mistersbeard: The labels we live with can often cause us to determine ourselves in a unreasonable li
mistersbeard: The labels we live with can often cause us to determine ourselves in a unreasonable light. Growing up as a child we encounter many things in the way that we are treated by others. Whether it be our parents, siblings, friends and family… Our teachers at school or the people that we are around the most. And often this treatment can turned out to be not so great. Abuse does not always come in the physical form and sometimes we fail to realize when we are being abused by other people’s words. But abuse that’s left unchecked will manifest itself into bigger problems down the line in our lives. A child who is constantly bullied, constantly told that they are fat and worthless by someone that they look up to…will then grow up to only believe that as fact and repeat the cycle by treating others in the same way.. making them believe it as a fact.. And that fact is something that becomes a truth to them that is hard to change. “The truth ain’t nothing but the truth ain’t nothing but the truth…” There’s this psychological disorder where a person can lie and they keep saying the same lie until the point that they are convinced it is the absolute truth and you cannot sway them otherwise. All too often this is what happens to us. We begin believing a lie from a young age because its repeatedly drilled into us… and as we grow and that lie continues to be told to us. Somewhere along the way we accept it as the truth and then the truth ain’t nothing but the truth. You can’t tell us that it’s not the truth and it only becomes a lie again through lots of hard work and dedication to healing from those lies. And so throughout our lives we have labels placed on us. We are ugly. We are fat. We are worthless. We are this. We are that. We will always fail.. we will never be good enough, smart enough, make anything out of ourselves.. we are only good for our bodies.. or our bodies will never be good enough for anyone. We are awkward and funny and creepy and weird.. etc and so on.. And all along the way we begin to believe the lie. But what we do not realize is that we also have a choice and that choice becomes not defining ourselves by the labels that are placed on us because at the end of the day that is really all that it is we have… these labels that are placed on us by other people and especially people of influence in our lives and we begin believing that the labels are like tattoos. That they are permanent and they could never go away. One of the most common things that I find with the Littles that I speak to is that they all share the same view on themselves. They are depressed. They are weak. They are stupid or worthless. They are fat and unlovable. And really where does all of that nonsense come from? Because we are certainly not born any of these things. These are things that we grow to learn about ourselves through the influence of other people in our lives. We simply allow ourselves to believe the lie and allow the label to be slapped on us. And that’s precisely the reason why we as human beings were given free will….because we do not have to simply except and believe what someone else tells us about ourselves. We have choices, and those choices are our own and cannot be taken from us nor dictated by someone else. We have a very prime choice and that is that we can go in one of two directions with our lives: You can either choose to allow what has happened to you in life be the things that define you, or you can choose to become the person that you know you want to be and have the potential to be. The things that happened to us in our lives are important, don’t get me wrong… I am not saying that they are worthless. What I am saying is that they do not have to define us. We can choose to be defined by the future that has not yet come, making the decision today that we are going to go in the direction that we want to go, and not in the direction that someone else has tried to choose for us. You are not defined by who you have been or what has happened in your life. You are not defined by what someone else decides for you. You did not start out broken, depressed, and in a dark place. And just in the same way that you have allowed yourself to get to that place, you can choose to get yourself out of that place. You can make that decision today… You can decide what your future is going to be… You do not have to allow someone else to define you and slap a label on you. Because the good thing about labels is… That you can rip them off and throw them away. Are you really worthless? Do you always really mess everything up? Or is it that you have simply come to believe a continuous lie and accept a false label that has been placed on you time and time again by others who didn’t deserve to give you that label in the first place? And what right do they have to do that over you? You know exactly who you are when you really look in the mirror… And you know that it is not who people believe you to be. Wake up, sleeper… Wake up to yourself… Wake up and realize how beautiful you are. Wake up and realize that you are not a product of a lie. But that you are valuable and you are strong and tomorrow will be a different day because you will decide it will be. Devotional Training: Wake up call. -- source link
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