Were you one of those like I once was who was pretty badly mangled, especially mentally and emotionally when you first found recovery from your addiction? If so, then it’s probably a safe bet to also say you most likely didn’t have much in the department of self-love at that point in time either.
Self-love is usually quite difficult to have early on in recovery from any addiction because of all the self-loathing, self-abuse, and selfishness one put themselves through when their disease was active. No matter what one’s addiction was, the reality is that in most cases it always came first before anyone or anything else. Their waking moments were normally built around engaging in the addiction and often in that process, loved ones got seriously hurt. Thus it’s hard to have any self-love for oneself when sobriety is found because not only is the recovering addict full of disgust and regret over the life they’ve lived, they also frequently have to face scorn and hatred from those family members and friends who were hurt by their addiction. Unfortunately, one of the most common things that happen when a recovering addict starts to deal with all this is trying to find that self-love outside of them to fill that empty pit of it within.
Some early on in recovery might seek to do this by looking for it in a new intimate relationship, which sadly will only end up creating a very codependent existence for them. “If I love you, then hopefully you’ll love me, and we’ll be very happy together because your love is filling my emptiness and lack of self-love.” I went through countless relationships like this and none of them ever lasted because eventually my lack of self-love drained any real love that came from them and my pit became empty once again.
Another way that people early on in recovery search for self-love is by trying to do nice things for those they hurt when their disease was active. They attempt to give money or various other gifts to those who might be upset with them from their past toxic addiction behaviors. While those actions may seem quite admirable, they ultimately aren’t being motivated by acts of unconditional love. There is a price attached to each of them and it’s to fill that void inside where self-love should be. This won’t work to fill it either because when they don’t receive the love they’re seeking from these actions, they resort to the same selfish character defects they exhibited when their addiction was active. I should know as I used my own money as a weapon for far to long to buy the love I wasn’t generating from within. While I may have found it temporarily at times, it was never genuine and my pit always remained empty in the long run.
True self-love can only come from forgiving oneself for all past transgressions. It can only come from changing one’s past toxic behaviors into much healthier and loving ones. And most importantly, it can only come from learning how to like spending time alone with oneself. The only way I ever became able to achieve any of this was asking my Higher Power for the strength to do so. Once I did, my path to self-love sustainability wasn’t an easy one. It took time, a lot of it actually, to learn how to love myself, especially knowing that I lived the majority of my life so selfishly. But once I found enough forgiveness within myself and changed enough of those past toxic behaviors, and once I really started enjoying spending time with me, I no longer felt that emptiness inside. That’s only because it was then I was producing enough self-love on a daily basis to sustain myself without having to seek it outside of me.
So whether you are in recovery from an addiction or not, if you are one of those who still believes that all the love you need in life can come from another person or another thing, you’re grossly mistaken. Any love sought in that way will never last or may never even come to you in the first place. If you really want to have an ever-lasting love, you need to learn how to manifest that from within. Ask your Higher Power for the strength to find self-love and with enough time and patience, I know you will eventually receive it.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
Sometimes, technology is the perfect “ego deflation at depth” for me….my carefully-crafted response to your post evaporated in a time-out moment. A not-so-gentle reminder for increased brevity and decreased pondering, I guess.
The heart of that response is this: I have to remember that the path of my recovery from dependence on other’s affirmation was not like a train reversing on a track, but more like an ocean-going super-freighter’s miles-wide sweeping turn over time.
The other thing I have learned in recovery is that I can become addicted to response to my comments in meetings. I had one post on my former blog that resonated with a lot of people – tens of thousands of likes over several weeks, and lots of people quoting it (for better or worse). I became addicted to the responses, believing that the value of my writing was in how many people responded to it. (This is *my* experience, and no reflection on you, of course.) Shortly after my melt-down from that, my faith mentor not-so-gently reminded me that “If it’s GOOD, it’s probably God – and if it’s slop, it’s probably Steve…”
Of course as I was reading your response my first reaction was ‘How do I get thousands of likes or comments’? LOL So it is apparent I still have some more self-love to work on then. And yes, the process to having a lot more of that has taken years, not months, to develop.