Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself.
We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.
You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.
The only way to get what you really want is to let go of what you don't want.
Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.
When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.
You have set standards for how you want to be treated and what you expect from yourself and for yourself.
One way to eliminate self negating thoughts and behavior is by gaining more understanding through realizing that you cannot force others to see that what you feel is real.
If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.