So when the divorce happened, I didn't consciously question my worth in the ways I see so many people do as they go through divorce. Even as I sorted through the distorted reality he was presenting and the blame he was hurling at me, my focus wasn't on what was wrong with me - it was on what I could have done better and trying to understand the entire dynamic.
But as I laid awake this morning, I realized my behaviors don't fully match a woman with that strong a sense of self-worth. My body and health has taught me that my conscious thoughts and subconscious reality don't always agree and maybe this is another example.
This early morning rumination I think stemmed from something that wasn't sitting well with me in yesterday's post about deserving or not deserving love combined with recent struggles with friendships.
When it comes to friendships, I really struggle. There is a huge fear/anxiety I have to overcome each time I decide to issue an invitation. I hesitate to even send short text messages on every day things concerned I might be bothering someone. And I think I'm hanging onto a friendship too long that has made clear I am an incredibly low priority yet demands so much of my energy when we do finally get together.
In yesterday's post, I asked the question "Why does he deserve that kind of love and I don’t?" I think everyone deserves love so this wasn't a question about whether or not he deserves it. Do I really believe I don't deserve it? I initially thought it was more a feeling of being cheated out of something I believe I deserve but that's not how this question came out in that post's ramblings.
And if I truly believed I deserve love, why would I have fought so hard for a man that I knew wasn’t as invested in me as I was in him? If I'm honest with myself, I have always known he didn't love me as much as I loved him. I wrote about him not prioritizing me before we even got married. During our marriage, we had many conversations where I reassured him over and over that I had no doubts about us - conversations that I suspected stemmed from his own doubts about us. And when we went through pretty unbalanced couple's counseling, I settled for "good enough" over real work towards resolution.
If I truly had as strong a sense of self-worth as I tell myself I do, I don't think I would have stayed. For all the pretending he did and the actions he took that made me believe we had a good marriage, there were enough times the mask slipped. I could sense the imbalance even in the good times.
So how do I change a subconscious belief that doesn't match my conscious thoughts?
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