This Week’s Recovery Application Challenge
“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength… Love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these.”
Mark 12:30-31 (NLT)
How do I love my neighbor… my brother… my children… if I don’t love myself?
Healthy love produces fruit while sick love produces sin, and sin when full grown gives birth to death. When we talk about sick love for one self, even the feeling of sick love is dark and ugly. Self hatred is the effect of sick love for one self. Whether this is for you or someone you know that is lost in self-destructive thinking and behavior, this matter of sick love versus healthy love of self is of crucial importance and could be a matter of life or death.
Beyond addiction and morally dysfunctional relationship nightmares is the very real problem of suicidal thinking and behavior. The notion that suicide is the ultimate act of morbid self hatred and disgust can be more fully realized in the light of self hatred produced by sick love of self. If it can be communicated to someone in danger of harming them self that perhaps he or she really does care and have concern even for him or her self, and that despite one’s denial of this truth, suicide is actually the desperate act of love, a very sick love for him or her self, maybe… just maybe… the person can be convinced that with help sick love can be converted into healthy love for self. Maybe there’s a chance to fend off a desperate act full of the uncertainty that lurks on the other side of such a desperate act of sick love. Escape from one thing through death might feel certain but escape from a thing is to enter in to something else far less certain; a frightful mystery.
Important to a healthy love of self is first extending the invitation to Perfect Love to be intimately involved in your life? It is the Spirit of the Living God in the person of Jesus Christ who is Perfect Love. It isn’t merely what He represents or what He can give to your life. He is Perfect Love.
7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
11 Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.
13 And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. 14 Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 All who confess that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love.
God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 17 And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world.
18 Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. 19 We love each other because he loved us first. 1 John 4:7-18 (NLT)
The following application challenge is intended to assist you in managing the depressive symptoms that emanate from internalized guilt, shame, anger, and resentment. It is a vehicle to acknowledging love of self so that one can with methods into a plan of action on how to love oneself in a way that is best—healthy, constructive and productive. When done prayerfully, and perhaps with assistance from a trusted confidant, it is a real opportunity for transformation out of fear, depression, and internal doubt, into courage, positive regard, and confidence in the truth about your self and how you see and function in the world.
Goal
Develop coping skills necessary to manage depressive symptoms.
Objective
Implement positive self-talk to strengthen feelings of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and hope.
Actions
- How have feelings of depression fed into negative feelings you have had and have about yourself?
- If you did not care for and value yourself, you would be indifferent to your own needs and not driven toward self-destructive behavior to in some distorted manner attempt to remedy your situation. How does your harmful response to depressive feelings and behavior suggest that you in fact care for and value, and have love for yourself?
- How would you say that your love of self (caring enough about yourself to act against feelings of hopeless and helplessness) has been unhealthy?
- How has an unhealthy love of self over time robbed you of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and hopefulness?
- How would you say that unhealthy love of self has been unreasonable and irrational? In other words, what is it about unhealthy (sick) love for yourself, or anyone else for that matter, that doesn’t make sense?
- As you identify unhealthy thoughts and feelings as irrational, what would you agree today are lies that you have come to believe about yourself?
- How have thoughts and feelings of depression fed into lies you might believe about how you see yourself and the world?
- How can you rationally challenge an unhealthy love of self? List at least 5 statements on how to rationally challenge thoughts and lies that steal your joy, robbing you of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and hopefulness?
- How can your higher power help you to challenge depressive thoughts and feelings connected to the lies you have come to believe about yourself? What can you say about your higher power and how he can help you? List at least five statements you can say to your Higher Power to achieve and believe in truth about you, consistent with what you are working on in recovery.
- Put these 10 statements on something that you can use to daily repeat them in your quiet time and occasionally to someone who can help you in recovery from depression.
If you or someone you know is struggling with this today, please share with them the evident truth laid out in this article. It is important to remove the stain of self-hatred and the notion that self hatred need be medicated by remedies that altogether destroy lives. Let it be said that self hatred is sick love and self pity feeding into misdirected misery by way of potions that do no more than to promote even greater misery. It serves no purpose other than increasing your pain and dissatisfaction. If you didn’t care about yourself you would be indifferent toward your inner self at the core and you’re not indifferent. No one is.
Let Perfect Love into your life and see what happens. Notice how the spirit of fear in you is changed into something courageous. Wouldn’t it be something if that bitterness your carry turns sweet and you literally sense all that inner resentment melt away as you grow in unveiling wisdom that allows you to see things as they really are from a much “higher” perspective. Wouldn’t it be something to be renewed into something far better than you are that allows you to once again see yourself as God sees you. How does He see you? He looks at you and sees Perfect Love alive within you; seeing the presence and beauty of Jesus all over you. Allow God to renew your mind and restore your joy.
Let God change your mind about yourself. Let Him help you to love yourself again with a healthy love, which you already read produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. What if you believed these things about yourself. Not only would your love for you be healthy but you could love God from a healthy place and love your neighbor with healthy love since you love your self that way.
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