There's a single word for what we've been told about ourselves that does more damage than all our other programming combined.
Amongst all the stories we've been told about who we are, where we've come from, and why we can never trust ourselves more than we can trust someone else who always knows better than we do, it's the story that tells us we're broken, that we've always been broken and we need someone or something outside of us to save us from ourselves.
Sound familiar?
The problem is that when we've accepted this as our own story for so long, we stop questioning it. And even worse, we forget we even have the right to. And we don't even see that there is a problem.
See, when you've been told you're broken, when you've been told you have to go to some being outside yourself to ask for forgiveness for the simple act of being human, you're going to have a hard time believing you're not.
And when heartbreak turns to more heartbreak and you can't seem to learn well enough from your past mistakes to exact any kind of different outcome, it's a tragedy that all you've got left is a scenario where you cast yourself at yet another man's feet and beg for forgiveness, for grace, to be given the right to be here just as you are.
It's something wrong with you all over again when you're told the very essence of you is bad, wrong, in desperate need of correction. Because the theme is the same as the one you first learned: you will always need someone outside of yourself to save you from yourself!
Look within, Beautiful.
Look at your beautiful heart and soul. Is there any good in you?
There is nothing but good in your heart, in you!
You don't need this validation from anyone else. Search your own heart and find your truth. Imperfect, yes. Human, absolutely. But to give your power away in the act of somehow absolving yourself enough to have permission to be here, absolutely no.
You've always known your own truth, regardless of whether the ones who programmed you with the belief that they knew better than you have caught up with you! In fact, that's the underlying problem right there.
We've been doing this for too long. Giving away our power to people who never have our best interests at heart and are only interested in serving themselves.
The next time someone puts their own inability to take responsibility on you instead of owning what has always been theirs to won, remember you're not broken. You're human.
Own what's yours.
Give them back what what's theirs by refusing to take it on you.
No big scene. No calling them out in the usual tone when you've only known two ways of being; accepting everything to be the good girl, or reaching your breaking point because this was never about you being their subjective "good" or "bad", but about being authentically true to yourself with your own healthy boundaries instead.
Watch the shifts.
Watch the growth in you, and in how you're treated without a story that was never in the best interest of you.
We know words like this serve the status quo that everyone's always been used to. The question is, how did it ever serve you?
Love,
Jane
Your turn. If this doesn't make sense to you, please send me an email or let me know in the comments below. I'd love to help you break through this label to the heart and soul of the perfectly imperfect human in you!
I tend to not learn from my mistakes. I keep giving chances.
Just like the rest of us, Kelly. You're not alone here. Most of us only learn these things one way - the hard way. And I hope on here, the loving, grace-filled, just-as-you-are non-judgemental way. We only stop giving chances when the pain of giving them becames greater than the pain of the beliefs we hold about what not giving those chances says about us. Until then, we choose giving chances every single time. So, yes, understandable when we come from the places we come from with the programming we're given.
I don't understand
When we accept a word like "broken" to describe ourselves that other people or the larger culture has given us without us questioning it, we're also accepting that we need fixing, that we need changing, that there's inherently wrong with us. The model for that is that if you're broken, you have to find someone or something to fix that, to somehow make us "right". But to do that, we're also told either directly or indirectly by the larger culture, that we have to go outside ourselves to have that happen. It can't be that there's something wrong with the culture or the very people who subscribe to these belief systems that tell us this is just the way it is; if we're accepting this word and this label, we're also then accepting there's something wrong with us. When we do that, we give away any power we had, even if we didn't realize this was about our power at all. Especially if we didn't realize we had any power to give away in the first place.
I know this is deep, Lashuna. But most of the roots of our behaviors run deep. This is one more place we can free ourselves from by questioning it, by looking at a word like "broken", and asking if that's really what we are or if it's what we've been told we are when we feel a certain way. The bigger question is why do we automatically go here? Why is this our default response to identify with this brokenness when we feel this way? Do we feel empowered when we think of ourselves as broken? Or is it the opposite we feel - powerless? Those are the questions I'm looking at here. If you need me to break this down even more, just let me know. Thanks for asking. All our questions are valid. Especially the ones we've been shamed for asking before.