Читать книгу Cooking Without Made Easy: All recipes free from added gluten, sugar, yeast and dairy produce - Barbara Cousins - Страница 26

My lack of self-worth and inability to be in touch with my feelings have drawn many lessons to me throughout my life. Because of my relationship with my father, I was attracted to emotionally unavailable men, whom I hoped would fulfil my every need—if I loved them enough. Basically, there was still a little girl inside of me desperately wanting the love of her father, so I transferred this on to the men in my life. My husband had come from an equally cold and dysfunctional family, where he was taught fear and learnt to control in order to allay his fears. Once married, I also gained an equally controlling mother-in-law and so my self-worth took another battering and my ‘people pleaser’ ran on overdrive. I wanted to have the perfect marriage and I was willing to suppress any discomfort I felt in order to make this happen. I loved being married and I loved being a mum to my two boys. I went to no end of trouble to make the home a warm, comfortable environment and was determined to make sure my children felt loved and secure. But I also felt trapped and controlled. No one was interested in how I felt and whether my needs were being met and I didn’t have sufficient self-worth to put my case forward. If I did try to assert myself then I tapped into my husband’s fears, and he couldn’t cope, so I suppressed my feelings yet again. And, of course, I never dreamt of talking to anyone outside the home, as my sense of self-worth was invested in being perfect.

Eventually I was introduced to astrology and I started to question what life was about. I read alternative books and looked at what was going on in my life from a different perspective. The floodgates of emotion eventually burst when my dog was accidentally killed. I remember finding her and wanting to cry but not being able to at first—but when I did start crying, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t just crying for her, devastated though I was, I was crying for me and all the hurts and injustices I’d suffered throughout my life and had never cried about before. That marked a turning point in my life. I could no longer be what everyone else wanted me to be; I had to start standing up for what I needed.

It was hard, however, to put the blinkers on and follow the path that was revealing itself to me. I felt like I was on a long, straight road that disappears into the horizon. On each side the land was lower than the road and all along were people trying to pull me off my path and divert me. It would have been easy for me to use everyone else as an excuse for not following my own star, especially as I didn’t know where my star was taking me. We are, however, always aware of the next step and the rest is revealed to us one day at a time.