Women's Empowerment Stories ...

Restore your Inner Home
~ Cena

Recently, I was asked why a woman would stay with someone who treated her poorly, in ways she did not deserve. Let's reflect on this question for a moment.

Why would we, as women, stay with someone who treats us less than we deserve?

The most important part of the question to tackle is 'less than we deserve'. What do we believe we deserve? Many of us short-change ourselves in this department. We believe we deserve exactly what we get. And even when we do not believe we deserve something bad, we accept it. Why?

We are all storied as children. Family, friends, even strangers leave hurtful comments behind – some intentionally, some unknowingly. Either way we are left to decide what to do with them. In an ideal world we would be taught to take those hurts, those negative messages out to the trash where they belong. We would wait and watch the trash collector come to carry them away forever, ridding our internal houses of such emotional garbage. Unfortunately, even in the best of homes some of that emotional sludge doesn't make it to the trash.

Over time we collect more. We cleanse our emotional house the way we were taught and often that includes not dealing with things properly – sweeping things under the rug that we will eventually fall over until we choose to really deal with them. I suspect those of us who stay or have stayed in a relationship that was not healthy for us, do or did so out of love, desire or hope. The reasons are usually something positive, albeit perhaps misguided.

Unfortunately, too often those things dissipate or are crushed, eroded away over time by emotional neglect or worse, physically stomped out of our souls. We plead till the end and many of us grow bitter or hopeless, splintering ourselves into fragmented versions of who we want to be. We throw ourselves into the fragmented roles of simply mother, dedicated career woman, or often the good wife. We begin to sweep parts of ourselves under the proverbial rugs and it is those parts we choose not to leave behind.

What if we decided to stay AND recover all the shards of ourselves? What if we decided to stay and clean up all the past messes? What if we decided it is within our internal houses we will always remain and that no matter who is with us, we must learn to care for ourselves as much as we care about others? What if we answer the ‘why do you stay?’ question with a series of more helpful self-directed questions?

How can we become better internal housekeepers? How can we learn to lift up the rugs and sift through what's underneath without losing pieces of ourselves on the way out to the trash? How can we focus not so much on whom we allow into our lives but how we allow them to be within our lives? How can we restore what is salvageable and find the courage to let go of what is not, so we can finally answer the more relevant questions: are we short-changing ourselves and why?

~ Cena