Reading affirmations helped me to reach a major epiphany

For about a week prior to my major realisations of last week, I had been reading quite a lot of articles on positive affirmations and mindfulness. These articles were all about telling yourself that you are a perfect human being, that you are wonderful and that you need to truly accept and love yourself.

I guess by reading these articles, they imbued my subconsciousness to such an extent that I had the profound realisation that I didn't really accept or love myself, that I was really hard on myself and that I wasn't kind to myself. And all of this made me think about why this was the case. While I did ponder on some of this consciously, I think it mostly occurred subconsciously. And then the answers to my unanswered subconscious questions did come to me consciously.

I think what happened was that subconsciously, I was thinking about my life, my parents, my relationships with other people - basically basically everything that got me to be the person I am today and to the point where I am in my life.

All of this information coagulated together in my subconsciousness to provide me the basis of understanding myself better and if I understand myself I can make myself feel better too. I realised that the reason I do not love myself and do not treat myself kindly and accept less than I deserve from people is because that is what I have been taught to accept by my parents and then by life in general. My parents have taught me that I am unlovable and unworthy of being loved (and unworthy, full stop) through everything they have said and done to me over the years and how they continue to treat me this way now. They cant help it. And what I have been doing is to accept everything negative they have been telling me about myself as true.

The thing is, I have accepted unacceptable behaviour by friends and boyfriends, simply because that is what I know and have been taught to accept. I have felt that it wasn't right and when I have said something, these people pushed back harder on me (they were meaner and tried to "put me back in my place") and when I didn't accept it, they didn't want to be friends with me or didn't want to go out with me any more.  Sometimes I removed myself from them after trying to make them see that their behaviour and conditions on me were not acceptable to me and they continued to try to subjugate me and to try to make me to continue to accept the status quo.  It was hard on me and all the time I thought it was my fault anyway and felt guilty if I didn't do what they wanted me to do, because that is the message I have always heard from my family and accepted as true.

Truly, it is amazing that I have managed to carry on as much as I have, given the poor upbringing I have had. But at least now, I am starting to see things a little differently and am starting to realise that I am not a bad person, it is not my fault, I am worthy and I am lovable. I really am.

I need to start telling myself this every day, until I really start to believe it and feel better about myself. Improve my own self-worth and self-esteem so that I feel whole again.