You Love... You Learn

By Martine Felton

You Love... You Learn is a combination of writings that will guide you through Martine Felton's journey of self-awareness, self-love, discovering her keen empathy, heightened intuition, and her soul's purpose. 

As a tarot lover and reader, Martine realized, in hindsight, how the Major Arcana cards showed up at dif

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jewel Publications
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780988828957

Book preview

You Love … You Learn

A Memoir

By Martine Felton

Copyright © 2021 Martine Felton

Published by Martine Felton, Jewel Publications

www.martinefelton.com

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written consent and permission from the publisher, except by reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written consent and permission from publisher.

You Love… You Learn by Martine Felton

Issued in print and electronic formats

ISBN: 978-0-9888289-2-6

DEDICATION

To my loving and supportive husband, Tony,

and my beautiful daughters,

Ciara, Chance, and Ava.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Leap Of Faith

Chapter Two: Those Damn Red Flags!

Chapter Three: Tunnel Vision

Chapter Four: Chrysalis

Chapter Five: Flourishing

Chapter Six: High Vibrations

Conclusion

Glossary

References

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank everyone that encouraged and supported me throughout this journey.

Thank you Lauria, for a beautifully designed cover

and Emma for a wonderfully edited manuscript!

YOU LOVE…

YOU LEARN

Introduction

I was the youngest raised in a Haitian blended family. Growing up I always felt invisible. I never felt seen or heard. My parents are Haitian immigrants. They came here before I was born with their children in search of the proverbial American dream. My mom had my brother Roody and my dad had his two kids.

If you know Haitian parents, you know that they don’t affirm or validate. They damn sure don’t coddle; they provide, govern, delegate and dictate. Their love for their children translates differently. Haitian immigrants who are my parents’ age were put through a lot coming up in the Duvalier era being traumatized and displaced from their families. Migrating to the US from what most would call a third world country was incredibly difficult, but they made it.

I have many stories and moments of hurt, disappointment and mistakes, all because I didn’t have the love for myself that I should’ve had; and each time my heart broke into a million pieces, I picked up as many pieces as possible and put my heart back together – never being able to put it back together exactly the way it was before. So, with my heart filled with voids and my soul fragmented, I would press on until the next time. One of my mantras used to be I trust everyone until they give me a reason not to. I thought that shit was so cool of me … to trust everyone. I had no discernment. I had never even heard of the word discernment, until a few years ago.

That lack of discernment caused me to get used a lot. I tried to fill voids with relationships and material things, mostly relationships though.

At fourteen years old, I had sex with my first boyfriend who I thought that I was going to be with forever. I know, so immature. Anyway, the second time we had sex, I got pregnant and had an abortion. I was only fourteen, a baby doing grown-up things. I seriously knew nothing about sex and what could possibly happen.

When I sit back and reflect on all my stories, I realize that they all stem from the little girl in me who never felt affirmed and loved growing up. I knew that my parents loved me because they provided. They brought me nice things, I had my own room, and they gave me everything that I asked for. So of course, they had to love me, right? The thing is, they never said it, nor did they show me. There was very little to no physical affection.

Even though my dad was there, he never talked to me about boys and how they would pursue me. How not to be fooled. How to value myself. How I was beautiful and special. No one ever told me that. I was very naive and craved love. And so I sought that love and validation from others.

This is not where I blame my parents, because I am fully aware that I am responsible for healing my adult self, plus when I think about them and how they came up, I realized that they didn’t have the emotional tools, to give me what they didn’t have.

You can only expect people to operate at the level of consciousness that they are at, you can’t expect more, if it’s just not there. So now, being a parent myself, I understood what they were working with, but that still doesn’t take away from my negative self-beliefs and lack of self-love that I grew up with.

The lessons that I learned about self-acceptance and self-love have allowed me to share my wisdom in the forthcoming pages. I repeated a lot of lessons because I was not learning, so it was like I kept dating the same guy over and over.

Those were the times I can remember that I was being led by Spirit and there were moments where I was getting intuitive hits and not following them. I look back and remember being at crossroads many times about certain things and making decisions that were not for my highest good; those decisions blew up in my face needless to say. I took a lot of detours. I used to feel like those detours wasted a lot of time of greatness, but at the end of the day, there are no mistakes where Spirit is concerned; everything is in divine order.

Where I made bad decisions and took wrong turns, like a GPS, my route just got recalibrated. Spirit just moved things around for me so that I could get back on my right path. Sometimes, that took years, but I would eventually make it back.

I always had the ability to sense people’s energies, but never knew what it was. I always thought it was all of my own. I felt crazy sometimes because of my high levels of anxiety. Recently, I learned that I’m an empath. Which makes perfect sense to me based on the types of men (narcissistic) that I attracted. The battle of the empath versus the narcissist is an epic one, until you become an empowered empath through practicing self-love, setting boundaries and learning how to control your emotions and not getting sucked into the toxic narcissistic hole.

I really identified with the attributes of an empath and realized that I had dated nothing but narcissists in the past. It was like a ton of bricks landed on me. My past made sense. The unknown emotions and feelings, the mood swings for no reason, the anxiety, the insecurity; I was an unaware empath, who tried to people please at every turn.

I dated various narcissistic, emotional vampires who led very dysfunctional lives. So, the fact that I even tried to insert myself into their dysfunction, is a telltale sign of how misguided I was. With a combination of insecurity and