Smiling with myself

This is a post I wrote last winter and it has finally made it onto the site.

Yesterday I caught sight of myself in a bathroom mirror and smiled at myself. The sort of natural smile that would come across my face if I’d just spotted a dear friend.

Not a forced smile, the sort you might have done as a child when told to smile on demand for a photo but a genuine beam. It struck me, that perhaps for the first time, I was the friend to myself that I was pleased to see. I actually liked myself!

To most people this might seem like nothing. So what, you smiled at yourself some of you might be thinking. Others, who like me have experienced a long lasting discomfort with being themselves might get why this felt so novel to me.

My inner world is now a surprisingly friendly place, which I attribute to a combination of Internal Family Systems, my meditation practice and learning to accept my neurodivergent brain and characteristics. And yet one remaining reminder of how I used to treat myself, at how uncomfortable I used to be at being me, was not liking seeing photos or videos of myself.

Just a few days before I had completed an IFS coaching session online with another coach, a session that I needed to video as part of trauma coaching certification we are both completing. I made a comment after about not liking watching myself back on video. The other coach shared that they felt the same and added “watching you during my session brings calm and happy. If only we could get there with seeing ourselves!”  I replied “If only! Maybe my parts will get there one day” but with no expectation that it would happen any time soon, or even at all. This was one of the areas where I've got very familiar with feeling uncomfortable.

And yet there I was, just a couple of days later happy to see my own reflection.

Sometimes moments of healing arrive like that. Unexpected. Unplanned. We just notice that something has shifted.

And yet it is the work we do along the way, in whatever form that takes for us, that allows it to happen. Helped along, often by the words that others say that we didn’t know we needed to hear. That set something in motion subconsciously.

I doubt it would have happened so effectively or naturally if I’d been told to like myself. Or given a practice of smiling to myself everyday. Or if someone had tried explaining logically why I should like myself, even if accompanied by a raft of compliments (See this post ADD link for my reflections on how affirmations don’t always work as planned for some of us).

But gentle seeds can grow with time and space until they are ready to bloom. What form might that take for you in your life?