Yesterday, I Cried

do not look at who inflicted the wound or how it was inflicted. That it was inflicted is the essence of healing. Find what your wound is, where the wound is being played out in your life, and heal it. Only by doing the work on ourselves that is required to heal mental, emotional, and psychological wounds can we ever hope to be whole in our spirits. I chose to do the healing work because I didn’t want to be mad anymore. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I wanted to heal so that I would have something to celebrate—myself

explained that those incidents have nothing to do with me. That history is not mine. It is not Iyanla’s. While I am well aware that without every incident, every event in my past, I would not be who I am, I no longer have the need or even the ability to promote that pain. I have told the same story many times. Many people know it by heart, as I do. My goal is to use the story of my life as an example, a reminder that you too can be healed

people don’t ask you how you feel, what you think, what you want, or what you know, there is no way they can know who you are. When people don’t know who you are, they mistakenly believe they can do anything they want to you. And they will do it, if they don’t know. When that happens, it is up to you to take a stand for yourself. It is up to you to let them know what you need. It is up to you to tell them what you think. It is up to you to let them know that you don’t know what they think you know. At all times, under all circumstances, every individual must shoulder full responsibility for telling other people exactly how they feel, what they need, what they know, and who they are

When we do not remember to celebrate our progress, the day-to-day revelations that led to our feeling better, what we do remember is the pain. It is the pain that keeps us stuck in our patterns. The pair is familiar

You can feel bad and recover without it being hard. I really had healed so many wounds.

Rhonda feels she doesn’t deserve to do well. She has to be punished. Rather than being able to fully enjoy what I am doing, I place myself in situations in which I feel bad. In which I cannot be happy. Oh my God! This thing with Karen is a covert pattern that sabotages my own happiness. As long as I am unhappy about Karen, what she does, what she does not do, and how I think she treats me, I am not happy, and Rhonda is being punished

And I did not have to be hurt to give her love. She was loving me in the only way she knew how, and it was up to me to determine whether or not it worked in my life. If it didn’t, I could love her and let her go, without malice or anger. I did not have to feel bad or get hurt in order to get what I wanted. All I had to do was love

Rhonda had been taught love and loving require doing and getting. If you do this, you will get love. If you don’t do this, you will lose love. She learned that love was a bargain, when in fact, love is a principle. It is a state of being that we experience as what we do and how we do it. Because most of the people in Rhonda’s life inflicted pain on her, she closely associated love with pain, whether mental, emotional, or physical. Love hurt Rhonda. As a result, when she loved someone, she would hurt herself rather than hurt them

Unconditional love does not mean that you accept or condone mistreatment. It does not mean you excuse people their faults and frailties. It does mean you see them, accept them, and love them, despite the things you may not like about them. If Rhonda had known that, she could have learned to laugh with her daddy, to have fun with him when he was available. When he was not available to her, she would not have blamed herself. She would not have believed that she lacked anything she needed to get love

If you say one thing and do another, you are going to get mixed up, forget what you are doing, and fall right back into the same trap you said you wanted to get out of. When you are getting yourself together, you must eliminate from your modus operandi everything you have done up to the point where you realized you were a mess. You must think a new way, act a new way, and keep your mouth shut. If you start talking about what you are going to do, chances are you will get confused