Can Self-Love Heal Your Faith?

Do you struggle with feelings of shame as a person of faith? 

Do you feel like you are always trying to please God and that God sees you as sinful and shameful?

Has the focus of your faith journey been on how much you are falling short?

If  you do, you are not alone. I carried those feelings for over four decades. I was confused about why my faith in God wasn't "fixing" me.

I found my answers and healing in the last place I would have thought to look: learning to love myself. 

In this episode, you will discover the following:

1. How trauma distorts our view of God.
2. How we make God in our own image and through the lens of how we see ourselves. 
3. How we can heal the way we believe God sees us by learning to love ourselves.

I hope this episode helps you to see that you have never been seen as anything other than who you truly are: love.

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. This is actually a really special episode for me to be recording, and a very personal one, one that I've held off on sharing for quite some time, but now I feel like it's the right time for me to begin to share this, to share this message and actually several messages that will be coming out of this episode that will be around this topic, and the topic is about how self-love can heal and transform your faith and your relationship with God. Now, you might be a person who doesn't believe in God, and that's absolutely okay in this episode is still for you, and you can still get useful and helpful content from this episode that can help you understand other people, their journey and where they're at in their relationship of understanding how to heal the relationship with themselves and how that impacts their faith and their view of God. So stick with me either way, because I think you're going to find a lot of value in this. Now, before we get into the rest of this episode, I want to encourage you to pick up a copy of my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. There's a lot of great content in this book that'll help you in your daily journey of learning to love yourself and to heal. I've left room in the margins for you to use it somewhat as a journal for your own reflections on the quotes and on the thoughts that I share in the book. So I encourage you to pick up your copy, if you haven't done so already. You can find it on Amazon, you can find it in Barnes Noble, you can find it on any place that you get your reading from. It's both in paperback and in the e-book version, so you can find a link to the book in the show notes in this episode or by going to my website at jerryhendersonorg. Forward slash. Returning Now, you might be a person who's listening to this, who is a Christian or a person of faith, and you've really struggled with feeling accepted by God, feeling accepted by the church, feeling accepted in your faith system, and you feel a lot of shame.

Speaker 1: 2:09

You have a lot of shame as a follower of Christ or a follower of whatever faith system, and it's been really hard for you to receive love and you feel that you're constantly under the judgment of God. You feel constantly shameful before God and that relationship is one that you thought was going to heal all of that for you. You thought the relationship that you had with God, or coming to faith or being a Christian. You might have been a Christian or a person of faith your entire life and you thought that that relationship was supposed to fix everything. And that view is causing even more shame for you because you're thinking well, everybody else says that as a Christian, I should be healthy, I should be whole, I should be happy and joyful, but I'm not and I'm struggling and I don't like myself. I thought that God would fix me, but that hasn't been the case for you. So you feel even worse about yourself as a result of your faith and as a result of your relationship with God. So we're going to touch on that today and I want to let you know you're not alone in that. You're not the only one in that boat. I was in that boat for over 30 years and self-love is what helped me heal and helped me come back to a place where my faith could be something beautiful and my view of God could be something beautiful as well. So I want to start today's episode by sharing some of my story about my faith journey, and you've probably heard pieces and parts of it as you've listened to the podcast episodes in the past, but I'm going to get into it a little bit more today because I really believe that my journey can serve as a way for others to see that they're not alone and can help in their healing journey as well.

Speaker 1: 3:52

As you know, I grew up with a very painful childhood of abuse, trauma, poverty and everything that that brings into your life. I often share about how trauma is not what happens to us, but it's what happens in us. We have a traumatic event, we have some event that causes internal things to happen to us. Decisions begin to get made, internal wiring begins to happen and as a result of that, it changes the way that we view ourselves, life and other people. It fragments and breaks those relationships and it confuses and clouds our view and it gets stored in our nervous system. So it's actually what begins to happen to us after the traumatic event. It's that complex post-traumatic stress disorder that we deal with, that we live with as a result of those events.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Now, the reason that's such good news and I just want to hit on this one more time is because if trauma was the event and that because of that event we're always going to be this way, well then it's pretty a hopeless scenario. But if trauma is, yes, an event that then causes a cascading of things to happen to us, then it's hopeful right, because the result of those things can be healed. The resulting wiring, pain, belief systems can be healed. But if it was the event that can't be changed, it's in the past, it's happened. But as we look at what's going on with this right now, we can begin to heal that and we can realize that we're not uniquely broken, we're not stuck, we're not trapped in that pain and we can find healing Now.

Speaker 1: 5:28

The reason I'm sharing that is because it's not uncommon for people of faith to have experienced a lot of trauma, either in childhood or relationships or in their faith system itself. They get traumatized as a result of the belief system, the treatment, the manipulation, the power structures, everything that happens in a faith church, religious community that can traumatize a person and as a result of that, we live with that trauma, even in our faith. So me sharing my story is to hopefully help you see that once again, you're not alone in this. So all of that trauma that I experienced, it caused those decisions to happen with me, my trauma, one of the major outputs of it for me was shame, the feeling that there was something wrong with me that was uniquely, broken, unworthy of love, separated, needed to isolate myself because if people knew me, if they saw me and really understood who I was, they would reject me. And so that shame kept me in a place of playing a character, trying to find ways to please others, to please God, etc. And so it had a massive impact on my relationship with God and my faith.

Speaker 1: 6:46

Now, before I became a Christian, I got in a lot of trouble as a young guy, as a kid and as a teenager. I mean tons of trouble. I was kicked out of school every single year from the sixth grade on until I made a faith decision at the age of 17. I'll get to that in just a second. But was involved in a lot of drugs, alcohol, as some of you already know. My parents introduced me to alcohol at the age of five, had other family members introduced me to marijuana, smoking weed at the age of nine, and so that just created a whole mechanism in my life of using substances to get relief from the way I felt about myself. I was very rebellious in school and that got me in a lot of trouble with authorities, and that was also a coping mechanism for me to try to be seen or for me to try to push back from people who were trying to violate me In my mind, thinking that an authority, system and structure was a violation of who I was. Well, because of all that pain, I was trying to find all those escape mechanisms and finally found that I could not escape myself anymore and I decided to become a Christian, a Christ follower, and I did that on August, the 22nd 1988.

Speaker 1: 7:56

I made a decision to become a Christian at the age of 17. And it had a huge impact in my life. It changed a lot for me. It was a beautiful message of love and that was the way that I saw it in the beginning, and I often tell people that I enjoyed my Christianity for about six months and then I learned all the things that I needed to do in order to be a good Christian. And then I started to feel really self-defeated, that I wasn't praying enough, I wasn't reading my Bible enough, I wasn't sharing my faith enough, I wasn't volunteering enough or giving enough money, and I was just failing God constantly, and so I had this feeling about myself that I wasn't good enough for God. So what was once a message of love immediately started getting turned towards. This is what it means to be a good Christian.

Speaker 1: 8:50

Then I found myself in a faith community that measured your spirituality based off of those things, and if you ever shared that you were struggling with those things, or if you said the wrong things, then you were judged for that, you were shamed for that, and there wasn't a lot of empathy that was provided in the church, and often the church struggles with showing empathy. Sometimes a beautiful part of empathy is saying yeah, me too, brother, yeah me too, sister. But in the church space for people to share, that means that they're struggling, that they're not the perfect Christian. So people wind up judging one another, comparing their spirituality to one another, living in secrecy, not sharing their struggles, because they're afraid of judgment, they're afraid of gossip that their story will be shared in these smaller communities or these larger communities, where that word travels really fast. So it's not safe for people to be able to be vulnerable in that space, which compounds more shame.

Speaker 1: 9:49

Now the other thing that started to happen was every time I'd read the Bible, or I would pray, or I'd hear a message. I was beginning to see all of that through the eyes of shame. What was actually happening was I was beginning to construct God in my own image. I want you to hold on to that thought for a second, because I'm going to share more about it in a little bit, but the bottom line is that I began to see everything about my faith, my Christianity, the messages that I would hear, all through a shame lens. When I would pray, I'd spend the first 10 minutes confessing to God all of my sins why was such a bad person and trying to get forgiveness from God before I felt like I could even ask God for things. Which leads me to the next thing.

Speaker 1: 10:35

That was a real struggle, which was the hyper focus in on sin that you had to really be aware of, watch for and look out for sinful behavior. And so you're constantly looking for your failures in your life. You're constantly looking for your shortcomings and, as I've shared before, where your attention goes, your energy goes. Where your energy goes, that's what grows. So if all my energy and all of our energy at times in the faith community is looking at where we're maybe not pleasing God or where we're disappointing our maker, or whatever our faith system is, then we've got a hyper focus in on sin, we've got a hyper focus in on our failures, and that leads us to all of our attention being put on that. So the slightest mistakes or the littlest things will then begin to cause us to feel bad about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 11:27

I remember feeling like I had to share the gospel, the story of Jesus Christ, with everybody I came encounter with, and so if I didn't share it with somebody at the gas station, or I didn't share it at the grocery store or with whoever, wherever, I would beat myself up for days because I felt like it was my job to make sure that they got into heaven. And so that was just wrecking me, wrecking my nervous system. I was always feeling like I wasn't giving enough money, that, oh my gosh, I gave 10%, but maybe I'm sinning by not giving 15% or 90%. How much of my money should I give? I'll come to learn later that that's not at all what that faith system or structure is really about. It's just that people have used those things in a way to maybe grow their church or to grow their giving, or whatever the scenario is.

Speaker 1: 12:15

And as I reflect back on my journey as a pastor of a church, I'm learning to work through a lot of the feelings I have around that and the things that I did teach and the things that I did share, and learning to forgive myself and move on from those things but also to help change that narrative in this space as much as possible. So for me, putting all that together made me feel unworthy of God, hyper-focused on my failures with God and an inability to receive the love of God. It closed me down to being able to have a sense that God loved me or that God was with me or that God cared about me, because all I could see was the shame, how I was falling short, how I couldn't share my struggles with other people, how I was isolated, and so all of that really messed up my relationship and my faith in a pretty big way. But I didn't know that. I just thought that that was normal faith. I just thought that's the way that it was supposed to be and that I just needed to figure out how to be a better Christian. I just needed to figure out how to pray more. I needed to figure out how to overcome all of that because I was the problem.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Well, that's not the truth, and you might be struggling with that as well, and this episode might be hitting home with you. And if it is, I encourage you to share it with other people, because what trauma can do to us is it can really wreck our ability to have a faith. That's healthy, because what we do is what I talked about just a little bit earlier, which is we wind up creating God in our own image, an image of being broken, an image of being shameful, an image of being unworthy of love, and so we've created God in our thinking and thought patterns, according to the way that we see ourselves, the way that we feel about ourselves, and that often comes from our experience with our parents or those who are caregivers. It comes from relationships that we've been in and absolutely yes, 100% it comes from the religious system itself. It comes from the teachings of the religious system, because when you're teaching people that you were born a sinner, born fundamentally flawed, there's something wrong with you from the get-go. That gets absorbed in our systems, and, instead of us being able to focus in on original blessing, where God said it's all good, it's all great, we focus in on original sin, the fall and all that's wrong. And today I'm not going to get into all of the theology about original sin Adam as one man sinned, all men have sinned all of that stuff. I'm not getting into that today. We might get into that in later episodes, but for today we're just focusing in on the fact that if you're a person who's experienced trauma and you've had relationships that have taught you that you're unworthy of love, you might begin to see your relationship with God through that lens and it's a very painful place to be and you begin to feel like you never enjoy that space. And I completely understand that.

Speaker 1: 15:28

And what I had to do to heal that was a number of things and I want to talk about that in the rest of this episode. The first thing I had to do was I had to realize what I just shared, that I had created God in my own image. And, yes, while the church was reinforcing that sense of shame, that hyper focus in on sin and isolation and the feeling that you had to hide yourself in community, and preachers projecting their own sense of shame on their congregations and everything that goes with that and all the things that I've already shared in this episode. All of that leads to making God in an image of one where we're constantly disappointing, constantly feeling a sense of shame. And so when I recognized that that's what it was, that it wasn't true that I was broken, it wasn't true that I was a sinful, horrible person, it wasn't true that I had to constantly do all these things to be good enough quote unquote good enough. It wasn't true all the things that people were projecting as their own sense of shame onto other people, that so much of it was connected to my experiences as a child in the way that I began to view myself. And I will say that a lot of times faith structures, religious structures, come out of that space. We have these broken relationships and so we begin to make God in the image of broken relationships and we write things and we say things that help support that.

Speaker 1: 16:54

I don't believe that I'm fundamentally flawed and shameful in the eyes of God. I don't believe that God views me that way. I don't believe that God ever has viewed me that way. I feel for me and what I believe is that it is often our relationship with ourselves that gets projected on God and we carry that around and we have no ability to figure out how to receive God's love or be healthy in our faith system because of the way that we feel about ourselves. The challenge with that is people often think, well, I'm just going to pray my way out of my trauma, or I'm going to have somebody pray for me or lay hands on me and help me get healed, or I'm going to have some aha moment as I'm reading scripture. And that may all be true for certain people and you may have had that experience and that's beautiful, but for the majority of people it often doesn't work that way. We don't just pray our way out of it, we don't just get healed out of it. Because I believe that God invites us into a healing journey and a process, and I believe that God is inviting us into loving the parts of ourselves that we shame, that we reject. So understanding that was really powerful for me because it shifted me away from thinking that was God's view of me. To me, understanding that was my view of God. And when you get that shift, when you understand that you might be projecting yourself onto God versus seeing God in a way that is more loving and is more encouraging to you and your healing journey.

Speaker 1: 18:31

Now, the second thing I had to do to heal that space in my life is I had to strip everything down. I had to strip my faith system all the way down to the bare bones. I had to let go of a lot of thinking that I had Because it had been like drilled into me and we're part of my core beliefs and who I really thought God was and how all of that worked. I had to strip all of that down and I've got to be honest, that was very scary. It didn't feel safe because when you're in a religious structure that judges you for questioning or even bringing up the possibility that some of that thinking might be wrong or some of that thinking may be not aligned with who God actually is, well, that's a scary thought because for many faith structures that's dealing with your eternity and it's dealing with your community and it's dealing with you. I mean, the whole thing gets so intertwined.

Speaker 1: 19:25

So being able to find the permission to strip things down and really ask questions like is that true Just because it's being preached or it's said, or even just because it's written, is that true? How do I know that's true? Have I examined that for myself? I had to really begin to look at God through the eyes of love and only love. I had to let go of all of the things that we as humans have attached to God. So I had to really look at If God is love and if everything that is on this planet and this universe resonates from the place of love. And I can find that pretty much no one really disagrees with the fact that love is something that's beautiful and it's the energy that is the creation. That is, when we really connect with ourselves and we really connect with another person and we really connect with the divine, we will find love.

Speaker 1: 20:28

Well, if I have to follow that through and think about what love is and what love does, I couldn't find a box where God would be less loving than humanity or that God would be less loving or compassionate than me and our immediate thoughts become well, god's ways are higher than our ways. And who are we Listen? All of that is training. All of that is wiring that's got put into us to keep us afraid to ask questions, to keep us afraid to examine whether or not the belief systems that we hold are true or serving us or serving others. If God is love, god is not holding my relationship with God at hostage. It's not based on all of these things that I thought through the eyes of the way that I viewed myself. I had to be able to strip all of that down and go down to the bones, go down to the studs, as we say and really look at it and begin to ask myself the question is it love? Does it resonate with love? That belief system that I have about myself, or the way that I view faith, or the way that I view God? Is it centered and rooted in love? And if it wasn't, I made the choice to let it go. That was just my choice. I made the choice to let it go.

Speaker 1: 21:48

Now, the last thing that I'll talk about is that those two previous things of understanding that I'd created God in my own image, that it wasn't actually who God was, and the second thing of giving myself permission to strip down belief systems it led me to the third thing, which was the ability to start practicing self-love. That's what began to allow me to understand that I was worthy of my own love, that I could begin to love myself. I mean, it was as simple for me as doing things that I celebrate when my daughters love themselves, when they're kind to themselves, when they're good to themselves. And if I, as a father, rejoice in that, I've got to think that God is ecstatic and is celebrating when we love ourselves, when we give ourselves the permission to love ourselves. And this was one of the biggest barriers for me to overcome in loving myself letting go of the fact that I thought that God was angry at me. Letting go of the fact that I thought it was bad or sinful for me to practice self-love. I had to let go of that belief system in order for me to open myself up to the possibility that I could love myself. And as I began to love myself, I changed the way that I viewed myself, the way I looked at myself. I healed my relationship with myself, and that healed my relationship with God. That opened me up to having God's love flow towards me, to feel like I was worthy of love because I healed my own sense of unworthiness.

Speaker 1: 23:31

And so if you're a person who has really struggled with feeling worthy of God's love, and no matter what you've done, you just feel shame and you feel like it's just become toxic for you even, and you might even be considering walking away from it, or you might have walked away from it, and that's okay, whatever your journey is. But if it is something that you really struggle with, I want to encourage you to begin to focus in on healing your relationship with yourself in the way that you view yourself, because reality is God never needed to heal your relationship with God. That was never a problem. God never has had a problem with us. Now we might want to give God all the judgment characteristics, the jealousy characteristics or all those bad things, but if God is truly love and the highest thought and the highest being that all things flow from, you've got to think that that space is so much more loving than we can even fathom or have the ability to put ourselves or wrap ourselves around. And so God never was in a place where God was disappointed with you, judgmental towards you.

Speaker 1: 24:43

The other exercise that helps me is I think about a child, an infant. Right, how could I ever judge an infant? How could I ever judge a one-year-old, a two-year-old or whatever? And I begin to think, if God is that level of intelligence that's created a vast, never-ending universe, I'm less than an infant in some sense of the intelligence that's there, the mindfulness that's there, the compassion that's there. And so how could God ever even expect me to figure out how to please this being, how to live according to whatever wisdom is there right? And so that, for me, began to open my mind, to go goodness, how could I ever be expected to figure this out, and how could the love that this being has for me be conditional on my ability to figure that out? I can't see how a person would have that capacity to do that.

Speaker 1: 25:41

And then I begin to think about oneness, oneness with God that if God's judging me or if God's judging humanity, then ultimately God is judging God's self, because we are one with the Creator. We are absolute oneness, and if you're struggling with that as a Christian, I would encourage you to read John, chapter 17, this oneness that we have with God and with one another, that everything is one. So if God is judging and shaming all that God has created or manifested, or all that springs forth through whatever your belief system is, then God would indeed be judging God's self. So all of that shame, all of that toxic faith can be let go of and you can heal your view of faith in God, and I encourage you that for many of you, it's going to start with learning to love yourself, giving yourself that permission to love yourself. It's going to transform that relationship, if that's something that you want, if that's something that you're interested in changing and transforming.

Speaker 1: 26:53

Well, thank you for being here and listening to this episode.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Now I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode.

Speaker 1: 27:00

You can email me at gerry at GerryHendersonorg, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. My handle there is at Gerry A Henderson, but I really would love to hear how your journey is going in this space and if you need help in learning how to heal your relationship with yourself and practicing self-love, especially if faith and Christianity and everything that's been in that world has been a real struggle for you and you're not finding a place to work that through, I encourage you to reach out to me as well. You can also find out more information about my coaching, how I coach people in that space, and you can go to GerryHendersonorg forward slash coaching and find out more about one-on-one sessions around that, and I'd love to journey with you through that healing process. Well, I hope this episode has served you on your journey of learning to love yourself and, as a result of that learning to shift or change the way that you think that God views you. And as I close out this episode, I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.