I have been struggling and praying about some issues in my life for the last few months and I believe that I finally have some breakthrough on it.
It all started when I found myself not liking someone. I mean really not liking them. I did not feel right about this at all. I figured there must be something about me that needed to change. This person was probably mirroring something in me that I did not like about myself. I came up with all kinds of things that it could be that I needed to heal from.
After a few months of doing this and praying for healing and to be able to love this person, it seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I was really looking to God to understand what the heck was going on. What I realized is that, it is okay for me not to like someone. Sometimes there are people we just don’t like.
The problems that came during this time was with my thinking, because for some reason I was having thoughts that everyone else around me shouldn’t like this person either, or there must be something wrong with me. I had to justify my feelings by making this person bad in my mind and if they weren’t bad, then I had no reason not to like them.
I realized that it was okay if I don’t like them. I don’t have to like everyone, and it is okay.
It is not okay, though, if I act unlovely to them. It made it a lot easier to treat them with respect and be nice when I realized I didn’t have to like them. I didn’t have to villainize them in my mind. I could just accept the fact that I don’t like this person, and no one else has to agree with me to make it okay. This helped to get my thoughts out of the gutter in respect to this person and just accept the situation. It is okay if I don’t like them, but I still need to treat them in a loving, respectful manner.
It felt unusual because I have never allowed myself to accept that I didn’t like someone. I didn’t have to distance myself or get others to agree with me for it to be okay. Before this realization I had tried praying to love them and to see them the way God sees them. To find the gold in them and all that kind of nice stuff but when it came down to it, none of that worked and I just don’t like them. I can now behave much better towards this person, most of the time anyway!
Then comes the next part of the story. There is someone in my life that I have been feeling rejected by. I have been struggling with this for a few years and I am pretty tired of feeling these overwhelming feelings of pain and abandonment.
I asked God what is at the root of this. I am really in need of knowing what about me and my past is digging up all these rejection feelings. I know from past situations that I have felt rejection in, it is usually something from my past or childhood that I was rejected in, and I had to get to the root and get healing from those things. I know it is usually about me and not the other person. I have had a lot of healing in a lot of areas, so I was asking God to show me what in my past this was coming from. I was very surprised by the answer.
The problem was the same thing I just learned about the person I didn’t like. Maybe it is okay if someone just doesn’t like me either. This is a shocking revelation. Can I be okay if someone doesn’t like me? I have never really thought about this. If someone I am friends with decides they don’t like me, or they just distance themselves from me, does that make me not okay? What if I didn’t do anything wrong to them and they just don’t like to be around me that much, can I still be okay? I realized that not everyone needs to like me either, and that is okay. It doesn’t make me not okay! Not everyone is going to like me and that is okay. Can I deal with this situation? Feeling rejected all the time makes me a victim.
It has affected me a lot in my life, and not being able to deal with someone staying away from me caused me to feel like a victim, a victim of rejection. No fun!
I have learned that changing my beliefs and my thinking will change my feelings. I believe this is true. So I said to myself, “Not everyone has to like me for me to be okay.” It felt very uncomfortable. It felt unusual for me, because I have not said this to myself before. My faulty belief has been that everyone has to like me for me to be okay. This was a lie that I didn’t realize I had been believing, or I wouldn’t have kept doing it. My worth and identity has nothing to do with who likes me or who does not. My worth is firmly grounded in who God made me to be, and being centered and focused on Him and His love for me, so it was obvious that I needed to change my faulty thoughts to truth.
Feeling our feelings will bring healing if the feelings we have are based on truth. If we feel the feelings that are coming from lies those are not healing feelings. Those lies need to be changed in our minds to the truth, and then the uncomfortable feelings we get from telling ourselves truths are good feelings that bring life. Feeling the feelings based on lies will just keep bringing us pain. All feelings need to be faced and accepted, but not all feelings are just to be felt. Some feelings come from lies that we are believing about ourselves and others. We usually have been believing them our whole lives. Those faulty ones are the ones we need to change.
For example, if someone close to us dies, feeling grief and ongoing pain are good feelings to feel because grieving is an important part of healing. If we continue to say to ourselves “I cannot live without this other person,” then the feelings that come from that thought is a lie. It is causing death in us. Thoughts create feelings and that thought is not going to help us heal.
Grieving the loss of someone is feeling feelings that will bring life to us once again. It is going in the right direction. Feeling the feelings that come from telling ourselves that we can’t live without someone else, will not bring healing at all. That lie will bring just the opposite to us. Grieving is a good thing, but it is very important to make sure feelings are not coming from a negative thought that we keep repeating to ourselves about a situation. Those are thoughts we need to change no matter how uncomfortable it feels when we start to do it. Feelings that come from truths bring life. Feelings that come from a lie bring sorrow that will not bring healing.
So the truth is that I don’t need this other person to like me to be okay. I don’t need their approval to be okay. I don’t need their attention to be okay. Me and the Lord are fine together right here, just the way I am, and these are the truths I need to repeat to myself as much as I need to. These are the truths that will bring me life instead of death and pain.