When you gonna love you as much as i do?

I was recently reading Love,Joy,Feminism. and the concept of JOY, (Jesus first, Others second, You last) came up and man did it resonate with me. We didn't call it that when I was growing up but that was exactly how we supposed to live, especially if we were girls. Except in practice what it meant was that I was taught never ever to think about myself, never to think about my own needs. I was never supposed to do anything nice for myself because that meant taking time away from serving others. And in this context "doing anything nice" wasn't just about treating myself it was about looking after and paying attention to my emotional and physical needs.

While growing up it was stressed time and time again that anything I did for myself was "selfish" or "thoughtless" or was a product of my "pride." So I never learnt that I mattered, that looking after myself was important, that using my time to do things that I enjoyed and that made me feel good was ever acceptable

And even after all these years I still don't believe it's okay to do nice things for myself or even look after myself. I eat things that I know will make me feel bad, I don't let myself sleep properly or on a proper cycle. I fritter away time watching crap tv or just mooching around the house because I still feel that actively doing something that I like such as writing or reading or eating good food or swimming or researching stuff I'm interested in or just sitting in the sunshine, or making crafts that are not directly connected to my job,or taking long hot baths, make me a bad person.I still somehow believe that wanting to do and doing these things is a product of my "self love" which in an evangelical frame work is a terrible sinful thing, because people, especially women and children, are sinful and fallen and don't deserve love, they are only loved through Gods magnanimous grace.

Leaving the evangelical community and finding feminism gave me a new framework to think about myself as a person of worth as a person who matters and deserves to look after herself but even so it's still emotionally hard to believe I am worth looking after by myself because those messages ran so deep. Even outside of an evangelical community we still live in a culture that expects women to look after everyone else before themselves, that thinks of womens emotional and physical needs as an unimportant afterthought.

And this is doing me no good, it leaves me unfocused, it exacerbates my mental health issues. Refusing to care about myself or look after myself reinforces those old messages even as I try to dismantle them Also there's an element of fear because somewhere inside I feel that really believing that I matter, will unleash all the rage I am holding back, because knowing I matter means that all the abuse I suffered was not okay, was not because I deserved it. But I have to do this. I have to at least behave like I matter and I think behaving like I deserve to look after and care for myself will help me start believing it on an emotional level. And I'm going to start with little things. I'm going to be in bed by 11 every night with a mug of Ovaltine, because I love it, and an episode of Buffy.

when you going to make up your mind?

I kind of had a revelation recently that my relationship with god replicates almost exactly my relationship with my father. However many twists and turns I make, however much I try to do the liberal progressive christian thing it always comes down to gratifying the needs and desires of a demanding male authority figure in ways that deeply, deeply damage me, while ignoring my needs and desires in return for a simulacrum of love and nurture from him. A refusal or even a reluctance to fulfill and gratify those needs and desires results in rejection and a refusal of love and nurture

And it's not like I made this up that description pretty much sums up the god of the bible, the god of the old testament and even the god of the new testament who planned for his son to die so his desires could be gratified

I kind of feel like on the one hand I'm engaging in trauma reenactment to try and change my history, change my relationship with my father and on the other hand I'm just hanging on to this Christianity thing for fear of abandonment or punishment. I was talking to a friend and our conversation made me realise that even if intellectually you ditch the beliefs in eternal damnation, emotionally it can still be there deep down in some part of you. I think my fear of hell is in the same part of me where the belief that i deserved everything that my father did to me is stored. The place in me that still believes that i am an intrinsically bad person who deserves to be hurt and punished and that believes that any goodness, any nurture that is given to me must be paid for because I don't deserve to be loved or cared about

And just as I understand that my relationship with my Father is unsalvageable I'm beginning to understand that my relationship with any form or portrayal of the christian god is also unsalvageable. I don't think I can heal from one without healing from the other