I Am Not My Enemy

How to love yourself if you don't know where to start.

“If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

Amen, RuPaul. A-fuckin’-men.

This quote became a mantra of sorts after I found my way out of religion and into the void. A goal that I struggled to attain but desperately wished would somehow happen if I tried hard enough. My ability - or lack thereof - to love myself has been an obstacle in my relationships with other people.

I’ve heard a lot about how great it is, and have been left to assume people are telling the truth. See, I grew up in an extremely high demand religious framework. Purity culture, blind obedience, conform conform conform. I developed a piece of myself that was constantly judging whether I was ‘worthy’ or needed repentance. Whether I was deserving of the love that the creator of the universe had to share. Hell, whether I deserved to even exist.

A lovely little scripture in The Book of Mormon goes a little something (exactly) like this:

Mosiah 2:20-21

20 I say unto you, my brethren, that if you should render all the thanks and praise which your whole soul has power to possess, to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you, and has caused that ye should rejoice, and has granted that ye should live in peace one with another—

21 I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.

That’s heavy shit.

I learned to recite passages like this before I was even 8 years old and getting baptized. Understandably, I’ve also internalized a lot of things that I’m likely still not aware of - yet.

That’s part of the journey. The quest to track down all those silly little self-sabotaging cycles and blow them the fuck up.

For a lot of this process, I’ve focused on simply trying to get to know my genuine, authentic self. My desires, hopes, wishes, dreams. My pet peeves, triggers, fears, and - crucially - emotions.

I’ve written already about the fuckery of emotional intelligence that comes with religious dogmatism here. Suffice it to say Christianity, especially Mormonism, teaches us ‘truth’ is discovered by feelings that the Holy Ghost gives you. So if you hear/read/think something and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and happy inside… it’s true!

Unless it disagrees with what church leaders say, then it’s just your own mind.

Now, if we combine the issue of emotional fluency with the instilled belief that we are undeserving of anything and less than the dust of the earth (Mosiah 2:25), we end up snipping off a piece of unprocessed emotional trauma and sticking it in the ‘presupposed truth’ category of ourselves. We treat that as an underlying premise of reality and let it fester inside us.

When I left my religion behind, I also started therapy and learned a lot about myself. I’ve been able to connect much more deeply with my emotions and, therefore, with those around me as well.

I’ve grown a lot. And I’m proud of it. But admitting that causes a little piece of me to kick back and doubt whether I should be proud. It’s the same instinct that tells me I don’t deserve my wife’s love, or shouldn’t let someone do something for me. The humility that we were trained to put on display and be - ironically - proud of.

This reflex of mine is what I was exploring in therapy today, and I’m excited to say that after years now of trying to figure out Self Love, I’ve finally had a bit of a breakthrough.

It followed 4 simple steps:

1. I identified that piece of me that’s been holding me back.

2. I recognized how I felt about that feeling - angry, sad, hopeless… just ‘ugh!’

3. I realized that my anger and resentment towards the piece of me was validating and fueling it.

4. I forgave and accepted that piece and the piece of me that was feeling resentful and doing the unconscious fueling.

Breaking myself into parts is easy - I did it naturally for about 30 years as a Mormon. Loving my entire self is hard - I shut that shit down naturally for about 30 years as a Mormon.

But loving a piece of me? Being able to recognize that it is an instictive response that was developed, at the time, as a survival mechanism for the fucked up environment I grew up in?

I can do that. That part of me doesn’t deserve resentment - it’s not my enemy. It’s an outdated survival mechanism that I am grateful I had when I needed it.

And that’s Self Love. Step one, anyway. Journey of a thousand steps and all that.

I hope this helps anyone else who’s struggling with religious hangover and has a hard time treating themselves as wonderfully as they treat other people.

And I’m just so fucking happy to finally feel like I can access the meaning behind RuPaul’s iconic line. So we’ll end it like we started it.

“If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an ‘Amen’?”