Author: eirini

How To Save Yourself From Being “Too Empathic”

Part 1: Wounded Empathy

If you identify as an empath, then unfortunately, this means that you have grown up in an environment which has conditioned you to take in others’ emotional energies to your detriment and also largely, if not completely, to the exclusion of your own.

If what you’d been experiencing was just pure empathy, you wouldn’t have needed to separate it as an identifiable part of your character.

Labeling your empathy means you’ve had to deal with something very traumatising. Pure empathy wouldn’t have felt like a tortured state that you’d want to escape from, it would have just been love and understanding between you and others.

So, this wounded type of empathy is not what people generally would associate with being empathic; it’s not necessarily caring about others’ feelings, but instead it’s primarily about being burdened by and afraid of others’ negative emotional states.

Wounded-empathy is an imposed state which makes us feel trapped, attacked, and powerless. In essence, it is the result of being assigned others’ emotions and not of simply feeling what others feel. 

Natural empathy is not something that automatically happens to us, it is a state of choice, where one desires to tune in to how others feel, out of compassion. While it feels instinctive and spontaneous, it’s not an imposed experience by others, whereas the wounded type of empathy is a helpless and martyric space. 

Additionally, natural empathy cannot be a space that feels negative, even when the emotions are extreme, because it is a secondary space of feeling, a place of sweetness in the face of sadness, grief, anger, fear – the primary space being the one happening inside the owner’s feelings. So, being there with others in their own experience of their feelings does not feel heavy, it’s like the way one might cry at a movie. It is still crying, but in empathy, on the outside of the actual life of the character. 

So how do we end up with this wounded-type of empathy to begin with?

Empaths are the scapegoated children of narcissistic parents, made to identify with giving only, and to be attuned primarily -if not completely- to their parents’ needs, which they then take on to their adult relationships. And the abusive aspect of what we have falsely learned to call “empathy” is that element of responsibility.

Empaths have been conditioned to sacrifice their own experience and substitute it with the other’s. This is not empathy, it is a one-sided, abusive type of relating.

That is why this type of false empathy feels so powerless, because if the feelings aren’t our own, they not only aren’t ours to solve but they cannot even be solved by us.

Emotional energy carries a unique to its bearer message, therefore, if it is transferred, the message does not reach its destination.

But, the empathic child unfortunately learns that it is both their fault and their responsibility to deal with the parents’ emotions instead of them. In that way the child also avoids their parent getting to the point of attacking them through their unresolved emotional energies. 

The empathic child is at the same time disallowed from tending to their own needs. This teaching happens through punishment by the “self-sacrificing” parent whenever the empath-child is acting in self-loving ways, as if self-care was supposedly a hating, rejecting or abandoning act towards the parent, when of course it’s only been assigned this false symbolic meaning for abusive purposes.

Part 2: Empathic Connection As A Substitute To Two-Way Connection

Apart from staying safe with an emotionally abusive parent, there is another important reason the child learns to take on the energy of the feelings of others around him/her: to substitute the much needed connection they are not receiving from their emotionally absent and abusive parents.

This works like so: The parent accepts them only as the negative to their positive; meaning the parent gets to be everything good, while the child represents the bad, when in fact those are the very aspects of the parent which the parent rejects in themselves.

If the child were to abandon this assigned role, there would be no other avenue to experience relating with that parent. It would be as if the child simply did not exist for their parent.

So, negative connection in a twisted way presents itself like a better option than no connection at all. And the child naturally accepts this dysfunctional connection.

However, the objective truth still remains: a negative connection is not a connection (love). It is instead a constant devastation much more detrimental than the acceptance of no connection, but the option to recognise it for what it is and thus deny it is only available to us as adults.

Another reason the empathic child would choose to maintain this connection would be to use it as a continuous plea towards the narcissistic-disconnected parent: “Look! I feel what you feel, therefore I am part of you (=love me)!”.

From these relational wounds, empaths naturally tend to conclude that all other people don’t want to take responsibility for their own emotions and/or that they can’t.

However, others are not only perfectly able, but also in complete freedom as to whether and how much they go into their own emotions. After all, we are all built “human” (with full access to all emotions).

It is not true that their parent(s) “couldn’t” deal with their emotions, that they were “too hurt” or that they “needed the empathic child’s help”.

That’s the original lie: that the parents “couldn’t”, when they simply weren’t allowing themselves to or they didn’t want to. The parents aren’t actually asking for the child’s emotional presence either.

They are simply trying to “receive love” by doing what their parents taught them: to not have any emotional needs. 

What they are asking for is an act of sacrifice that to them means love, but of course isn’t. In a mentality where love is sacrifice, there is only ever space for one; it is impossible to create a loving relationship. As soon as the other has needs, it feels threatening and disapproving to them.

The key to escaping wounded-empathy is to not take responsibility for another’s emotions more than they do.

When we are desperately trying to rescue others, it’s ultimately because we have accepted responsibility for their unhappiness.

The important thing to realise is that they don’t want to be rescued, they instead want to keep receiving “rescue” (=the feeling that somebody is putting their needs ahead of themselves).

The truth is that nobody is emotionally incapable. Choice does not imply disability. Besides, nobody can grow emotionally if somebody else (the empath) is always rushing to save them from developing their own emotional “muscle”.

So, empaths must learn to not take responsibility for others’ emotions and to not confuse this with natural compassion (which includes both people’s emotional needs).

As an “empath”, you must learn how to put your energy towards your own emotions first – and that’s what you crave after all, isn’t it?

Because through these patterns, you have learned it’s appropriate to feel guilty for your emotions taking too much space, too much energy, so you are constantly pulled to take care of others’ emotions for them.

You must reverse this false direction and lovingly apply your energy to yourself too. You will be pleasantly surprised to gradually find both others being happy to tend to you too and that it doesn’t diminish your capacity and desire to be there for them either.

Because your sense of reality has been severely distorted by the lie that your parent’s supposed self-sacrifice was love, and that the parent’s hatred was because of your “selfishness”, you now hope for somebody to release you from that torture, by accepting that the pain you have been in is real: that you have indeed been hated, not loved.

You now have the opportunity to recognise the truth that you have been the subject of pure hatred, that none of it was actually love. That is the saving that you’ve been so desperate for! So give yourself this gift, point those saving efforts towards yourself! 

Real empathy does not negate the self; it does not hold responsibility that values the other more than the self. Empathy is “and”, not “instead”.

Part 3: Helpful Practices

Lastly, let me leave you with some practices to assist you with distinguishing between pure empathy and wounded-empathy, because empathy is after all a beautiful and essential part of relating:

When you find yourself feeling burnt, overwhelmed or broken by “empathy”, notice and ask yourself:

  • Are you relieving the other of their emotional energy in order to be “good” and/or avoid being shamed or punished?
  • Are you tuning into them to be able to solve it for them so that you’re not burdened by them and/or so that they become “healed” enough into choosing to bond/connect with you?
  • Are you subconsciously attuning to them because you feel obliged to give priority to them?
  • Are you assigned their emotional energy so that they don’t feel bad?
  • When somebody is in emotional distress and requires your assistance/presence, do you abandon your own energetic space to show that you’re with them?

Try emotionally disconnecting (temporarily) or even physical distancing to see if your symptoms withdraw, so that you have a clear space to be able to examine what is yours and what’s not from a neutral space.

Finally, lovingly remind yourself: It is not your responsibility. They are powerful to solve their own problems. Tell yourself also that you don’t have to “pay” others to be with you (by accepting being burdened by their emotions). And make this your mantra:

It’s totally ok to feel however I feel. It’s totally ok to be in my own energy.

You are alive to be first and foremost in your own experience of self. That does not negate nor does it disconnect you from other people. Love includes both your energies and others’, simultaneously.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Why Addiction Is Not The Problem

 

Addiction is not weak, bad or self-indulgent.

Addiction is the result of denying ourselves pleasure. And pleasure in its natural form ignites, sustains and heals.

When we seek to gratify a desire in a way that has negative side-effects, it isn’t pleasure; it’s a subconscious targeting of both the positive and the negative effects produced by that behaviour.

Here’s how that gets formed in our subconscious:

As children we learn that we don’t “deserve”, that we shouldn’t want what we desire, so we become conditioned to expect punishment in order to appease the condemning parent, as a way to “pay” with self-destruction. That in turns allows us to experience a substitute of the pleasure that we actually want.

Going straight for the real pleasure would make us feel intense shame, as if we were claiming something beyond our “worth”. And this is the same shame that we suffer from even when going for the impure substitute.

So even though we attribute that shame to the addiction itself (as if it was an irrelevant result of character), it is actually the original need that we feel shame for. If the need had been deemed normal to begin with, it wouldn’t have been a “failure” to seek to fulfil it and therefore it would not have been associated to an imagined “weakness” of character.

The shame that’s preventing us from meeting our needs is based on the concept of “selfishness”. We are infected by this idea, even though it is entirely fictional.

If we get addicted to anything it is exactly because we are blocked from having what we need, so our system is going for the next best thing: something that we can control and that destroys us at the same time, so that we don’t mistakenly honour ourselves beyond our worth in receiving the direct pleasure we want.

So you see, addiction is the opposite of selfishness!

If we had been taught that pleasure is normal, strengthening, and enlivening, we wouldn’t be running from it as if it is “selfish”, all the while still needing pleasure, thus reverting to coping mechanisms -addictions- that must at the same time attack the self.

The idea of “selfishness” is born out of a gross misunderstanding of how the human system works.

Loving the self is not shame-worthy behaviour, neither is it in any way a detriment to other people.

It is only because our original environments shamed us for pleasing ourselves that we developed an antagonistic relationship between our pleasure and their wellbeing, thus combining pleasure with shame, limitations, social exclusion and rejection.

In reality, there is no pleasure that hurts others nor ourselves. Again, it is only the shame imbued in seeking pleasure that makes us adopt destructive alternatives which don’t truly satiate, so they become highly addictive.

Indeed, taking care of the self isn’t actually destructive.

Instead, it is self-sacrifice or selflessness, that create a world of struggle, stark emotional poverty and suffering health.

Because we follow society’s/parental demands in that eternal quest for “earning” our “worth”, we learn that we must only be “giving” our love out. So when it doesn’t come back in enough, we become depleted but without being able to remedy that because we’re disallowed to give to ourselves.

And so this is where power trips, control games, and manipulation are born: Not from actual “selfishness”, but from the unavoidable eventual result of selflessness/self-sacrifice.

One of the most damaging associations humanity has ever created is that of suffering with worth, and thus constricting a person’s availability to receiving. That positions pure pleasure totally beyond reach.

This is the perfect set-up for powerlessness.

Selflessness does not result in receiving others’ love, as we are led to believe, however it does make it possible for others to have control and power over the individual.

Sadly, exactly because we cannot allow ourselves to be full, when potential love comes and tries to fill us up, we suddenly feel acutely threatened, and we deny or even disbelieve in the offerings towards us. And that’s because our subconscious has been conditioned to expect punishment, withdrawal, even attack as we’ve learned we “deserve” when we honour ourselves with pleasure.

The reality though is that filling yourself up would disgust only anyone who would want you in that disempowered state, where they would be able to control you by making themselves the sole source of your needs and playing a starvation game against you to establish their hold on you.

Your happiness cannot be a threat to somebody who wants to love you into even more happiness.

So, you see, addictions cannot be seen as a person’s “fault”; they are just disallowed and unfulfilled pleasures/needs.

But because addictions have been formed through shame, they actually overshadow our true needs, so they present an obstacle to us getting our underlying, true needs fulfilled.

The real problem is that we believe we cannot or should not meet the need we have, directly.

The addiction is just a coping mechanism that can easily be remedied in the presence of what we actually need. So it is crucial that we identify and clear the path towards those needs.

Furthermore, it’s very important to realise that in all addictions, the core is a need that can only be covered by others.

Because we had no control over what we received in our original relationships (those with our parents), we learned to search for ways to address our needs that could be entirely controlled by ourselves.

Our cultures worship the ideal of “needlessness” and condemn the concept of “neediness” exactly because of this dynamic, when it is not only human but entirely healthy and beneficial to society for us to need one another. In any case, we actually do need one another, regardless of whether we are in a space of admitting it or not.

Another thing that we must acknowledge relative to addiction is that it is absolutely always a response to recurring violation in one’s life.

Addiction is never a “creation” within the self, a supposedly weak-character response to a normal situation, but a reaction to an environment of psychological abuse, which also presents no hope for change (and so the person resorts to addiction to cope).

It is vital, therefore, to identify emotional violations and change or leave abusive environments before we can become able to replace addictions with our true needs.

It is however important to also note that addiction has an unfortunate negatively-affirming result:

The more one uses these substances or behaviours to escape their reality and induce a substitute for their sought out feelings of relaxation, peace, excitement, safety and joy, the weaker their natural ability to create those things becomes.

Their brain’s ability to release the hormones that are equivalent to the natural positive emotions of a loved individual becomes weaker and weaker. So they gradually and eventually find themselves believing in a nightmare kind of life, which in turn “requires” further substance use to escape the “reality” of their depleted brain.

It is imperative to not believe what years of abuse and lack of love have convinced us about “reality” and about what our life is supposed to feel like.

Life is meant to feel pleasurable! The only reason that it seems otherwise is because as children we are stuck with the (abusive) parents we get. And they most usually are either unaware or unwilling to admit to the emotional violence that they’re inflicting on their children.

No matter how hard abuse/abandonment is however, it is actually much harder to live in a “reality” that disconnects us from our pain.

As soon as we are able to accept that the reality we grew up in was indeed abusive and thus separate it from the potential that is available in our future, we should passionately and willingly start facing our pain.

Facing our pain is loving ourselves. Pain is simply what happened to us, not something that we deserve, should feel shame about or be blamed for.

So while that choice of addiction is completely beautiful, smart and appropriate as sought after by our subconscious, we simply don’t need to keep making it as adults. But that door only unlocks with the key of recognising further and further the details of abuse in our parents’ accidental or purposeful behaviour.

Here, it must be said that our parents’ abilities and intentions do not have an effect in the negative results of their parenting.

While parents can absolutely be well-meaning and innocent, their actions must be measured objectively if humanity is to be set free of abuse and not carry it forward into the next generations.

And that objective measure is only their child’s emotions.

Lastly, anything that we do use as a drug is still part of our healing. Because the drop is actually as beneficial as the high, because the negative emotion becomes both easier to perceive and available for us to access. So if we support the wounded emotion to complete its cycle by allowing it to be felt fully, addiction can be enlisted as an ally to our healing.

Addictions are born only out of our innocent desire for belonging.

We damage ourselves to belong and we seek only the pleasure of belonging/love in everything that we do.

And so it must be that the universal remedy for humanity’s pain of isolation and the addictive coping mechanisms that are only the logical result of a very real and unbearable state of existence is in fact  sweeter relationships.

Filed under: Uncategorized

How To Uncover And Satisfy All Of Your Emotional Needs

All of your needs need to be met.

But it’s really hard to be able to figure out what you need when you’ve never gotten it.

That’s why it’s absolutely imperative for you to receive the objective reflection that your emotions are trying to communicate to you all the time: they show you exactly what is missing, no matter how opposing your reflecting experiences (how others reacted to your emotions) may have been in your reality.

The emotions that are created to communicate to you your unmet needs are absolutely precise. It’s simple: if you feel it, it’s accurate.

Problems have arisen only because you’ve been taught to discredit your emotions and to distrust their healthy and necessary reflections.

Another obstacle to discovering what your needs are is the conditioned belief that your needs have to first be approved by others in order for them to be valid.

Sometimes people go towards complete disowning of such needs in order to cope; they separate from the needs that other people didn’t find acceptable.

However some of those needs do need to be met directly by others and that of course produces a problem.

The good news is that whether a specific person is willing or able to comprehend, validate and meet your needs is irrelevant.

Because you can still listen to and allow yourself your needs and then honor them by taking each need to another, appropriate person (one that wants to and can meet them!).

The mistaken belief we’re accustomed to is that we must fight for the right to have our needs, usually against one person-which mirrors one or both our parents, or to invalidate those needs altogether.

It really is about fully honouring different needs, regardless of who’s in agreement rather than automatically complying to what we’ve been conditioned to allow as appropriate.

Another block is that we’ve learned that it’s “selfish” to insist to get our needs satisfied when others disagree with them.

But it’s not only not selfish, it’s actually beneficial for them too!

The needs others resist in us are the needs they resist in themselves.

So in pushing for our needs, we aren’t actually competing against theirs, we’re forcing both to come to the surface.

This is why it’s usually confrontational to experience this seeming clashing of needs, because the way the other’s been forced to disconnect/deny their needs is the way they’re going to fight against yours.

So it seems like there is a conflict, when in fact it’s the same unmet need in both that’s aching in unfulfillment.

The confusion we usually have around this is also due to the fact that repression of the need manifests in similarly opposing ways, so again it looks like a conflict, an opposition, when in fact the root is the same.

Here’s how this works: The one side of the coin shows the obvious denial of the need (self-sacrificing/co-dependent/rescuer mode) and the other is the entirely superficial glorification of the same need (narcissistic mode).

But the second side doesn’t actually satisfy the need itself either! It is simply a loud declaration for the need (in an effort to justify it), but without actually managing to receive the thing truly needed.

So, in essence, both sides of the coin still have the need unmet.

For example, if we’re talking about the need to be seen, the first side of the coin will look like humility, hiding, egolessness, while the other side will look like an over-zealous display of their image.

But the real need in both parties in this case is to be seen for who they are.

So while the first obviously does not get it -while secretly hoping to get to it through the never-ending path of being “good” towards others first-, the second one also does not get seen!

Only their exaggerated facade gets the attention and none of their real experiences and feelings get the nourishing witnessing they’re so desperately fighting for.

Worse, they’re also living with the fear and burden of having to prove and maintain that same facade, which makes them feel removed from who they really are, and that adds even more to the distance of the experience they need, that of being seen.

It is only due to the convincing of this type of narcissistic facade that we’ve learned we’re not getting our needs met “because of the other’s needs”.

Because part of the narcissistic facade itself is the illusion that they’re getting what they need (otherwise they feel unworthy/failed etc).

So we don’t actually need to fight the “narcissistic” elements in others in order to assure we get our needs met, because there really is no competition. Nobody is getting their needs met that way anyway!

We simply need to get what the need is and understand that facilitating others’ ACTUAL needs is automatically opening the door to us facilitating ours too!

Here be careful though not to commit to “cover-up needs”. It is imperative to find the actual, core needs.

Both people are hoping for the same need through their dysfunctional coping mechanisms, so don’t fall into the trap of meeting any needs just because they’re needs!

Meeting needs without a filter (usually out of obligation) traps you in eternally offering energy for the “cover-up need”- such as having to constantly give superficial attention for something “impressive”/appealing about the facade, rather than actually seeing the truth of the being behind the facade.

If you have a tendency to fall for “cover-up needs”, it is highly likely that you are invalidating your feelings about your underlying core needs too:

You cannot bear to see others suffer the way you are from this unmet need, so you get trapped in accidentally enabling others because you aren’t owning your negative feeling from your unmet need directly.

You’re trying to “save” the other person from the pain, but you should both be following your negative feelings towards actually meeting your underlying need.

You can use either your feelings or the other’s – it may be easier to notice feelings/unmet needs in others- to uncover your actual needs and then directly apply your energy on meeting the real need for both (if the other is open to communication) or simply love yourself by taking your valid need to somebody who’s actually available and happy to meet it.

All of your needs are meant to be met.

Filed under: MythsTagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Do You Think That Your Love Should Be Perfect?

A function of true love is allowing for the knowledge that we do not love perfectly all the time.

When somebody expects the other person in their relationship to consider the “love” they give as always flawless, there is a mono-dimensionality in their perception: they can only see themselves as either good or bad; they cannot tolerate feeling like a bad person.

But being “good” does not actually allow being loving, because it doesn’t leave any space for the true perception of other people’s pain caused by our behaviour (or even just our own pain).

In this scenario the person will always demand that their “love” is recognised as proof of their goodness.

They cannot afford to have “flaws”, because that would make them unlovable. This is the irony of trying to be loving: It suppresses, controls and misses real love instead.

On the contrary, a person who cares about being loving will be happy to acknowledge where their love’s limited, as that relieves the loved one from the confusion this conflicting experience brings :being told you are loved when your experience doesn’t match the label.

We have learned to accept fault for not having been loved.

But, ironically, only when we’re not focused on appearing loving, can the result ever be love. If we are able to say: “Friend/lover/family member, you are correct in feeling unloved because I have not loved you as you need”, we are saving that person from the inner confusion of  feeling not fully loved, while being told otherwise by their loved ones.

Note that we are not saying we are obliged to love either, as indeed we never are. So we are also freeing ourselves from the expectation of loving perfectly and naming what is love, love and what is not, no-one’s fault. We are all growing in love, all the time. And we can only develop our love by seeing the reality of where it hasn’t expanded yet, always compassionately.

Where we recognize another’s unmet need, we open up the space for it to be met by anyone, including them and ourselves and we also allow ourselves to have free will in choosing whether we’d like to meet that need.

It’s like all elements of love are now individual expressions both in what we choose to give and what we desire to receive.

And isn’t that the truth of the matter anyhow: that we are all individuals and therefore our needs cannot be the same and we cannot expect everyone to generically be able and desire to meet all of our needs?

By the way, having only two parents also seems entirely wrong.

This is why we are both confused and restricted in our concept of love/emotional needs, because we’ve had to adjust to only two persons’ abilities and worse, their incorrect perception and evaluation of those abilities too.

Perhaps we would do much much better growing up in communities rather than households, extended families, perhaps even poly-relationships instead of one woman and one man. Heck, most of us don’t even get both of our parents to begin with!

If we had love available to us from multiple people, we would not be so easily conflicted about the supposed “love” we’re told we’re getting from our caretakers and we would not have to feel either guilty for needing what we need or angry at not getting it.

We are all correct both in what we need and what we want to give, but only if things are clear (love is love and no is no), and we actually have options to go satisfy our needs elsewhere.

The solution then is good pairing! But it all starts with each one of us learning about ourselves.

Our whole lives are about discovering what we want, who we are through each experience. So let us make that come into focus finally instead of being preoccupied with whether we look loving or not. We are not selfish for needing and others are not selfish for not giving. We all have the right to choose to be as loving as we want.

And no-one’s unlovable. We just have to be with the people that naturally want to give what we want to receive.

Filed under: Emotional woundsTagged with: , , , , , ,

Why You Shouldn’t Love Everyone

The idea that we need to love everyone is faulty.

We suffer from trying to co-exist with people who don’t actually love us, but we believe we are faulty in that because we grew up in environments that did not resonate with who we were.

But we can still find our home with those like us.

We don’t have to love everyone (and they don’t have to love us).

We get obsessed about not being accepted because we’ve gotten the message that we need to fit into the world. Otherwise we’ll supposedly be entirely cast out, alone.

But “the world” is not that limited energetic space you’ve grown up in; it’s not the mental moral creation with its specific boundaries and demands that your family/culture had in their heads.

So, in expecting and allowing yourself to dislike others and be disliked by others, you are freeing the space for the people who like you for who you are.

All judgment of others is self-definition. It simply says “I am not like you”.

Judgment is natural and essential. It only becomes an attack when we feel forced to remain locked to that original home-environment (or one that resembles it) that is not tolerant of us, so we go into a fight against them to survive as  ourselves instead of being sucked into their kind of being.

But if we disallow being disliked and disliking, we keep asking for approval from these same (type of) people who already don’t see us as approvable while they too are locked in a battle to safeguard their identity.

So, whenever other people don’t want you, allow that, because they are actually relieving you from trying to be approved by someone who does not resonate with you enough, so they would in essence have to reject themselves in order to approve of you.

And what about the spiritual concept of loving everyone?

Well, even that only comes when we are not needing approval from them/clashing with their ideals, so usually, it comes from a place of distance and as a generalised soul-feeling as opposed to the basis of real, bonded, secure relationships with these people.

Because whenever we are too close (in an setting where we are asking for love) being disliked is a huge blow to our self-esteem and requires huge energy to battle.

So, sure, allow love for everyone but first take care of whether you are being loved by finding your true home-environments in the people that NATURALLY care to love you.

Those are the people who are already enough like you and loving you increases their self-love too.

The people who reject you in any way do not resonate with you (at least at that time) and they are rejecting what they do not want to be or what they do want but feel disallowed to be.

In either case, you do not have to force yourself to “love” and adjust to their energies-this is a mirror of the powerlessness that you experienced in childhood where your only option was to adapt to what your parent(s) demanded of you (justifying it as you being “loving” towards them).

Children love their parents automatically.

It is never the child’s love that is faulty and always the parent’s perception that could benefit from the child’s pure reflection of where their actual love has been compromised.

So, let people dislike you and let them be far from you since the jarring nature of your togetherness hurts you (both).

Do not seek those people; unless you want to be more like them because something in you is attracted to their qualities (different from seeking approval by contorting yourself to match what you think you should be).

We are all meant to be different and we are never too different to have a home-environment of love.

Filed under: AuthenticityTagged with: , , , , ,