How To Love Yourself

Explore the profound journey of self-love and inner healing with "How to Love Yourself." This powerful talk is a personal story to help you overcome past traumas, confront deep-seated fears, and embrace your true essence.

Transcript

We're going to be talking about the relationship with your inner self or the relationship with our inner selves.

I want to speak about this subject from a quite a pragmatic point of view because it's something that's very close to my heart in that it looked like a struggle.

To me,

When people said love yourself or you have to love yourself before you can love somebody else,

I couldn't think that.

How could I love myself?

I did not like the person that I saw in the mirror.

I didn't like the shape or the look of the person that I saw in the mirror but I also rarely looked into the eyes of that person in the mirror because to me what I saw beneath the vibrant,

Energetic,

Bubbly personality was broken and damaged.

And how could you love that?

That's what I used to think.

I'd look and I'd think,

How could you love that?

And for a really long time,

I actually realised later on that I didn't even look into my own eyes.

I'd brush my hair and do my makeup and get out of that mirror as quickly as possible and avoid mirrors at all costs.

How we find that inner self is bespoke to everybody.

So you can't find it by listening to what I did and then doing what I do.

It will be bespoke to you and you almost can't find it by looking.

I didn't have a good relationship with my father.

I grew up in a very traumatic,

Violent household,

Neglected,

Abused,

Just everything really.

That continued all my life.

So even though I wasn't living with my father,

I was petrified of him.

So whenever he contacted me,

Which he did from time to time,

I would get all sorts of feelings of fear and wanting to please and wanting to be loved and anxiety and a whole cocktail of unhappy feelings.

We'd have our interactions and on and off over the years,

Some of those would be nice and some of them wouldn't be so nice.

I was 39 years old.

I was about to have a hysterectomy.

I had enormous fibroids in my body that had to be removed.

My son,

Who was 16 at the time,

Got scared and wanted help,

Wanted my dad to come and help and wrote to him and said,

Your daughter's having a hysterectomy and you need to,

You need to help her.

You need to be there for her.

My dad,

Whose name was Peter,

He called me up and he said,

I can't visit you.

My wife would be really jealous if I was to visit you.

And so all of a sudden on this phone call,

I thought,

What a weird thing.

His wife would be jealous.

She wasn't my mum.

And I looked in the mirror and I thought,

You crazy woman,

You're nearly 40 and you've allowed this relationship with this very strange man to influence your whole life,

Your whole relationships,

Everything.

I'd have violent relationships when I was younger.

And at that time I had relationships where they weren't violent,

But they were emotionally abusive,

Mentally abusive.

And I just looked at myself and I thought,

Just stop it.

You're nearly 40,

Grow up.

And overnight I stopped attracting abusive people.

Only nice people came into my life.

Only kind people,

People who wanted to be nice to me or treat me well.

I was really shocked because all my life I'd thought those were the only men that I could be with.

Fast forward a few years,

Me and my son had moved to another location and Peter Bennett,

Who was my dad,

Didn't know where we were,

But he tracked me down and he was dying of cancer and he wanted a relationship and he wanted to be forgiven.

His words were,

I want you to be three again and we'll start again.

He asked me to come back into his life.

He asked me to be around.

And I remember when I made the decision,

I had the sort of night of the long knives and I thought,

If I do this,

I've got to do it with an open heart.

I've got to go in and see him for himself.

And so I did.

It was a rocky five months.

We both tried.

My son tried.

We even went to Australia to see our family.

But it was hard and you can't just wipe away 14 years.

We all struggled in our own different ways.

So anyway,

He got sicker and the three girlfriends that he had,

I put them onto like care duty as he got sicker.

So different girlfriends looking after him at different times.

He lived about 30 miles away from me and one of them called me up and said,

I think you better come.

I think he's really ill.

So I went along and he was still being an old goat.

He was like stroppy with everybody and throwing his toys out the pram,

But he was dying.

I could see that.

My internal project manager switched on.

So I got him sorted out,

Got him into hospital,

Went through all the forms,

All of these things.

I didn't know so many things about him.

So I didn't know what faith to put down.

Anyway,

We went through all this process and he was there and people came and visited and little girlfriends came and wiped his mouth and they were all loving over him.

And I looked at him and thought,

It's horrible.

Like how can they bear to touch him?

This gnarly old goat in the bed.

But I was just doing what needed to be done really.

And there came a point where the doctors called me in and asked me to sign the do not resuscitate forms.

And I thought,

I don't even know this bloke.

And I've basically gone and let him die.

They said that was the best thing to do.

So I did that.

And they put him on to palliative care.

And by this time he was just breathing.

He wasn't conscious or he wasn't knowingly conscious.

And he was lying in a bed and they put him into this undulating bed to stop bed sores.

And there was some morphine or some sort of pain killers going through to keep him out of pain.

But they stopped feeding him and they were allowing his natural causes to take their toll.

And when I'd packed his bag to take him to the hospital,

I'd swooped up a book off the bedside table.

Everything had settled down.

I'd been in the hospital now around about 48 hours.

I sat beside his bed and I said,

And I knew that he had been fighting the cancer.

He felt like his workout wasn't finished.

It was only 60,

By the way.

But in his older years,

He repented.

He realized that he hadn't been a very good person and he'd done all sorts of things,

All sorts of therapies.

And he wanted to find peace before he died.

He thought he could fight the cancer somehow.

It wasn't a case of being positive.

It was more of a,

It was,

It was him.

It was more of a right now,

You know,

You bugger,

I'll get you with the cancer.

He wasn't,

He wasn't peaceful at all.

So I sat beside him.

I said,

Right,

I'm going to read whatever this clap trap is in this book.

I'm going to read it to you because you've obviously been reading it.

So I just opened it at different pages and read him different verses.

And I said,

I'm going to read to you till you let go because you need to let go.

It's okay.

And you're not alone.

I wanted him to know he wasn't alone.

And it wasn't,

It wasn't a daughter,

Father thing.

It was a human to human thing.

That's all.

And I held his hand and he,

He lay there and I read and my son texted me and said,

How are you doing?

And he said,

Get some sleep.

And I said,

No,

I'm okay.

I'm going to stay with him until he's gone.

And my son said,

Well,

Why don't you kick someone out and kick someone out of the bed and sleep in their bed?

They probably wouldn't even notice.

And so I told Peter Bennett this,

And he laughed.

I went,

He just laughed.

And I texted my son again.

And I said,

He just laughed.

And he said,

Well,

He won't laugh when he finds out it's him you're kicking out,

Will he?

I told him and he laughed again.

I said,

You old bugger,

You can hear me.

I am definitely not leaving that.

I'm going to read to you until you feel safe enough to let go.

You're stuck with me because you can't get away from me.

I held his hand and I read these verses and just paused and the nurses came in and out.

And at some point during the night,

An overwhelming feeling came over me of being sorry for the relationship that was not had,

For the time,

Things that hadn't been said and things that had been said.

And for whatever my part in it was,

I looked at him and I said,

I'm sorry.

And he lifted his hand,

Was mine in it,

And brought it up to his chest.

And to me,

It sounded like the air that came out of his breath said,

I'm sorry too.

But I don't remember now whether he actually did that or not.

So I kept reading and there was no further reactions from him.

He just kept breathing.

And the next morning,

All the tribe came,

The family and the girlfriends and the various people who were also people from my past that I didn't really want to be with.

And I went into his little,

Like,

Toilet area,

Bathroom to wash up because I'd been there 72 hours by now with no sleep and no makeup.

My hair was lank.

You probably know what hospitals are like.

I went in and I looked in the mirror.

And in the mirror was the most beautiful person I've ever seen in my life.

And I just looked at her and I said,

Who are you?

And the moment was gone.

And later that day,

He died.

And there's more stories around that.

I didn't know at the time,

But the sense I make of it now was that was my true self beneath the barriers and the boundaries and who I am and who I'm not.

And in the moment,

The magical moment of forgiveness between us two human beings,

My true self somehow showed itself to me.

And I saw my essence in a glimpse.

And that's what started this journey for me,

Finding out about the innate health of working with people in prison,

Of mending my relationships with my family,

My son in particular.

That's what started that journey.

And I am so grateful that I got to see her.

Of course,

That's not the only way to see our true selves.

But the fact that it's there,

Because I knew when I saw that,

I knew if I see pure essence in me,

It's in everybody.

Reviews

A beautiful story that made me cry💕thank you for sharing it with us Jacqueline❤️❤️