Self-worth and twisted thinking

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hung this on my bedroom wall in high school. I believed it then and I believe it now.  The first year seeing KavinCoach felt like being dropped into a bottomless pit and I kept falling downward crashing into the sides as I plummeted.  We talked early on about my total lack of self-worth.  KavinCoach pointed out that I am a child of God.  I shot back, "So was the pedophile."  Years before I understood that God loved me and valued me so what twisted thinking skewed my inward view.  God created me and warthogs too.  Have you every seen a warthog? 
http://true-wildlife.blogspot.com/2011/03/warthog.html  (I have a one of my own pictures somewhere but not going to go looking for it.)  I was a child that even my mother couldn't love.  How could any other human love me?  I believed it sometimes but I also set myself up to fail.  Not on purpose, just a lot of misunderstandings about boundaries and people.  I worked for a major university in the computer labs for the art department.  I was hired by the professors then the dean of the college became my boss.  The Dean never saw what I did.  I was a little x on a spread sheet that when they needed to cut the budget it was easy to cut me off the page.  I was nothing to him.  I unfortunately tied my self-worth to what I could do.  The work rug was jerked out from under me.  Fortunately, I was also a student there.  I was an art major myself by the time I was laid off.  I landed on this safety net and kept going.  My ideas about self-worth were twisted and distorted since birth.  Before studying to be a photographer, I was an engineer.  I am still a scientist at heart.  I read geeky stuff on a regular basis.  One of the experiments I read about has to do with how the brain sees the world.  It was believed if a person wears glasses with a lens that turns everything upside down, within 3 days, the brain corrects your vision and the world looks 'normal' again.  Here's the kicker, when you take the glasses off it takes 3 days for your brain to straighten out the world again. *  I was given funky weird glasses from the time I was little.  That showed me a world where I was less than nothing.  Strangers and second class citizens were treated better.  The pedophile hammered into my mind that horrible things happened to me because I deserved it.  My world was twisted and distorted upside down.  I tried to figure things out.  I read the New Testament of the Bible on my own when I was in junior high school.  I knew that something was wrong with how I was treated and what I was taught.  Unfortunately, I grabbed the wrong end of the stick and tried to be a very good girl.  Not understanding, that it wasn't me.  I tried to fix a problem that belonged to the adults in my life and how they treated me.  Counseling tore off those weird glasses.  I saw for the first time that I wasn't the problem.  I certainly felt the results of someone else's unhealthy and cruel choices but I wasn't the problem.  I just want to throw up when some people say that we invite into our lives what happens to us.  No infant or toddler asks the adult in their lives to hurt them.  Adults figure that out all on their own.  But like the upside down glasses, reteaching my brain that distortions were outside of me is taking time.  KavinCoach took the twisted glasses away.  I felt frightened by these new views.  I felt bewildered as to why grown ups would blame children for their short comings.  I wondered why people did the things they did.  KavinCoach patiently retaught me that the world is a much nicer place than I believed.  He encouraged me to strengthen that thread that said, "My Heavenly Father values me and believes in me."  He kept pushing me to accept that I am a person of great value and worth.  I am still working on this project.  

*This article updates the information about the experiment. 
http://io9.com/5905180/does-your-brain-really-have-the-power-to-see-the-world-upside+down