#174 When You Don't Know How to Love Yourself

In a recent introspective moment, I stumbled upon a journal entry from 2013, a year after my first battle with breast cancer. The pages revealed a painful truth: I had been incredibly harsh and judgmental towards myself.

The level of self-criticism and pain mirrored in my words from that time is jarring. Yet, I know that many survivors are caught in the same tumultuous mindset today.

That's why I felt compelled to share my past struggles. If my story from then can give even one person hope for a brighter future, it's worth it.

Know this: You are deserving of love, happiness, and joy. Even the tiniest steps forward can lead you to a day when, like me, you find your life enriched and even more meaningful than before your breast cancer journey.

Read full transcript below:

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This is Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm a healthy lifestyle coach, a clinical Ayurveda specialist, a personal trainer, and I'm also a breast cancer survivor. In this podcast, we talk about healthy thinking and mindfulness practices, eating well, moving your body for health and longevity. And we'll also hear from other breast cancer survivors who have reengaged with life, and have incredible stories to share. This podcast is your go to resource for getting back to life after breast cancer. Hello there friends, welcome to another episode of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I am Laura Lummer. As always, I'm thrilled to be here with you today. And I gotta say, when this show comes out, it'll be the last day of the five day SUGAR SUGAR challenge that we've been doing. It is just been amazing. And you know, a lot of people here sugar challenge and they think I don't have that big of an issue with sugar, or I don't want to give up sugar or something of that nature. And so it's just been such a powerful experience, because the sugar challenge has very little to do with food and a whole lot to do with the way we think about food. So I love going through these challenges because I come out on the other end so much better for what I've learned and thrilled for the transformation. It's amazing the shift that I see in people in just five days. And so it's been a very exciting week. It's been a wonderful week. And it just reminds me how much I love doing what I do. And another exciting thing that happened this week was we had the Fit and Fabulous after 50 summit. And I gotta tell you, Jennifer Patrick, who put this whole summit together was amazing. She was so organized, she was so so great. Like, I mean, like she's my organization idol, she was incredible. And I'm so honored to be able to have been a speaker and be interviewed there at that summit. I believe he did. So check it out. If you haven't checked it out, I'll put a link in the show notes of this page, which you can find at the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash 174. Or if you're listening to this on a smartphone, just scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the link there. But it was amazing. She had some talented, fantastic experts, and I'm very honored to have been a part of that entire summit. So I hope you check it out. I've heard from many people that they really enjoyed it and got a lot of great information out of it too. So hopefully you will as well and it will support your health. All right. So let's get right into the show. So this last weekend, my husband decided to start reorganizing a closet in our house and it needed to be done, it needed to be done. And he wanted to put new shelving in and we're going to make it into kind of like emergency supply kind of tools and emergency supply kind of closet. Well, in order to do that, though a lot of the things in their mind. They were no books, they were of course materials, books, things of that nature. So as I started going through them, I found this workbook that I had, from a course that I did, and I've talked about on the show, I did this course back in 2013. It was before I ever became a coach. It was really my first exposure to coaching. And I remember this I'm not having a great mindset. But the coach and the reason I did the course was because the coach was Aaron Summerville, who was a guest on my third podcast, you go back to number three, it's an oldie but a goodie. And she was my guest there. She's a mind body oncology coach, and she was facilitating this course. And I had met her while I was training at the hospital, she was doing this course at I was training to become a breast cancer mentor for newly diagnosed women. And that's where I met her. So when she told me about this course she was doing I thought, yeah, I'll do that. I'm open, I'll check it out. And I was struggling with many, many things about recovering from breast cancer. And I was hoping that I would find some solutions there. Which I'm going to tell you why. I didn't find as many as I could have, but it actually did move me forward in my life quite a bit. It's an amazing program. And I've gone back and done it since then in a much better mindset. But as I've said before, in that first three years after I finished treatment, it was a major struggle for me. So I found this book, the course is called beat the odds and they do it at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. They do it online too. So if you're out there and you're hearing this and you want to do some kind of course like that, you can go to Long Beach Memorial Hospital's website, I believe and look for it. It's called beat the odds. So anyway, I found the notebook. And as I was looking through the notebook because I thought, oh my gosh, I forgot about this. This was the first time I did beat the odds. And there were some loose pages sticking out because there are assignments in the course, and you do drawings and you do journaling and writing and that was really the first time that I had focused any effort at actually right writing my thoughts down on paper two, which, you know, I am a huge advocate of now. So I see this loose piece of paper. And I think, oh, cool, what is this, let me look back. And one is a drawing of my family and my dream and all of this kind of stuff. And the other one, I'm not sure what exercise in the book this was. But I started to read it. And I thought, Oh, my God, I was in so much pain, I was creating so much pain for myself at that point in my life. And I'm not saying it was judging on my previous self, or shame on my previous self, I'm just reflecting back on where I was, and how what I'm going to share with you here in a moment, is just a mindset that I can empathize with. Because it was my mindset, this was me, I wrote this stuff. But just a place that I would never go to now, I would just never allow my brain to take me down this road. And I'm going to read to you a page out of what I found. Because I want you to understand I talk on this show about, you know, I struggled and what I fought with and what I wrestled with. But I think when you hear this, and the reason I wanted to read this verbatim, is because I know a lot of you out there struggle with the same thing. And when you're in this place, when I was in this place, it was it felt like this place was truthful. This was the truth, this is the way it was. And I actually wrote something in here about not having any hope that it could ever be different. And so I thought, okay, as uncomfortable as this is, and I gotta tell you, it is a little uncomfortable. Because it's really a painful letter. But I thought is important to share. Because if you are in this place that you will hear I was in this letter, I want you to have hope. And I want to give you offer you some steps that can get you from that place to a better place in your life. Okay, here we go. Apparently, I was writing about my thoughts about myself in this letter, I didn't look back through the book to see what the actual assignment was. But here's what I wrote about myself. I look like a failure, sloppy, lazy, fat. I will never be able to work in the health industry, the way that I look. I'm never going to look like me again. I'm going to die. An overweight diabetic just like my dad did. I started thinking I'm okay. Now if I let myself do that, if I accept this, then I'm accepting failure. And I'll be like this forever. It's not easy to even read. It's horrible. I hate the way I look and feel. I feel like I look so much older than I really am. My stomach is in the way. It's uncomfortable. I can't do yoga the same. I feel it when I tie my shoes. I'm disgusted by myself. And I'm starting to think it will never change. I eat right. I work out ferociously, consistently. But I feel like everyone thinks I'm lying. Like, I'm some kind of a person who binges on Twinkies at night alone in my bedroom and then pretends to live a healthy lifestyle.

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That is what I was telling myself.

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And is it surprising that I wasn't healing? Is it surprising that I was suffering that I was frustrated that I felt angry? Oh my god, and horrible. It feels so emotional right now. I read that I look at that. And I remember how much pain I was in. And it was a lot. And it was emotional pain. And I was bringing it on myself. Those thoughts, talking about myself like that. Thinking about myself like that. If you're thinking about yourself like that, that is not a place of healing. That is not where healing comes from. When I'm working out or doing whatever I thought I was doing and nothing was working. Well of course it wasn't working. Because I was telling myself it wasn't gonna work. I was setting myself up for failure with the way that I was looking at myself and thinking about myself. There's no love there. There's no self compassion there. There's no caring there. There's no support there. I've just been through cancer. This letter was written in 2013 and my very last treatment was my last treatment being like the finishing of my reconstruction happened in December of 2012. I expect it to go from that. And from that treatment, right back to 100%, who I was before cancer. And because I didn't, I decided to hate myself for it. And I know that a lot of you do, too. And that's why I shared this. It's horrible. It's horrible. I look at it. And honestly, I look at that I read it, it breaks my heart, it feels like a different person. Because I would never never allow myself to think about myself like that now. But I meet people. And I see and read posts every day, every day of survivors who are thinking about themselves like that. I see this public messaging that encourages us to think this way to think that we have to be warriors and fight this and screw that and Fs. And I'm telling you, I've been there, it does not serve you. It does not support a healthy happy life. The things I just read to you. Is that a happy person? Is that a joyful person? How does a person like that have a deep connected relationship with someone they love when they hate themselves? They don't I can tell you because I was there. That's me. That's me. And you know what? That class that I was taking where I wrote that was my first step towards the idea that I could change the way I thought. And I gotta tell you a ton of resistance came up for me around that as well. So even in that place, I was resisting, right? I didn't want something new. I didn't want it to be the way it was. I kept telling myself it's not right. It's not fair. It shouldn't be like this. Look at me now. This is what happened. And it isn't my fault. Those kinds of thoughts. Here's the thing. They may be very true. It's very true. It's not my fault that I got cancer. It is not my fault, right? Is it fair? Well, what is fair? Who shouldn't happen to Is there someone in the world that could happen to and be fair, there are things that happen in life? It's 5050. It's good, and it's not good. But it's the way that we choose to direct our energy. Was it right and fair that that happened to me? Well, in my belief, no, it wasn't. But how does it help me or serve me to think that? How does it help me or serve me to put my energy into a thought like that? It made me miserable, and breaks my heart today reading it, I want, I'm glad I helped. I want to look at that woman and say, it doesn't have to be like that. You don't have to live like that and help her. And I did. Thank God. So I want you to ask yourself today. Because again, like I said, I mean, I'm on Facebook, you know, a lot of my business happens on Facebook and online. And I have Facebook groups, private Facebook groups, membership, Facebook groups, other breast cancer groups that I've been in. And I see women talk about themselves like this all the time, all the time. And the first step in changing the way that you talk to yourself, is going to be to ask yourself, How is this making me feel? Not? Is it true or not? Or you could ask yourself that. And you could acknowledge that, yes, this thought is true. You could say, Look at my breasts, I hate the way that they look. I'm not going to tell you that's not true. But I will ask you, how do you feel when you tell yourself that? Why do you tell yourself that? Why do you put your energy into that? This is a very simple exercise, because for some reason, we think that all the negative things have to go away in order for us to be happy. And that will never happen. If you are waiting for that to happen. Friend, it is never going to happen. There is always going to be fear, anxiety, and your brain will offer thoughts of judgment or criticism. And it is up to you to become the observer of what you think and let you say to yourself, and when you hear yourself saying things that cause you to feel worthless, less than sad. Lost. There's no hope. Never going to be the same again. And ask yourself, Why am I choosing to tone myself that? How does that make me feel? Not good. Isn't there another true thought that you could put Get that energy into and feel a lot better about yourself. There is because I know because that was me again, that was me in 2013. And this is me with stage four metastatic cancer in 2022. And I love my life. And I love this miraculous body, and I do everything I can to treat it with love. I mean, I may look at it, sometimes a goat muffin top is not gorgeous, okay, we're looser top today, you know, but I don't hate on myself. I'm like, Thank God, I'm still here to even see the muffin top, you know, and it doesn't mean that one feeling is valid. And one feeling is not one feeling just doesn't serve me. So I am not going to give it my energy, I'm gonna give my energy into something that helps me live a happier life, and look at myself through more loving eyes, to support my own personal practice of self compassion, because that will change everything. And as I said earlier, when I started this, just from the women in the sugar challenge, you know, I don't know what they expected when they came in, if I was gonna give them a diet or say, don't eat sugar, which I don't in that challenge, and I asked how do you think about yourself? What are the stories you're telling yourself about yourself? What do you deserve? What are you worthy of? And so when I see a letter like that, that I wrote to myself, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I just

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want to help anyone who is in that place, because it is a very painful place. But it is also a place that we create for ourselves, and that oftentimes we keep ourselves in. We keep ourselves very rooted there. And I find that getting external support is something very helpful. Getting feedback or input from someone who's been there is helpful, because we can allow our brains like take us down this path. And it happens so subtly, and it feels like it's the capital T truth, right? It feels like this is for real. When I wrote that letter. That was real for me. I believed that was true. And it took a lot of work for me to ask myself, Is it possible that there's a different way to look at this? Is it possible that there's something better for me? I didn't start there. I couldn't go from there. That letter I read to you from I don't know this, this is the bomb. This is I'm gonna happy life. No, I just started a little bit at a time. And I had to say, what what's possible? What can I be curious about? What could I maybe do here? What might help me feel better? I believed in that letter, I could never work with anybody that had anything to do with health because of my physical appearance and the changes that happened to my body from cancer. Well, look at me, now, I have a business, that's all I do is serve other cancer survivors. I have hundreds of 1000s of downloads of a podcast, dozens and dozens of women that are my members that I coach that I work with hundreds of women who come to challenges and workshops. So it was not true. But it took some time in some coaching for me to start stopping telling myself that you've got to first notice what you're telling yourself and stop with the destructive language. You've got to stop with the beating yourself up and open yourself to the idea that there's a possibility that you could treat yourself better. So as you're listening to this, now, I want you to just ask yourself that. Is it possible that I could treat myself better that I could learn to love me? Is it possible? And then the next question is, if it is possible, what would it look like? What would it look like? If I loved myself more? I will love to hear what it would look like. I know we'd love to hear your thoughts. Or if you have a question or a comment on that, I really would. Because if you're in the place where I was, when I read you the letter in that place that I was in, I'd love to help you move past that place. So you can find me on Facebook, Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, you can find me on Instagram, same, you can come to the breast cancer recovery group. And leave your comments in there and find support from other women who are learning to love themselves because that is really what this is about. And that letter was not a person who loves herself. And I've made a commitment to myself a long time ago that I would never be that person again. And I would like to encourage each one View to not allow yourself to be the person that loves yourself less than anyone else in the world that is never going to heal us. Alright friends, I hope that helps somebody who makes me feel very emotional. It's very, very sad. It's a sad state for anyone to be in and I know a lot of people are there and that was a really shocking reminder for me, of what that place feels like. So know that I love you know that you are worthy that You are a human being. And just because you're a human being, you are worthy of love, and you got to start loving yourself first. I'll talk to you again next week. Until then, Please be good to yourself. You deserve that

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you've put your courage to the test laid all your doubts your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures even all you know has you been waiting