Sunday, August 5, 2012

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.







4 comments:

Evan said...

Hi Ruth, I do think accepting all of who we are is the path to liberation.

I also think that choosing the easier way to achieve our goals is entirely sensible.

Anonymous said...

This is beautiful, like water to a sun-parched desert. I'm trying to believe it.

Judith said...

I've seen Dave Peltzer speak twice. Once was an inspirational talk to young writers and he was hysterically funny and talked about a teacher who encouraged him. The other speech was also inspiring, but absolutely devastating.

I think it is remarkable that you see beauty in so many things and you are able to share that hidden beauty in your photography. Your past did not take away your spirit.

Ruth said...

Thank you Evan.

Charity I am happy to know that this is helpful.

Vicariousrising, I am officially jealous. Dave Pelzer is one of my heroes. I would love to hear him speak some day. Thank you for your comment.