Touching Insecurities and Healing Them: Redefining Love in Order to Love Myself For the First Time
“You’re like a garden and I worry about you sometimes, bro. I worry because you are kind to people and you let anyone into your garden. You let anyone into your garden and you allow them take without having to put anything back. I worry that people will take advantage of that and you’ll be left with nothing.” – Dwayne, 2020
Love for me had always been defined by painful silence and unnecessary sacrifice. For me growing up love was performative. In order to receive love, I believed that I had to produce or give something of myself. That something wasn’t just love itself but something tangible or something painful that would put my moral obligation to myself in jeopardy. To no fault of my parents, who were oblivious to how love was introduced to me, they instilled this belief early on by praising my grades in school. I knew from early on that good grades were rewarded with more attention or even a tangible gift. This would’ve been great if there also wasn’t a critique on what they would consider mediocre grades. Bringing a 3 home (1-5 grading scale while in grade school) or bringing home an 80 (while in middle school) was met with “why didn’t you get higher?”. This created a great deal of anxiety for me as a kid but even without knowing I sublimated that anxiety and turned it into this energy of determination. All I wanted was love and really good grades would be the gift that would give me love (validation, acknowledgement, etc.)
At some point my good grades became the norm. Praise turned into “that’s what you’re supposed to do”. The lack of words of affirmation and absence of validation, made me try harder as if that would break the cycle of feeling invisible. The more I attempted to go above and beyond, the more I was ignored. I compared myself to my siblings. I wondered why I wasn’t receiving attention. I realize looking back now that I was invisible because I was considered to have had it all together. I was self-sufficient. I studied even when I knew I had the content down. The feeling of being ignored intensified once my sister’s boyfriend Edward, and our cousin Willie, were murdered back-to-back summers. I felt emotionally neglected and unloved. I began to look for validation elsewhere because I didn’t feel like I would get it at home. I knew I would be getting the new gaming system and I knew that I would get clothes, but I wasn’t sure of how loved I was. I didn’t feel unconditional love because I felt like I needed to achieve a certain standard to deserve the things that I was getting from my parents.
There was a savior complex that stemmed from my trauma as a child growing up along with the need to feel emotionally taken care of. My attempt to “save” these partners was rooted in benevolent sexism. I was performing what I thought was the way a man was supposed to. I was only following the blueprint that I saw brought men love. It only fed the belief that I had to pursue and perform in order to receive love and feel deserving of it, which left me open to a toxic dynamic of seeking validation. I was the savior and my partners were the damsels in distress who needed me to show them the way. Me putting attention in “saving” them distracted me from the depression, anxiety, and feeling of worthlessness that I was experiencing. The world that I lived in added to the feeling of worthlessness. I felt inferior and I was looking for something or someone to tell me that I wasn’t. I continued the pattern of looking for validation from my romantic relationships. If the relationship didn’t work out, I felt like a failure and the feeling of being worthless and meaningless crept back in.
This pattern led me into toxic relationships with people who I did not know how to protect myself from. The relationships that happened in my teen years impacted my self-esteem significantly. One relationship that did the most damage to my ego and sense of self took years to heal from. My search for validation due to my insecurities that were already present before her was met with critiques and a lack of appreciation for what I would do for her. No matter how far I traveled to see her or how far I would go to show her I liked her, she said it wasn’t enough or would downplay it. She projected feelings and blamed me for her own internal conflict. My insecurities told me that it was my fault she felt the way she felt. I felt stripped of my humanity as I performed for her love and, in that moment, I knew that I could never allow someone to cause me to question my worth like that ever again.
I tried to heal my wounds with a false sense of self-worth. I was still looking for validation though. Due to my weight and my low self-esteem regarding my physical appearance, I showed my body upon request to women that I flirted with on social media in order to feel validated and desired. I wanted that attention that I felt like I missed out on. I wanted to feel man enough. I gave people access to my body virtually because it gave me a sense of validation. I fell into a space of trying to validate myself through their approval. In return these young ladies were being objectified by my attempt to feel desired. I was not only sexualizing and objectifying myself but I was also externalizing it toward them. Looking back on that time in my life, I still cringe because I can now see how empty I felt, especially in the beginning years of college. I can see how low my self-esteem was and how detached I was from the concept of loving myself.
As time went on, my experiences with other women changed. I matured more, yes, at the same time, I encountered two women who saw and acknowledged me outside of my physical body and sexual prowess. For them, from what they expressed to me, what they were attracted to was my gentleness, poise, empathy, intellect, humor, and modesty. I began to see certain parts of me that I wasn’t before. This started a tough transition that I have just recently started to embrace more. There was still a level of saviorism apart of the dynamic with one of them. At some point I met my next partner and I was stuck between choosing the savior role or choosing a new way of showing up.
I consciously chose my partner because I felt less obligated to save her. But I had not yet learned how to not be performative. I had lost sight of what love really was but I attempted to learn. I learned a lot about myself in this relationship. I learned how to compromise, be supportive, and venture outside my norm but at some point, I fell back into the cycle of sacrificing and silencing parts of myself in order to save the relationship and feel accepted. My love became performative all over again. I didn’t know how to create nor set boundaries with myself so I definitely did not know how to do it with others. I wore the mask of being the stabilizer, which never allowed me to really feel emotions. It felt like I had to always be stable and reliable in order for it to work. I would say yes and help without a question asked nor a complaint. I was happy to help her because I was in love with her but I was not mindful of how this can drain me if I am the point person of stability. With this role of stability, I was afraid to take a breath or make a mistake because mistakes meant disapproval and disapproval led to the absence of love.
This presented itself toward the end of the relationship as I stressed about the next event that we could go to or how I could one up the last time we went out. This was fueled by the desire to make things work because deep down I felt like I didn’t deserve better than what I was being given. I was still struggling with knowing my worth. I did all I could even if it meant to feel emotionally drained in order to make things work. I avoid difficult conversations and was willing to change who I was at my core for this person because I thought that’s what love was. I treated it like a performance instead of a practice. My efforts could not save the relationship and my efforts would not bring me the attention I wanted/needed. The effort didn’t cause me to feel desired. My efforts were often met with a short moment of appreciation but within two weeks’ time, the narrative became that I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I was in therapy during the last 10 months of the relationship. I had been asked by my therapist to reimagine love. As I did, it didn’t match what I was doing or how I was feeling in that relationship at the time. I was torn because I knew that I was in love with this person so if I was in love, how could the homework not match the dynamic in the relationship? I tried to apply my new concept of love to the relationship but it didn’t work the way I thought it would. I had to come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t save it on my own. The more emotionally open I became, the more it seemed to fall apart and I started to beat myself up for attempting. I felt undesired throughout the last year of the relationship and felt emotionally drained from this dynamic. I looked elsewhere emotionally. I tried to pull from friends in order to give love to my relationship. I tried to use the emotional/sexual attention I received from another woman who lived on another continent to supplement my need for it in my relationship but that didn’t work. It only caused guilt, shame, and low self-esteem: an act that took me a long time to forgive myself for. After my break up, I still felt unattractive and I didn’t want the attention from the other woman anymore. I felt undesired throughout the last year of the relationship so my self-esteem needed self-love in order to heal; not an unhealthy replacement in an attempt to seek validation. I had to redefine who I was without the concept of performing because I felt unlovable.
I remember crying and asking my therapist if I was asking for and expecting too much. I felt even more underserving of love after emotionally cheating and breaking up with my ex-partner. There was a significant amount of negative self-talk that I had to work through in therapy. My therapist asked me again to redefine love because I was defining it by other people’s standards and what I believed other people needed from. “Josh what does love look like to you? How does a healed Josh practice love?” Me being the person that I am, I went straight to take the 5 love languages test to find out the type of love that I was more receptive to in an attempt to give that love to myself. The three most important ways that I receive love are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, and Touch. I had to learn how to give myself these three things. I had to go back to the drawing board and reconstruct what I knew love to be and I had to start with self. Quality time and words of affirmation showed up through car rides down the beach side of my neighborhood, parking up near the boardwalk, and writing in my journal. I always ended my journal entries with affirmations and loving words. Touch was practiced by hugging myself in the shower, giving myself a kiss on the shoulder, and hugging a pillow. I made sure I practiced these things without any conditions attached. I expressed this love to myself just because. I learned to see myself as the whole person that I am by understanding that I am worthy of love just for existing: that I am not difficult to love.
Love, to me, was never complicated when I first thought about it as a child. Love to me was a hug from my parents, a high five, and a “good job”. Love was laughter and jokes. Love was sitting at the table during Thanksgiving and Christmas while listening to wild family stories. Love to me was existence. I didn’t need a gift and I didn’t need anyone to do a specific thing in order to feel loved. The love I was most receptive to cost nothing and was simple. I learned to love myself for just existing just like I love my family and friends for just existing. All I wanted was for them to acknowledge my presence and I felt that the most during those moments. The next step was to acknowledge myself. I had to acknowledge the amount of forgiveness that I needed to show myself. Before I could forgive myself, I had to acknowledge the hurt that I caused others and understand how I got to the point of hurting someone else emotionally. I didn’t like myself at times during this process but all the tools I learned in therapy helped me realize that accountability is not punitive: it’s restorative. I cried and felt like shit throughout the process but my love toward myself never wavered.
The love that I was able to give myself translated into my relationships. I started to tell the people in my life that I love them more frequently. One friend in particular was shocked when I said “I love you too fam.” after a phone call. I would send random text messages to them expressing how much I missed them and did what was needed to see them in person. I took a road trip with my mentor (little big sister) to see my other mentor (big brother) because I missed seeing them. I fell in love with myself and in return I existed in love with all those in my life. I thank God, from the bottom of my heart, for the people who he has allowed me to love: for giving me a place to feel loved because I know this is a privilege and a blessing that not everyone has access to. I used to think loving and choosing myself would pull me away from people. Thus, I was afraid to love and choose myself for a long time. Now, I understand that it actually brought me closer to them. I know I deserve love from myself and from others. I am deserving.
Thank you for reading.
Love,
Josh The Therapist
