As we go through this journey together, I will share what has led me to finally feel love and give it more consistently. My hope is that you too can reevaluate the love in your life, finding answers on how to feel love and give love.
I was born “different.” My mom tells me that I was an extremely difficult baby and cried all the time. As I grew older I was serious, studious, artistic, and basically a “nerd.” I was “that kid” who fell asleep on the school bus and was made fun of. I had big glasses, wasn’t athletic, and wasn’t particularly popular. I was hard on myself; not feeling like I ever achieved anything great, nor feeling like I was recognized for anything I did achieve.
I didn’t feel loved, or even liked, throughout many of my childhood years. I didn’t even love myself.
Growing up, I thought that love was the kindness other people showed me only when I did something that benefitted them. Love was conditional. If I did what people wanted, when they wanted it, and how they wanted it, I was loved. If not, I was nothing. I became a perfectionist trying to do everything right, all the time. Nothing I ever did was good enough. This feeling followed me throughout my life into adulthood.
My strict religious upbringing taught me that God did not want us to love ourselves.
That we should be careful of feeling a sense of accomplishment and pride. I learned not to do things for myself that I enjoyed, or show self-love. I didn’t feel loved by myself, anyone else, or even by God.
This warped sense of love stayed with me throughout a good portion of my life, impacting my friendships, relationships, marriage, and children. For decades I have questioned the love that I was receiving and giving.
As we go through this journey together, I will share what has led me to finally feel love and give it more consistently.
My hope is that you too can reevaluate the love in your life, finding answers on how to feel love and give love.
Being born into this (insane) world and being blessed to struggle through it, I had hurt, overwhelmed people all around trying to help me grow up. They diligently tried to teach me that God wanted me to be good to other people, but I was also taught to NOT be good to myself. They told me that God loved me so much, but then they told me how hard it is to please Him but somehow He still forgives me. I was told to behave and act in certain ways to be accepted and not punished.
It felt impossible to please the people around me. All these teachings drove me to become a perfectionist, TRYING TO BE GOOD ENOUGH TO BE LOVED AND ACCEPTED BY GOD AND PEOPLE AT THE EXPENSE OF MY OWN WELL-BEING.
As an older sister, I learned I was supposed to be an example and always take care of my younger sister. Of course, we fought as any good sisters do, but I was responsible for her. My sister and I would experience life together as our parents divorced and had new marriages with new step-siblings in the mix. When we were children divorce was still more known as a disgrace in the church I grew up in, and anyone who had someone divorce in their family was somehow a lesser member of the church. Our ‘blended’ family life was very difficult for every member in it, and so-called spiritual support was judgmentalism instead. There was not very much LOVE THAT FELT GOOD inside the family or in the church.
As a blended family, we built two houses on acres of land to tend to and we were also expected to work in our family’s janitorial business, WHILE we went to school and studied. We learned to work hard and we did not get a lot of sleep. All of us were in survival mode, and although LOVE WAS PREACHED, it did not come out in our relationships in a healthy manner even though we went to church.
Growing up in a strict fundamentalist church with a strict family, taught me many good, valuable lessons, but one of them I treasure the most is learning to be okay with being different. It takes A WILLINGNESS TO BE DIFFERENT to continue to learn and grow instead of being like everyone around you. These experiences gave me strong clarity that I did not want to be like people in the church or outside of the church in how they dealt with Love. I wanted to RECEIVE AND GIVE A LOVE THAT FELT HEALING, FULFILLING, ACCEPTING, and HOPEFUL, AND HAVE HEALTHY BOUNDARIES when possible.
When I was around nine years old, it occurred to me that something was wrong with what I knew about THE GOD WHO LOVES US. According to what I was taught, if I did what God said, then it would bring me happiness even in the middle of a hard life. As a Bible believer, I was told, a hard life was the way to please God.
I was taught to always put a smile on my face and to believe that if I acted happy then I would become happy. A Bible Believer was shunned strongly for saying anything negative. My 9-year-old mind said that I might not understand something properly with these teachings at the local congregation level, but if I could go to the church’s college campus, where church headquarters were, I surely would learn HOW TO MAKE THIS LIFE WORK BETTER for me. I pushed with all my strength to make it to this college. After attending two years of that Bible college of my dreams, I found that they did not know the WAY TO LOVE AND HAPPINESS either.
But there was one sliver of hope: Fellow humans at the college! I made very close friends with some people from around the world who showed me love when I needed it. Their love had a different quality to it. Their love felt like they GAVE HAPPILY FROM THEIR HEART and were genuinely concerned for me even if I did not have a lot to give back in resource ways (I had low amounts of money, time, and health in college). My new relationships gave me the hope that finding A HEALTHY TYPE OF LOVE in the categories of God, myself, and others was possible. I did not finish college.
At 23 I got married to a man I met in Bible college. Then had two baby boys pretty quickly after that. While we first lived in various places in the States we spent most of our life in Central America. Living in Central America was exactly what I needed to REALLY START GROWING SPIRITUALLY. It took living in houses behind metal bars while thieves roam the streets, having to keep purses and belongings in front of me with my arms around them, sticking out as a foreigner, and starting out not knowing the language, to make life tricky enough to make me really push into FAITH IN GOD’S HELP instead of just working on my own strength. My first son, who is special needs, compounded the stress.
In the midst of this difficult land I lived in, I found a few ‘angels’ (or shall I say fellow Humans?) some who believed in the Bible and some who did not, who taught me further what genuine love was like. They ministered to me in the middle of several nervous breakdowns I had in this foreign land. Thankfully, my last nervous breakdown in 2009, God started giving me clarity that GOD REALLY DOES LOVE US. I mean He LOVES EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING no matter what they believe or know. I have never needed another breakdown after finally understanding this about God’s true nature.
I am thankful to the fundamental churches, Hebrew Roots groups, Charismatic churches, Healing and faith ministries, deliverance ministries who have taught me many important and good things. They have all found me to be a very hungry learner to find the answers for trying to FEEL LOVED, HAPPY, AND THAT GOD WOULD BE PLEASED WITH ME. I also found each church and group had many people strongly trying to find these same things and still not quite attaining the love they sought. Instead, it felt like many in these groups seemed to think they knew what they were doing, but there was only hollow love in general amongst them. For instance, if someone believed as they believed, and followed their leaders well, then a person was acceptable to them and to God. If someone had different opinions at times or had life problems that they tried to help fix, but could not, then a person could be rejected or ostracized.
The Bible Believing community seems to not know how to stop ‘shooting their own wounded’ within their groups. To my own dismay, I realized that I had grown up to be quite judgmental of many people myself, and although I was not as strong on the outside in rejecting and ostracizing, my inside world needed a lot of growth to love as God loves.
Furthermore, most Bible Believing communities I have been part of seemed to have unhealthy perceptions about ‘non-Believers’ as well. People who do not believe in the Bible are known in these religious groups as ‘non-Believers’ or as ‘The World’. One perception, that seems to be chronic, is that ‘worldly people’ were to be pitied as ‘lost souls’ that God was going to judge and punish. Another persistent perception was that ‘The World’ had spiritual cooties and hanging out with people who had cooties would make us dirty or ‘fall away from the faith’.
And yet another strong perception seemed to be we had to help save those poor souls from A LOVING GOD who was going to destroy them. Somehow all of these church experiences in front of my eyes throughout my life just did not seem THE TRUE WAY OF HAPPINESS AND LOVE FOR ANYONE inside or outside the church. My conclusion was that the churches were still struggling to figure these things out just like every fellow human in the whole world.
Currently, Katrina is living in beautiful Germany. Her former husband just passed away from colon cancer in January of this year. She has two sons. The oldest, Zachary (28), is special needs with autism and seizure disorder. He blesses everyone’s life with hugs, kisses, and a lot of work. The youngest, Caleb (23), loves computer gaming and dreams of going pro or at least starting his own gaming stream. Katrina loves meeting people, exploring new places, dancing, and long walks in nature.
