Accept it all

Positively Positive 
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end -- no apologies, no regrets. — Henry Kissinger

Too many years of my life I spent hiding from myself.  For over 40 years, I functioned in a way that always kept 4/5 of myself hidden.  In counseling, I wanted to reject all the sludge and keep only the good stuff.  I wanted to prune my life of all the damaged ugliness so I would be beautiful.  Photography to the rescue.  I started a project in my early years of counseling taking pictures of damaged plants.  The images turned out beautifully.  I called the project flawed beauty.  It actually started with my trying to accept that I had cancer and that my body is now scarred from that surgery.  I can hide it but it is always there.  I didn't feel pretty.  I felt less.  In my mind, my scar was becoming who I was.  But I am not my scar.  I am not just a cancer survivor.  I am me and I had cancer.  Emotional abuse is cancer to the soul.  For years, I have focused on feeling and repairing the damage from years of neglect and abuse.  (Neglect is a form of abuse but I list it separately since many people forget how damaging it is.)  Then I started working at accepting the good, the bad and the ugly.  All the parts to myself.  All the fears.  All the anger.  All the history that made me who I was.  I admired Dave Pelzer when he said, "I like the man I am today.  I would not be that man without the experiences that I had."  I was astounded by this.  I read his books.  I knew that his childhood was brutal.  What did he do to reach this point?  I kept reading his books until I understood that he accepted himself completely.  Nothing left behind.  Looking back at integration, a vital part to the change was total acceptance of all myself.  Integration for me meant nothing left behind.  I am not a product of my abuse.  I am a person that was abused and chose to change how I treated others differently than I was treated.  I am also discovering that as I accept my past hurts, I own them, then I can let them go because they are mine to do with what I choose.  Seemed like as long as I denied past events, the more they clamored to be heard.  I notice the same thing with emotions.  As long as I attempted to depress my emotions, the stronger they fought to be felt.  I stop trying to depress them, I feel them and found that they were less extreme.  The emotion seemed to become stronger trying to fight past my efforts to stop it.  Yesterday, I had a situation over food that usually sends me into a tail spin.  Instead I acknowledged my anxiety, found a solution, and moved on with the day.  Accepting it all does not make me less of a person no more than having cancer made me less of a person.