Celebrate Your Gifts and Contributions
Bring Your Whole Self to Your Future! Heal Your Past #5
Hello! I’m Kate, a psychotherapist sharing weekly Letters from Therapy. If you enjoy my writing, make sure you’re subscribed. Improve your life and relationships and join me to nurture your soul, accept yourself and find deeper meaning, by upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get enriching discovery tools, worksheets and journaling, the podcast, the Heal Your Past Course and more. You’re invited!
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.” ~David Viscott
Hi friends,
If you have been following the Heal Your Past series, you may be doing the courageous work to leave the pain of the past behind, those unhelpful patterns and adaptations, so you can step into your bright future. You’ve owned and unravelled your unfinished business, you have found tools to move on from painful memories and you know how to send shame out into the wind. You can upgrade here if you want to take this mini course. Let’s keep it going into a beautiful future, bringing your whole self. Spoiler alert: the future is now!
Bringing Your Whole Self to Your Future
To move into our future, we must bring our whole selves. The vulnerable part of us we have been healing goes with us everywhere. We must embrace him/her fully with our compassion.
But what about the rest of us? The strong parts. The wise parts. The parts that survived, despite everything?
What about our qualities and unique gifts? All the things we have done. All the things that we grew. We can’t push all this to the side either.
We often overlook the beauty of who we are. If we have missed out on compassion from others, we can internalise their rejection, judgement or dismissal of us, often when we were most wounded. We learn to reject ourselves. We bury those lovely parts, or pretend they aren’t part of us, leading to pain and dissatisfaction and a constant sense of striving for more. To be better. To improve.
We forget that the world wanted us in it, and we are here, against all odds, and that we bring so much to the world and our communities, big and small.
By ignoring what we are good at we feel we are not enough, and self sabotage ourselves daily leading to hiding, shrinking, pain, low confidence, anxiety or low mood. And it is all our own doing!
In truth, we don’t really ever need to achieve anything in life, but just to live it. But we must validate our achievements and our daily contributions so we know we are enough. So we can feel the natural, pleasant feelings of happiness, completion, and satisfaction from all the things we do and are.
Celebrating our contributions and achievements makes us whole.
We need to remind ourselves how far we have come, and that we are already enough.
Celebrating Your Gifts and Contributions
Today, let us acknowledge what you bring to the world.
Celebrate your gifts, and your daily contributions, from the mundane to the wonderful, the necessary to the frivolous. From the everyday grind to the sublime! And your achievements, big and small!
The human being (you!) are an amazing miracle. To acknowledge our gifts and contributions is not boasting, but a statement of truth. We are good enough.
You are good enough and clever enough and kind enough. You work hard enough, you do enough, are beautiful and you have fun enough. You are enough! (from a recent note.)
Let’s shift your perspective.