next.  I had to start doing things differently than I had in the past.  I had to stop repeating the behaviors from my past.  I had to face that no matter what happened I was good enough and could get through it.

I started believing in myself and I set small goals.  The first one was to actually change things like eating habits, spending habits and doing things that made me uncomfortable.  I took on the Whole 30 diet which completely changed my view of food.  I saw benefits from not spending money on eating out all the time.  I lost weight and had real clarity about how much weight and food had affected my view of myself.  I had to make changes in schedules and understand that the temporary changes were just that… temporary.  In the long term it would be worth it to do the harder things now.  Strangely enough for me doing these things started creating a new mindset for myself.  It helped me start liking me again.  I accomplished things and I was proud of it.  I realized that I was my hardest critic and the thoughts of being judged by others were my own internal thoughts not what people really thought.  I stopped caring what people thought about me and started caring about what I thought about myself.  The irony of that is that when you care about what you think of yourself, you make better choices most often.

I know I have a lot of things to accomplish and clean up from the past behaviors.  The difference now is I know I determine how to handle those things.  They don’t determine who I am and I am good enough to have the things in life that make me happy.

The lens didn’t break right away.  Its a process…a long hard one that I haven’t completed yet.  The big lens or view of myself, I am chipping away at still.  I broke through part of it when I cracked the not good enough lens.  There is much more to go though and I now feel like I am good enough to be happy with myself.

The best explanation I have received about a lens was what follows:  picture a windshield…when a rock hits it driving down the road it doesn’t shatter…instead it makes a small divot.  From that divot though the windshield will eventually crack all over and break.  The same is true with our own lens.  You have to keep working at it…make a small indention, keep at it and it will eventually break.  Throw those small pebbles at your windshield…crack your view of yourself until it breaks.  You get a new windshield and things will be a lot more clear.