What is self-love? Too often people confuse self-love with vanity, or that is to say, they consider peers who show outwardly a love of self, to be vain. From my experience, the percentage of people who are shamed for learning to love themselves vs the percentage of people who are simply vain is baffling, but what’s interesting about that is how the person learning to love themselves may feel hurt by such an accusation, while someone who is just vain, might not care what you say about them. They may like the attention either way.
Self-love is a personal journey that might start anywhere from hating yourself, to some form of tolerating yourself, with the goal being to honestly and authentically love the person that you are. The entire concept sounds easier than it is. It seems totally logical that we should love ourselves, but many people find it easier to focus on loving someone else instead. Just like relationships with other people, we may struggle to form a healthy attachment to ourselves for many of the same reasons we struggle to form healthy attachments to others. By about the age of 6 or 7, most children will have a set of core beliefs that they’ll use to guide them through the rest of their lives, whether the beliefs are functional or not. Those beliefs often impact a person’s ability to form functional attachments. That doesn’t mean that we can’t change our beliefs, it just takes a lot more work than it did to gather it in the first place.
Self-love requires being honest with yourself first. Pretending that flaws don’t exist won’t help you with another important piece, which is acceptance. Before you can get anywhere near loving yourself, you must first accept yourself. You must accept the person you are right now, the person you’ve been in the past, and the choices you’ve made. It’s important to have compassion for yourself like you would a child because it’s likely that whatever dysfunctional choices you’ve made are connected to belief systems you built for yourself as a small child. When you were a child, you weren’t trying to sabotage your older self, you were only trying to figure out how to get your needs met. Love is a complicated need.
I see confusion in how we action self-love as well. Indulgent behaviors are sometimes masked as self-love. I can speak from experience that being more indulgent can, in fact, be a form of loving yourself. For those trying to break the cycle of feeling low self-worth, postponing joy until conditions are met, and considering yourself not good enough to experience joy, or spoiling yourself can be therapeutic. I’ve also seen people claim healthy habits such as dieting and exercising as acts of self-love while using these habits to punish themselves. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on what’s going on on the outside than it is to focus on what’s going on on the inside. The reality is that there is no “one size fits all” formula for love.
True honesty is so important because no one outside of yourself can tell you what you are doing right or wrong to love yourself. Some serious reflection is also invaluable, as we tend to mask things that are hard for us to accept in order to make our lives easier to manage. I honestly don’t know if someone can arrive at full-on, unconditional self-love without experiencing pain. I would like to think it’s possible though. I think the journey is far more ugly than the romantic blooming of a new love affair with another, but that is my experience. Your experience may be very different than mine. I certainly still have a long way to go and have no desire to judge this experience for others. I believe it is worth it though.
I truly believe that the journey to loving yourself is one of the most important processes we can go through. While loving ourselves can be put off until we get that new job that we’ve always wanted or until we lose a few pounds, prioritizing self-love is the way to go. We make everything harder for ourselves when we aren’t focused on what really matters first. When we allow ourselves to be distracted, when we lie to ourselves, we are denying our own needs. Love is a need, probably one of the most important needs we have and one that so many people are starving for. Most people can relate to being their own worst enemy. Goals are great to have, but the best way to reach that goal is to get on the right team first. Self-love is the way. Reach those goals while loving yourself, not before. I would argue that you don’t even know what you are working so hard for in the first place if you aren’t able to love yourself.
Of course, you can be in a perfectly happy, healthy relationship and not love yourself. You can achieve all your dreams without ever loving yourself. Plenty of people are out there right now doing all the things without it. But happiness, pure unadulterated joy, is available to everyone. It’s inside all of us. We have all these coping mechanisms that are just in the way. The brain isn’t smart when it comes to growth. That is something that I have had to acknowledge on this journey. We think the brain is smart when really it’s complicated, but not always smart. Our brains want to keep us safe and it’s going off of bad programming. It can’t tell that you are safe and that it is the thing getting in the way of growth that it doesn’t even know it needs.
You can give yourself the love you crave. You can be truly happy. You deserve it.
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