Body Clutter. It is not just about the physical clutter, but the emotional clutter as well. I’m pretty convinced its more about the latter. So much of my journey has been about overcoming spiritual and emotional battles. Battling the hate, the anger, the fear, that I had created for myself. As Psalms 145:8 says, God is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger and rich in love. I think we should use those qualities in our relationship with ourselves as well. We must first and foremost, love Him. But I believe He expects us to love ourselves in this way as well.
When we take on various situations in life, we take on different roles. In this chapter, FlyLady and Leanne presented the different roles we can take…
- The Pleaser- We want everything to be ok and running smoothly, so there is never any tension or flared tempers.
- The Ostrich- No matter how difficult or strained things are, we just bury our head in the sand waiting for things to get better. When circumstances don’t get better, we just stick our head in deeper in the hope that everything will disappear.
- The Self Preservationist- We take whatever is handed out to us because we know it is just easier to swallow it than actually to confront what is happening around us.
- The Protector- We defend everyone we love and go into mama bear mode to make sure that on one will get close enough to hurt our loved ones- or us.
- The Excuser- We make excuses, not just for others around us, but for ourselves as well. We always have an excuse for why something has happened or why something has not happened.
- The Perfectionist- We always look for everything around us, including the people in our lives, to be perfect in every way, yet perfection is something that neither we nor they are ever able to achieve- a sure setup for failure.
All of these roles often lead to anger and fear. I know I have been each and every one of them. And I struggled with many of them in the past year as I battled negative body image. I was definitely the ostrich for quite some time, as I didn’t want to face the fact that I needed to do something to fix the hate I had for myself. I just wanted to hide from it, and myself. Because at the time, I didn’t love myself at all.
I was the Excuser. And you know I had quite a few excuses.
And my biggest downfall…the Perfectionist. And when I wasn’t to my standard of perfect, I beat myself up with negative words and thoughts. And became someone that wasn’t me. But the reality is that I had/have to let go of that (which is still a struggle, but a work in progress!).
Honestly, (and I was just discussing this with the hubby), I feel like God has used all of the “bad stuff” I went through in the last year to bring me closer to Him and He is really teaching me SO much. Almost to the point that I am overwhelmed! (in a good way). When I first started this blog, and titled it Living Healthy for Him with the slogan “learning to be spiritually, emotionally, and physically fit,” I didn’t realize how heavy the spiritual and emotional part of this journey would be. And I continue to learn this every day.
To me, it is so much more important then the physical part. As I learn how to become more like the Ideal Woman of Proverbs 31 and put what I am learning into practice, I am seeing so much growth in my relationships with loved ones and God, and in my ability to cope when negative body image tries to seep back in. It is far from perfect, far, far from it. But I am seeing the growth. And that excites me!
Love- there it is. That very word that brings us all back to what is really important. Loving yourself enough to take your first Babysteps on the journey to living a life with peace and hope rather than fear and anger. We all want to feel love and have that love validated by others, yet there are so many times that we are unable to love ourselves first. Loving yourself is a work in progress; you will never be finished. Love is always something that must be nurtured. -FlyLady
All I have to say to that statement is: Amen!
It all boils down to not feeling worthy of being loved. We set ourselves up for failure because deep down inside we can’t believe that we could be someone who is lovable. -FlyLady
Why do we not feel worthy? What is hurting us? Why do we want to be perfect? Why do we feel like we aren’t worthy of being loved? Especially by ourselves?
Leanne talks about CONSTRUCTION vs DESTRUCTION. All of that anger we have at ourselves, we can either use it to build ourselves up or let it destroy us. Once we understand the answers to those questions above, we can learn what causes those feelings of desperation, that frustration, that lost feeling…and we can start to use that understanding to make changes in our lives that will lead us out of anger, and into a much more fulfilling life. It isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time to make those changes. And here comes that word that we have seen so many times over this series…babysteps.
Which role have you or do you fall into when difficult situations arise? What can you do to overcome them? Share in the comments!
Source: Body Clutter by Marla Cilley and Leanne Ely
We were talking about these things to night. Thanks for putting it down in writing.
Thank you for stopping by! It's a difficult thing to talk about, I think, but it really is something that needs to be addressed. Fly-ing (finally loving yourself) brings so much freedom!