The number one message I give to people I do readings for, whether they ask directly about it or not, is around the theme of self-love. Somehow this issue comes up often. I think this is because it’s such an important thing to be able to do for ourselves - to be loving and compassionate. It’s also one of the hardest things to do and most people struggle with this. Learning to love ourselves is a lifelong process. And what I’ve found personally and seen in others is that when we think we’ve gotten to a good place with self-love, something happens to help us see that there is still more room for growth in that journey.
So why do we struggle with self-love? There are many reasons - some of which are at a societal level and some of which come from our own personal histories, including our upbringing and identities we carry. If people were critical of us or love was conditional, we learned that we needed to be a certain way or do certain things to be loved. If others told us that we were less than or not equal to them, we may not feel worthy of love. If we saw others around us focusing so much on others’ needs and not their own, we were modeled and taught to pay more attention to loving others and not ourselves - to put ourselves last. These are just some common examples but there can be so many other reasons for struggling with self-love.
Most of the time we feel that there is something we must do to earn love. The truth is we are worthy of love by simply being. Can you take that in? In this moment, just as you are now - you are worthy of love. No strings attached. No expectations. No goals to achieve.
It may resonate with you why loving yourself is hard but there’s another important question to consider: Why is it important to give ourselves love? Let’s compare love to water for a moment to better understand this importance. We need water to survive and even thrive. It’s so vital to our well-being that if we go too long without it, once we get it we may guzzle it down and want to over-consume it to make up for the deprivation we experienced. And what if we didn’t allow ourselves to give ourselves water and only allowed water to be given to us from others? What would happen? We might become desperate and anxious not knowing when the next time we’ll get the water we need. We might even engage in manipulative behaviors or push past boundaries in the desperate attempt to get enough water. When it comes to something as vital to our well-being as water, there’s probably a lot of things we would be willing to do to get it from others if we didn’t have control over it ourselves.
So let’s take this back to the idea of love. If we only are allowing ourselves to receive love from others, how desperate might we feel to get it from them? What lengths will we go to and what potentially harmful behaviors will we be willing to engage in to get it? And what is the harm we are causing ourselves by depriving ourselves of self-love?
If we were able to love ourselves whenever we wanted or needed to - just like with being able to give ourselves water whenever we needed or wanted - how would that change things? Giving ourselves love is not selfish. It is more than a gift. It is a necessity. So those things we think about doing but never make time for, or the things we do to take care of ourselves but feel guilty about doing, do them. Self-love can look like: taking care of basic needs, spending time alone in silence or at a favorite coffee shop, engaging in a hobby, wrapping yourself in a cozy blanket, or taking deep breaths for a minute. It’s the act of doing something nurturing for yourself. It’s taking care of yourself. If it’s as important as our basic need for water, can you prioritize self-love? What would that look like?
This journey of growing in self-love is just that - a journey - and not necessarily an easy one. You may be at the very beginning, unsure of where to start. You may be somewhere in the middle wondering where you can go next and how to keep deepening the love for yourself. Wherever you are at, if you need or would like help understanding what is getting in the way of loving yourself, or how to start or deepen this journey, reach out to me. I would love to connect with you on how I might be of help to you with this. Because you deserve love, and even more importantly, you deserve it from yourself.
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