Growing up, my story was not unique. My mother did the best that she knew how to with the tools she was equipped with (the tools that were handed down to her from generations of hurt, pain, loss, and devastation). My mother loved me so much that it hurt. As an adult woman who is now conscious of how imperative the nurturer-nurtured relationship is and the effects of it, I am able to see how her love for me translated into only pain, insecurities and strongholds. Here is a list of the 7 things that mother believed to be truths and 7 things that I had to recognize as lies for myself:

You are only important if people decide you are. 

I was always taught that I had to be understood and valued by everyone I met. I had to demand every room that I walked into and I had to be social and I had to be outgoing. The problem with this was that my mother was a singer so her natural extrovert tendencies always clashed with my soft-spoken introverted ones. It is okay to sit in the back, to smile and wave, to go somewhere where no one knows your name. It is okay not to be “important”.

You need to look like everyone else and any deviation is not okay.

 I was always a chubby kid. My father is 6’5″ and about 300lbs so I really didn’t have much of a choice in that aspect, but my daddy didn’t raise me- I lived with my mom. My 5’6′ 130lbs mom who was sure that everything would be okay if I were just skinnier like the other girls. Things like putting me on fasts at the tender age of 11 to diet pills in 9th grade, she was desperate for me to look the part. I had to teach myself to love myself, whether I weighed 2 lbs or 200 lbs. I had to teach myself that there wasn’t any amount of love and affection and attention that anyone in this world could give me that would make up for the extreme deficit of those things that I had for myself. I started wearing my hair natural at the age of 19 (I’ve always had very thick and 3c/4a hair) and her only comment was “I only like your hair straight.” I just wanted to be liked regardless.

What people think matters- a lot. 

What will people say? The thoughts and opinions of others were elevated over the thoughts and opinions that were my own. Everything was “what will people say” or “what will your friends think?” when all I wanted to do was be myself. I had to teach myself not to care about their opinions more than I cared about ME. No one else will be living my life except for me- best to live it happily.

Men will always be good-for-nothing. 

My mother was hurt by every man in her life. She wanted me to be cautious lest the same thing happened to me. Unfortunately, all that did was give me an irrational fear of men and intimacy. I’m still working on this one…I'll get back to you.

You need a man. 

A single woman is no good if no man wants her- that’s what I was taught. I don't even know where to begin with this one. Just know it's the furthest thing from the truth.

Don’t be obsessed with God. 

I don’t have enough time to explain how detrimental this was to my heart. To know that my mother viewed my love for Christ an “obsession” hurt me the most because it meant to me that she was blind to how he’d changed me. I was severely depressed, suicidal, and dancing freely on the border of addiction before I bumped into Jesus. I had no one and I was very aware of it. Her ignorance to the most intimate and important parts of me was hard to understand. Then Jesus told them, “A prophet is without honor only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household.”

You have to do more than just one thing. 

Having only one hobby was not enough. It is not enough to just work or just go to school or just play piano- you have to do all three. This doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing until you imagine how damaging it is to a young girls self-worth when all she wants to do is go to school or all she wants to do is go to work- I was 15 when this dialogue began.

The lies that you were taught as a child may not have been the same as these, however, I cannot stress to you enough the importance of unlearning the behaviors that come from these lies. We can identify "all men will hurt you" as a falsehood, but rarely do we focus on doing the work to change the subtle behaviors that come from hearing it for years (like how you flinch when you walk by a man, or the sinking feeling you get when a man shares his heart with you). Let's identify and grow, flourish, and end the cycle of damaging "life lessons".