Struggling with Self-Love on the Mental Health Journey

@TraumaHarley First of all, happy birthday!! I hope the rest of it is just as great as it should be since you deserve a nice birthday :) For most circumstances for me, I make sure I remind myself that I can only truly “control” about 10-20% of what happens in my life. The rest of it??? It just happens. All you can do is put in your 10-20%, and hope for the best in the outcomes of that 10-20%. For the case of the oatmeal, you did what you could! You put the oats and presumably water or milk in, and prepared it. That’s your 10-20%. It overflowed, and that’s okay. Maybe you lose a little bit of the oatmeal, sure, but you can’t hold a grudge against yourself for doing your part in preparing oatmeal and something coming out of the blue. It sucks, of course, to not feel like you’re able to control it not overflowing. You can take precautions, but that doesn’t mean it will NEVER overflow. And you didn’t specifically and consciously make the oatmeal overflow (hopefully!), so why do you hold it against yourself that you somehow did..? Those are the thoughts you can try to populate your mind with when you feel hard on yourself, and sometimes it’s harder than others to push away those detrimental thoughts, but to even try to remind yourself that you’re not in complete control of everything around you, you can give yourself a little bit of grace.