As children, we look to our parents to show us, how the world is and how we should perform within it. From a very young age, we take everything in, everything we are exposed to and it becomes the foundations of who we are. How we react, how we interact with others. Our home environment, has a huge impact on how we navigate our life. Learnt behaviours, that sometimes, make our lives more difficult, than they need to be.
I grew up in Ireland and I'm very proud of where I come from, my culture, the land that I feel so connected to. And yet, being kind to oneself, is not something that was a common trait when I was growing up. We were still coming out of a life of oppression, from colonialism
to religion, trying to find our way, back to ourselves.
Being gentle with myself, well it certainly didn't come natural to me. I grew up, where you had to work hard and always push yourself. Where life is a struggle at times. And to this day, I find myself repeating that pattern. To run myself into the ground, because I never learnt to be kind to myself. Let's be honest, I think there are many of us, that never learnt how do, because it was absent from our home life.
If your parents are not kind to themselves, then we tend to follow suit. I'm aware that I do it and I have been trying for a few years now, to break that pattern. To not push myself, to the point that I get overwhelmed and run down. I am getting better at it, but still there is that voice in my head, telling me that life should be hard.
Because that's all I knew growing up, that was my first insight into life, that life is hard. So it makes sense, that I would recreate that throughout my life. But, finally it is becoming less. Because now I am aware of it. I even wrote about it, in my last post, to remind me, to continue to break those patterns. To hold myself accountable, because I want to continue to grow, to really thrive now in my life.
Ah, to be kinder to myself, so if felt fitting that I answer one of the questions that is part of the Weekend Engagement challenge, (which is in it's 6 year now), that asked, " Have you ever found yourself being unkind to, or hard on, yourself?".
