Who are you chosing?

We dive into the Stephanie Bennett-Henry quote deeply - ask yourself would you put your love for someone before your love for yourself?

Transcript

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Okay. Hi, this is Angelique Clemens, the host of the Can I Borrow Your Skin podcast? We are in July, and the year is more than half over. And I am extremely grateful to all of you guys for like rocking with me and walking this journey with me. It has been a fantastic journey, and we're just going to keep chugging along and finish out 2026 strong. Today we're actually going to talk about the quote by Stephanie Bennett Henry that states, it's a hard lesson to learn, but the truth is you cannot love yourself and someone who hurts you at the same time. Please choose you. Like on the surface, that quote makes so much sense. And it's an analogy about self-love. It's the equivalent of one plus one equals two. And we all know basic arithmetic, at least I think most of us know basic arithmetic at this point. But the issue is not knowing or understanding that someone who hurts you, um, you should not love over yourself, but it's that knowledge of what they did to gain your love. Most people don't go around just seeking someone to hurt them and be like, oh, I'm so enamored with you, and you're gonna be mine forever because you beat me or or you hurt me emotionally. Like, that's not how we as humans work. It's the fact that this person did wonderful things for you, and they may still do wonderful things for you here and there, but they also hurt you. And it's the fact of the matter that the human brain takes three to 12 months to fall out of love. You know, and if you have even deeper connections with someone, someone that you've been with for a very, very long time, it can take up to seven or eight years for the neural connections in your brain to completely fade away. And again, we talk about neurotransmitters on this show all the time. It's that dopamine, it's the oxytocin, it's that, you know, noradrenaline. They they make these neural connections. And if you're someone like me who's looked at the brain quite a bit, one of the things that they teach you is you can reteach the brain. So, say you've had a TBI, a traumatic brain injury, a TBI, um, and you don't know how to function the way that you used to. Well, you can teach yourself and your brain to do those things with new connections. And so this person who you love, um, they begin to hurt you, or you know, nagging apparently is a thing now, or they show you all these wonderful things about themselves, and they start to slowly sprinkle in that hurtful bullshit. And at first you you gaslight yourself and you're like, that that's not what they really did, or oh no, no, no. They they didn't mean it that way. And so you start to ignore those little hurtful things, and it happens more frequently and more frequently, and then at that time, you're like, no, no, this is a pattern. I I'm definitely seeing things the way that the things are, and so then you confront them and you're like, Are you doing these hurtful things on purpose? Is this who you are? Because if this is who you are, and I don't want to be with you, and then they start gaslighting you, so they gaslight you, which makes you think back on the ways you were gaslighting yourself, and you're like, Okay, no, no, no, no, no. This this isn't real. And so when you start thinking about the way, so first you have this this straight way where you're like, I love this person, this person loves me, and it's all good. And then the hurt starts to come in, and it's not just A to B. And so now your brain goes, A to C to B, uh because you're gaslighting yourself, and then you're like, no, no, no, this is bad, this is bad. But then they start gaslighting you, so then you get a D B C and so you the all these things that they're doing, your brain starts making new connections to get you back to this place where you're happy, and so that's why it takes so long for your brain to fade and to realize this is no longer giving me joy. This connection is bad, this way to the connection is bad, this way to the, like it's just all bad, and you have to learn to not go A to B. Um, and honestly, breaking that connection can be physically painful. You have to think about it as trying to heal from some sort of um substance use disorder. Your your brain is getting all these positive things from this interaction, and now you you have this pain because you can no longer get it. And think about you know, very simple experiment. Everyone knows, like, you know, you train this mouse to run this maze, you give it a treat. Well, you block one part of that maze, that mouse is gonna find another way to get through that maze to get that treat. Well, you give the average human an orgasm button and they're gonna press that thing until they die. And it it's that sort of thinking that you have to have. So a lot of people, instead of going through the pain of getting away from that connection, of getting away from that neurotransmitter buzz, that button, so to speak, they will just take the pain instead of confronting it. And you start doing even worse things where you try to love them into loving you. Like I can put so much more effort into them and so much more love into them, and then they'll love me again, or uh they'll love me the way they used to, or they'll love me the way I'm showing them how to love. And you you can give them all the love that you have. But if that person is hurting you, they're never gonna stop hurting you because that's who they are. And so you can give the love and give the love and give and give and give and give and give, and they'll happily take. Uh, you know, I don't know, a single person, you say, Hey, let me give you all these wonderful things, and you want the wonderful things, but you say, Uh, I'm not gonna take these wonderful things, even though you're gonna keep giving them to me. Uh no, no, no, I I like it, I like it, I like it, but no, no, no wonderful thing. That's just that's not that's not at all how things work. Um, and so people are gonna keep taking all of this love, but they'll still give you the hurt because you're reinforcing that. They can treat you however they want to treat you, and you're still gonna give them what they want, or even more than what they were getting, or even more than what they were expecting, because their actions, their hurt doesn't matter. They can do all these negative things, and they can treat you really, really poorly, and you're still going to give because you would rather continue to give for that small piece of goodness that they will give back, or you'll give and accept that hurt because it's better than confronting the painful path forward to fade those neural connections. Or you just put yourself out there and have faith, they'll come back to me. Things will get better, things will get better, and you can die on the things get better he'll. Um, there are so many people in abusive relationships that will tell you how many months or years, even some decades that they spent telling themselves it will get better. Truth of the matter is, there are some relationships that just don't get better. And you can have all the faith you want that they will change or they will get better, and things will change, and things will get better, and they'll get back to the person you fell in love with. But it's more likely that you fell in love with just a small figment of that person's personality because most of us in the beginning of a relationship, when we're trying to start a relationship, we pour a little bit of ourselves out at a time. And the crazy doesn't come until you know that person likes you and likes so much of you that you can then you know bring that crazy out of the box. Did it dink d d dink d ding d pow and you let that crazy out. And sometimes when you let the crazy out, people are like, oh no, that's too much. And they will leave. And that is a risk you have to take if you're going to be your authentic true self with people. And then there's those people who let the crazy out so infrequently that you then gaslight yourself that that's not really them. Or their hurt is so, in your mind, so small compared to what you get out of it, that you're willing to accept that um just to have that person. And I do want to put a brief comment in here about DS relationships because there's a big difference between consensual um hurt and uh in a DS relationship, um, than the non-consensual hurt that I am speaking about. And relationships where there is a certain amount of physical pain that is expected and agreed upon at the onset, uh, that's much different than you know the physical hurt or the emotional hurt that you get and you gaslight yourself into thinking, well, that's not who this person really is. And the kind of pain that I'm talking about now, um, about this Stephanie Um Bennett Henry quote. So what you have to do and what you have to get to, and you need to sit yourself down and talk to yourself. And at the end of the day, and the base of the question, as you start to face um rewriting these neural connections and telling your neural network, I know I love this person, but they're hurting me. You have to say, Well, who do I love more? Me or them? And at the end of the day, that is the only thing that matters is who do you love more? Yourself or the person hurting you, and you need to ask yourself, how can I choose me? And also choose the person hurting me. You should be choosing yourself, you are worthy of being loved, and you're worthy of having someone love you the way that you deserve. And when you choose yourself, channel all that love and all that affection that you are giving to this person that does not deserve it into yourself. Uh, it's it's that song, and right now I cannot think of the artist's name, but you know, buy yourself the flowers and uh date yourself. You know, take yourself out. You know, write your, you know, I I'm a firm proponent um of throughout the year, do little nice things for myself. Early in my uh in my marriage, every year when my husband and I went to an event, or he got me flowers and wrote a sweet note, I would put it in a box. You know, ticket stubs or the note from the flowers, or I'd take pictures of us out when we did something and print out a copy of the picture and put it in the box. And at the end of the year, um, on December 31st, we have a lot of traditions um that we do both from um my cultural backgrounds and his cultural backgrounds. But one of the things that we did together is we would take these boxes that we made and we would open them up. And we would, and I would write the date on mine. So I would just pull something randomly out the box and look at the date, talk about it, talk about the memory. And this is what we would do for like an hour and a half um every December 31st. And it was nice to recap all the wonderful things that we did together as a couple. I recommend that if you're someone going through a hurtful breakup, especially a breakup of a relationship that lasted a really long time, if you're getting out of an abusive relationship, when you start dating yourself again, write yourself love notes, put them in a box or in a jar. You know, send yourself flowers, take yourself on little dates, write those memories and put them in a jar. And you don't have to wait a whole year if you're having a very, very difficult time with this breakup, with learning to date yourself and learning to love yourself again, you know, once a month, once every six months, once a quarter, however long you need um before you have to reassure yourself. Sit down with that jar, that box, if you want to make notes on your phone, however you want to do it, and read the nice things you wrote about yourself. Look at some of the pictures that you took, um, the things that you took yourself on. Take yourself to get a Manny Petty, take cute pictures of your of your nails or whatever, and put those things in a box. And when you need that reassurance, sit down and you know, read the notes you wrote to yourself. Talk how you talked about yourself like a rock star. That one time you took yourself to that one restaurant that person would never take you to, and you've been dying to go. And the picture of your plate or your beverage or whatever. Like, do those things for yourself. And, you know, whether it's once a month, once a quarter, once a you know, every six months, every year, however, sit down and read those notes. Look at those photos and remind yourself how amazing you are as a person, how much you love yourself and how deserving you are of being loved. And quite frankly, how easy it is to show you love because what that person did not do, someone else is willing to do it for you, even if that someone else is yourself. So you cannot love yourself and someone who is hurting you. Choose you. Thank you. Uh huh. Like, subscribe, say, follow, tell friends about it. Get down in these comments. Let's talk about it. Mm bye.