Learning How to Love YourselfLearning How To Love Yourself Learning how to love yourself, or beginning to treat yourself well, is something that women especially, have a hard time doing. It seems we spend the better part of our lives pleasing and appeasing others, silencing our inner voice, and being riddled with insecurity and a feeling that something is just "missing". We beat ourselves up pretty badly. Re-playing a small mistake we made over and over again in our minds. Fighting with ourselves… looking at ourselves with disgust… saying things to ourselves that we would never say to any of our friends. Why do we do it? Because we don’t know any better. No one tells you how important “loving yourself” is… in fact, they tell you how much you should love others. If you even mention “love yourself FIRST” in polite conversation, people will look at you like you’re a monster. To love yourself first is definitely selfish. Being "selfish" means being ‘primarily concerned with your own interests’. What is wrong with that? The ONLY rational way to live is to take care of “you” and to treat yourself well. For all your life, all you have is you. You must make YOU your number one priority. By NOT making loving “you” your primary concern, you will engage in self-destructive behaviors and activities. Selfishness, even with its negative connotation, is vitally important to your health and well-being. Besides, you can’t love anyone else if you don’t love you. First Love You How can you give a gift to someone if you don’t already possess it? You cannot give what you don’t have. And that includes LOVE. Before learning how to love yourself, you are coming to others out of “need”… even if you think that you are “loving” them, you are not… you are manipulating people to get your needs met. You need them to give you a sense of “YOU”. And that’s why we lose ourselves in our relationships. We allow others’ opinions and approval to run our lives. We give and nurture… sometimes to the point of resentment… and then expect others to fill our emotional well. It simply doesn’t work that way. Loving yourself FIRST means that you develop a healthy sense of “I” and are not dependent on others to tell you who you are. You give more weight to your inner voice than to what others think or believe about you. You take the responsibility to define and create your own life. It's a part of becoming a healthy individual. The first step in learning how to love yourself is healing your past. Heal Your Past, Then Drop It Learning how to love yourself begins with healing your past because you have to have know who “I” is and where “I” came from before you can love that “I”. Have you ever thought about where your idea of “self” came from? If you’re like most women, your idea of “me” came from someone(s) outside of yourself. You carry around very un-real ideas about “who you are”…and these ideas form the lens through which you see the world and interact with others. In fact, most of us carry other people with us as we go from situation to situation in life. This emotional baggage interferes with our experience and does not allow us to relate in healthy ways. Learning how to love yourself helps you drop the baggage and be YOU. For instance, in childhood you may have picked up the idea that women should always be “nice” or that “good girls” don’t make waves. This stops you from taking appropriate action, sharing your opinions, or expressing your emotions (like grief or anger) in situations when you need to be assertive. It’s so important to figure out WHY you believe what you do about yourself, and HOW you came to believe it. Maybe you struggled with math in school… and from that came the idea that you aren’t very smart. Or maybe your parents led you to believe that your sister was prettier than you. Or maybe those kids who teased you in 7th grade filled your head with the idea that your “self” is a pimple-faced, flat-chested, freak. Whatever the case, you still carry all of these people with you each day until you make the decision to kick them out of your head. There are some less obvious ideas that you carry, too… just beneath the surface, a little outside of your consciousness, you hold at least a few self-limiting beliefs. “Women are the weaker sex”… “You have to be a mother”… ”You’re only pretty when you smile”. You may not SEE how these ideas affect you, but they do… every little thought you think affects you in some way. Make a List of Everything You Think About Yourself Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write your name in big letters at the top. Allow yourself to write freely all over the page to answer the question “Who am I?”. You might start with your job title, or some role that you play (“daughter to so-and-so” or “godmother to ______”), and then you may move on to more descriptive words. “I am strong”, “I am weak”, “I am clumsy”, “I’m not happy all the time”, “I laugh a lot”. Don’t just scratch the surface on this. Try to recall every little thing that someone has said about you. Write down every nickname people have given you. Write down what your high school sweetheart used to call you. Write what your old boss said about you in your last performance review. Write down every rumor you’ve heard about yourself. Write and think, write and think. Dig deep. After you do this, take a look at your list. What ideas from your past have you been carrying around? What thoughts have shaped your reality? What is your ‘Ego’ made of? Be Who You Are Once you see where your idea of “I” came from, you can begin to be the person you are meant to be. On your list, start crossing off the things that you would NOT like to carry around anymore and add words or phrases that sound good to you. “I am so pretty”. “I have a million dollars in the bank”. “I treat myself well”. “I can fit into those cute shorts from last summer”. :-) What you are doing is creating your own version of “I”, instead of letting others do it for you. The funny thing is that whatever you write on your “What I Want to Be” list, is what you ARE when you drop all of your negative programming. And that’s all that ‘learning how to love yourself’ is… dropping everything that is not the real “You”. See, at your root… at your core… you are a perfect being. You are “YOU”… Unique and divine. You are beautiful, strong, and powerful. You are worthy of the absolute BEST that the universe has to offer because you are a child of the universe. When you realize this, you will become more authentic and not be guided by other people’s opinions. You will joyfully express your “I” in the world. Learning how to love yourself and being who you really are, is the greatest gift that you can give to anyone...most of all, to yourself. First Love You and everything else will fall into place. I wish you the best. Related Articles about Learning How to Love Yourself * How To Love Yourself, Part 1 * Improve Relationship With “I” * Get Self-Confidence * How to Love Yourself: Why Alpha?
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