You're Not Enough (And That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love - Hardcover

Stuckey, Allie Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593083849 ISBN 13: 9780593083840

Verlag: Sentinel, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From one of the sharpest Christian voices of her generation and host of the podcast Relatable comes a framework for escaping our culture of trendy narcissism—and embracing God instead. 

We're told that the key to happiness is self-love. Instagram influencers, mommy bloggers, self-help gurus, and even Christian teachers promise that if we learn to love ourselves, we'll be successful, secure, and complete. But the promise doesn't deliver. Instead of feeling fulfilled, our pursuit of self-love traps us in an exhausting cycle: as we strive for self-acceptance, we become addicted to self-improvement.

The truth is we can't find satisfaction inside ourselves because we are the problem. We struggle with feelings of inadequacy because we are inadequate. Alone, we are not good enough, smart enough, or beautiful enough. We're not enough--period. And that's okay, because God is.

The answer to our insufficiency and insecurity isn't self-love, but God's love. In Jesus, we're offered a way out of our toxic culture of self-love and into a joyful life of relying on him for wisdom, satisfaction, and purpose. We don't have to wonder what it's all about anymore. This is it.

This book isn't about battling your not-enoughness; it's about embracing it. Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian, conservative new mom, found herself at the dead end of self-love, and she wants to help you combat the false teachings and self-destructive mindsets that got her there. In this book, she uncovers the myths popularized by our self-obsessed culture, reveals where they manifest in politics and the church, and dismantles them with biblical truth and practical wisdom.

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Allie Beth Stuckey is host of the Blaze Media podcast Relatable, where she tackles theological, cultural and political issues from a conservative, Reformed perspective. Stuckey speaks to college students, Republican organizations, Christian ministries, and businesses across the country about the importance of biblical and conservative values. She also offers frequent commentary on Fox News. She and her husband welcomed their first daughter into the world in July 2019. This is her first book.

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Myth #1

You Are Enough

I Wanted to Be Enough

“You’re going to die,” she told me, leaning forward on the edge of her seat. Her elbows rested on her knees, and her hands were clasped as if in prayer. “This is going to kill you.”

I knew I had a problem, but I didn’t want to admit it was serious. I just couldn’t kick the habit of throwing up my meals. What started out as restricting my calories and working out twice a day turned into a cycle of bingeing and purging that, as hard as I’d tried, I couldn’t get out of.

It had started to affect my life. I’d be at a restaurant, having just finished dinner and unable to enjoy the conversation with my friends because I was thinking about how badly I wanted to get rid of the food I’d just eaten. Once, when I was working at a conference for work, I lied to my coworker about needing to get something out of my room so I could go throw up. Another time a friend caught me in the bathroom, my head over the toilet. I thought she was downstairs. She walked in and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine. She didn’t push, but she knew I was lying.

I wanted to stop. It was embarrassing. It was inconvenient. More than that, it wasn’t who I wanted to be. I’d never struggled with any kind of addiction. Before that year, I had never gone to extreme lengths to lose weight. But here I was, in a counselor’s office, hearing that what I was doing was killing me.

About a year earlier, I’d been through a bad breakup. I dated a guy for two and a half years who met all my criteria: a Christian from a good family with solid friends and a nice personality. We met my freshman year, and I thought for sure he was the one. But things got rocky two years in, and both of us were having doubts. But I was determined to hang on because I was convinced I couldn’t find anyone ­better.

The fall of my senior year he broke up with me. Though I was ­devastated, I knew I didn’t want to spend my last semester sad. But it was my last semester of college, and I was determined not to spend it sad. So I rebounded—­but not in a good way.

I started going out more often and drinking more heavily. Single for the first time in my college career, I had a slew of new dating prospects. I was hanging out with people I considered the “party” crowd. They welcomed me and encouraged me to live it up these few months before the last year of college ended. The newness of it all helped numb my pain.

I also restricted the calories I consumed and spent multiple hours a day working out. The more weight I lost, the more alcohol I drank, and the more guys who paid attention to me, the easier it was for me to ignore the haunting fear the breakup had left me with: that I wasn’t enough.

Things got worse. Eventually I missed food too much to keep skipping meals, so I started to eat again, only to throw up an hour later. At first it was just once or twice a week. Then it became an addiction I just couldn’t break. I’d started to binge. When I did, I’d feel guilty and afraid I would lose all the “progress” I’d made, so I’d get rid of the food as quickly as I could.

Fast-­forward to a few months after I graduated from college, and I was in a new city in a new job, and I was stuck in the same cycle. I was still going through guys and drinking too much, and I was still throwing up my meals. But I started to feel like I could no longer keep up with my own addiction, and, honestly, I was getting a little worried. I’d thought I had the power to turn it all off after the semester ended, but I didn’t. This “season” was turning into my actual life. It was one thing to me to have some college “fun,” but I wasn’t okay with this behavior be­coming who I was.

So one morning at work I called a number I’d found on a list of recommended Christian counselors on a local church website. I thought the process would be simple: I’d get a few tips on how to live a better life and some mantras or mind games that would break this binge-­and-­purge addiction.

I believed that because that’s the popular message today: you already have everything you need inside you to solve your problems. The idea that while outside tools like therapy, medication, meditation, yoga, hypnosis, or crystals can help unlock your innate potential for health and happiness, you are ultimately healed by the inner power you naturally possess. But this isn’t reality.

Rarely does Teen Vogue publish helpful articles, but in July 2019 its site published an insightful op-­ed critiquing modern wellness culture titled “Being Diagnosed with a Chronic Illness Taught Me That Health Isn’t a Meritocracy.” The author wrote:

“Women have been conditioned to believe both that our bodies are our self-­worth and that our bodies are under our own control. As wellness culture would have us believe, health is a meritocracy in which ‘fueling’ your body and ‘detoxing’ and holding crystals can rocket you to the top.”

Her debilitating fibromyalgia showed her that no amount of self-­care could completely heal her, and that the road to coping with her sickness was going to mean dependence on others rather than self-­sufficiency. She realized that healing, whether mental or physical, isn’t a quick fix accomplished by unleashing our inner power.

We’re not enough to heal ourselves. I don’t mean that natural remedies and positive thinking aren’t at all effective; I’m saying that we don’t have some inherent mystical force inside of us ready to solve our life problems or physical maladies.

I learned the same lesson in my counselor’s office. Though I reached out to her because I knew I needed help, when we started, I thought the process would be one of self-­empowerment. I figured she’d give me the keys, and I’d unlock my own capabilities to stop overdrinking, ditch the unhealthy relationships, and quit the bingeing and purging.

I was a product of the mainstream messages of our day. Though my mess of a semester should have taught me that “doing me” led to a dead end, I didn’t want to give up control and I didn’t want to decenter myself from my world. I still wanted to believe I was enough.

But the counseling sessions weren’t as straightforward or as focused on self-empowerment as I would have liked. At first the counselor just listened. Then over the course of a few weeks, she helped me peel back the layers of defensiveness and delusion I’d used to bury the sting of rejection and fear of loneliness. She helped me see that underneath all my behavior was my crippling fear of insufficiency. The attention I was getting from new friends and flings made me feel better about being rejected by my longtime boyfriend, and I’d convinced myself that being skinny was the thing making these new friends and flings possible. If I lost the “progress” I’d made, I wouldn’t be wanted or accepted anymore, and I’d have to face the pain of being rejected. That would mean I have to answer the question I didn’t want to ask: Am I enough?

I knew I wasn’t enough for the guy I thought I was going to marry, so I wanted to at least be enough for myself. I’d prove that I was fine on my own by doing the things that made me happy in the moment. And when the things that made me happy eventually made me miserable, I still assumed I had the power to take back control of my life and get myself on the right path.

It was clear that I didn’t. I was actually...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sentinel
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593083849
• ISBN 13: 9780593083840
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien