It’s interesting that even after 10 years of being recovered there are things that come back to me that would have triggered my bulimia, and today may trigger a feeling of insecurity. Today I became aware of one. Feeling like I am hard to love.
Question. How did I realize this? It was something my sister was talking about in regards to my own mother. God bless my mom, however there is something she often lacks. A filter. The consequences of some of the things she says without that filter can be very hurtful, antagonistic style. Once she has hurt, and the protagonist becomes frustrated, angry or starts to cry, she will then ask “what have I done to make you hate me?” I have heard my mother utter these words enough that I equated them to “I am hard to love” and this transpired into my life. I can recall being in relationships where I just felt that I was just that. The feeling was such that I even started to feel disassociated with those I loved. Like I was an outsider looking at my life with my children and my husband, and thinking there is no way he loves me as a wife and his other half, nor my children as their mother. There is no possible way they can love me as much as I love them – because I am hard to love.
The feeling was indeed worse when I did become a mother, maybe because I felt a disassociation with my mother, which I have never told her about. I never really felt loved by her, and I wondered if my children felt the same way about me. I was equating myself to being like the only mother I knew. Mine.
Looking back I think that “food” never made me feel that way. It was like I was “eating” the love I couldn’t feel, yet in a way, after I had eaten, I really didn’t deserve that “food” and purged it. This was only ONE of those feelings that I turned to food for. There were others, however I realized today that would be one of the triggers. I also wonder if by continuing to be bulimic, I was able to blame that on why I was hard to love. Interesting thought.
About a year and a half ago my two boys alienated me. I was broken and so hurt and grateful that I didn’t turn to food this time. I reached out to my support system. My friends. They were so amazing, and some even shared about their own experience of their children doing same. However, until today, I don’t really think that I truly understood what I was feeling. What it was was that this was substantiating my feelings of being “hard to love”. And that fear I had of that was the fear of being abandoned and my sons did just that, as did my ex husband when he reached out to another woman which ended our marriage. Luckily, after some deep soul searching over the past year I realized this is not the truth. I am not hard to love. I do choose wisely who I do and who I want to have love me, however those who do love me I know truly do. Do I still struggle with it at some level? Yes. However with using my own program, I am able to work through this.
I continue to be more and more aware of feelings I had buried back when I was bulimic and day by day I deal with them and learn how to change my mindset.
Have you ever felt you were “hard to love”?
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