Is Lack of Self-Care Self-Abuse?

Why is lack of self-care so prevalent and accepted as normal behaviour?

In a support group for carers recently, one participant began sharing about their decades-long relationship of constant verbal and occasional physical abuse. During the group the ‘penny dropped’ for this person that accepting abuse from this person was self-abuse. When self-abuse is normalised in this way it acts like a cancer in how it affects the lives of many.

We often see self-abuse as the extremes of behaviour, but is it?

‘Walking on eggshells’ for example where we put up behaviours, condone another, ‘keeping the peace’ at all cost. What is the real effect of this? Can we consider that this is not self-care and self-nurturing when we engage in behaviours such as this? One of the constants in these situations is that people do not speak up because they are fearful of expressing the truth to another.

To be treated as if we didn’t matter, seen as less, not met or held in love, each an example of abuse in the family home. If we didn’t receive love as a child, how can we love ourselves? Not loving ourselves, feeling less and judging ourselves harshly makes it easier to attract abuse from another.  We may be told it is difficult, but it is not impossible to shut off the self-talk that constantly self-bashes, criticises and is loathing of self.

Self-abuse starts within, with false beliefs fed to us from childhood and then played on constant repeat by ourselves in our own heads.

“If we honour what we truly are, that we are all very sensitive, innately and beautifully so, and acknowledge it, we will live accordingly. This will produce a natural Will to self-care and nurture deeply in honour of what is in essence already there. If we ignore our true essence we will have to bury it with all that we are not. Thus, self-abuse overtakes the self-care and the nurturing that are otherwise naturally there.”
~ Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume II, ed 1, p 268

We break the cycle of self-abuse by switching off every negative track (belief/self-talk) that tells us we are less. Change the needle. Switch over to tracks that only confirm the truth of what we are in essence:  loving, sensitive, tender, beautiful, grand, truly powerful. 

The world we live in is predicated to provide an array of stimulants that distract us away from living the essence of who we truly are. We can bring ourselves back to our bodies and true essence through the way we breathe, the way we exercise and move and the way we go about all of our daily activities. Through having an approach that is gentle to begin with we start to develop increasing awareness of our bodies and the effect of the way in which we move on our bodies. Through this, we begin to realise that it is our responsibility to build a loving relationship with ourselves, moment by moment.

When we love ourselves so deeply, we will never allow any abuse to come close.
Because everything is possible.

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