Do you deserve to be healthy? I recently had occasion to observe someone repeatedly making choices that hurt him. I mentioned that nothing he was doing or saying was hurting anyone but him. At first, he thanked me for caring. He followed that with a drunken phone call in which he had twisted the entire conversation wrong-side out and turned himself into a victim of some great conspiracy that will never end.
There’s some basis for him to lean toward that point-of-view. But he has taken a painful short-term situation in which he was a victim, made it chronic through his choices, and weaponized it against himself. This has cost him a marriage, contact with his children, a lasting career in his field, and the opulent life he craves, not to mention a decline in health.
Does he do this on purpose? This is tough to answer. And in the end, it probably doesn’t matter. What he, and many of us, must find is a way to move past the point around which we circle with no seeming ability to move in a different direction.
We may consciously know we can do better for ourselves, but still maneuver in a way that allows us to avoid the accountability of owning the choices we make that aren’t good for us. There are a million different patterns for doing this. Most are subconsciously designed to help us avoid embarrassment, fear, shame, vulnerability, and potential loss. We have a deeply felt need to save face.
What’s weird about being in this position is the sort of blinders that come with it. It becomes easy to adopt a view of ourselves that doesn’t match others’ experience of us or our actions. When we hit a point in which other people can see we’re making decisions that aren’t helpful and we defend those decisions by twisting indisputable facts they themselves observed, we lose credibility.
Once that credibility is lost, we may also lose their support. Why should someone else spend time struggling to figure out what part of our story is valid so that they can then figure out how best to help us when it’s clear we are not in a position to accept help. We are too busy clinging to a position in which we are unwilling to help ourselves and would lose face accepting help from others.
What sometimes happens at that point is the person making poor choices will sense support is waning and begin to lean even further into stories of victimization to try to manipulate us back into what may feel like connection. And it is connection, but not the healthiest sort.
So when the person making bad choices is us, what can we do?
Obviously, it’s easy to tell someone else they deserve better and to stop making bad choices. But it’s not that easy. Many of us have a skewed self-image from injury or abuse we have suffered at the hand of others. We are subconsciously choosing what feels normal. That normal may be to treat ourselves badly.
Others are attempting to avoid a deep sense of shame. We may believe we have done something unforgiveable. Or maybe someone has told use we’ve done something unforgiveable. Or maybe we have done something we have criticized others for doing.
No matter what we’re attempting to avoid or cover up, we must be able to make conscious choices to improve our lives. That begins with being able to own the choices we’re making. And not just own them but own our choices while granting ourselves grace when we could have done better. And we have to be able to let go of shame.
Brené Brown has written volumes on shame and vulnerability that are worth exploring. Daring Greatly begins with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic:”
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly….
This is a great passage to keep in mind before asking yourself if you deserve to be healthy. Then, instead of asking that question, first ask yourself:
What is the worst thing I’ve ever done? Name it. Feel it. Say it out loud to yourself. (No need to tell anyone else.)
If someone else did that (whatever you answered), could I forgive them? Could someone forgive them?
When you can forgive yourself your worst wrong, you will be able to hold yourself accountable. When you can hold yourself accountable, you will have no problem owning your choices. They may not all be good choices, but you’ll be able to learn from each one and avoid blaming someone else.
Forgiving yourself your worst wrong will also allow you to shift how you view yourself. What other people think will become less important. This paves the way for recognizing you deserve, we all deserve, to be healthy!
Coda: Mere hours after I posted this, I watch an introductory video for therapists (I am not one) regarding the diagnosis and treatment of moral injury. While it didn’t change anything I previously wrote, it made me recognize I should expand a bit rather than stopping here.
Anyone who has committed acts or made decisions that violate their own moral code may need assistance in achieving self-forgiveness. It doesn’t matter whether those decisions or acts were a result of force, coercion, danger, leverage, direct order, dissociation, freezing, or a desperate need for comfort, we may subsequently view ourselves as irredeemable or contemptable.
Trauma therapy that provides a compassionate response, helps realign actions with internal moral code, and allows us to retain necessary guilt without shame can help to process through events and put them in the past. This will put us in a position to recognize we do not deserve eternal suffering and punishment. We can find ways to follow a path that doesn’t create internal dissonance.
We can change. We can grant ourselves grace. We can feel appropriate guilt and make necessary amends. We are imperfectly human and perfectly deserving of the opportunity to grow, improve, and face our demons. Doing so is difficult, but leads to a healthier existence.
And we all deserve to be healthy!
Author’s note:Some disease and injury are unavoidable. It does not matter who you are or whether you make perfect decisions, you may not be able to be as healthy as someone else who does not suffer the same unavoidable condition. That reality does not change the fact that you deserve to be healthy and can make the best choices possible within the limitations you are given.