what Henri is saying to me

it was suggested to me by a counselor that i read "The Inner Voice of Love" by Henri Nouwen so i promptly found it in my church community's library and i started into it yesterday. i read the intro and he was suggesting that you should look through the Table of Contents for those things that you think might speak to you. i read through the titles and saw several things that i thought might speak strongly to me and then i gravitated to a one page piece that i thought spoke right to where i was at.
it rocked my world.

Avoid All Forms of Self-Rejection

You must avoid not only blaming others but also blaming yourself. You are inclined to blame yourself for the difficulties you experience in relationships. But self-blame is not a form of humility. It is a form of self-rejection in which you ignore or deny your own goodness and beauty.
When a friendship does not blossom,when a word is not received, when a gesture of love is not appreciated, do not blame it on yourself. This is both untrue and hurtful. Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others. You want to be with those whom you consider better, stronger, more intelligent, more gifted than yourself. Thus you make yourself emotionally dependent, leading others to feel unable to fulfill your expectations and causing them to withdraw from you. This makes you blame yourself even more, and you enter a dangerous spiral of self-rejection and neediness.
Avoid all forms of self-rejection. Acknowledge your limitations, but claim your unique gifts and thereby live as an equal among equals. That will set you free from your obsessive and possessive needs and enable you to give and receive true affection and friendship.


OH ... MY ... GOD. did Henri just lay out my struggle for me in 100 words? i've often wondered and hated how needy i get in my hardest times. it's my own spiral of self-rejection and it all stems from my own self-blame from my own difficult relationships.

Lord have Mercy.