When “love yourself” doesn’t quite cut it, we need to go deeper

I love what is happening in the self-help books landscape. More of us realise that relationships don’t just happen. Especially not the good ones.

There are things we need to look at, things we need to learn about ourselves, before we can turn wonderful dating into a beautiful relationship or breathe a new life into a dying relationship.

We get it, more and more, that good relationships take some learning, they don’t just pop up.

However, I also see that most of the work that is suggested to us has some limitations. Let's take the headliners:

"To have good relationships you need to:

• be self-loving

• learn to communicate better

• set boundaries

• be vulnerable".

It's all great advice, but those of us who’ve tried it know that it’s not so easy.

For example “be self-loving”. It sounds so compelling: if we don’t love ourselves, then who is going to love us, right?

But what does it really mean to love oneself? And how do I do it every step of the way when I date, or when I have a strong discussion with my partner? What does it mean to be self-loving when “he” doesn’t call?

My “thing” was to learn better communication. So I applied myself 120% to learning and using Non-Violent Communication, otherwise a beautiful way to speak in relationships, which I call “the language of vulnerability”.

But to my surprise, after a couple of years of persevering in it, I realised it helped here and there, yet in the big picture of my desire for a connected, loving, vibrant relationship with a man, I was not yet seeing the light.

So what’s going on?

From symptoms to the real cause

It is tempting to believe that a lack of self-love, healthy boundaries, self-esteem or communication skills are the root cause for our trouble.

But what I came to see through the years is that they are mere symptoms of something deeper. Have you ever wondered “why, if love is something so natural, I am not naturally self-loving, naturally speaking lovingly, naturally setting boundaries, naturally non-judgmental?”

If you really sit with this question, it will not take long to see that it has to do with our upbringing.

Over years of dealing with my own difficulties to create the love I wanted (and the frustration that "the language of vulnerability" was not really working for me), I came to see that we can’t change the way we do things in relationships without taking a good look at how we were brought up.

You see, we make our own, personal, map of what works in relating with people and what doesn’t based on our first years of life.

Why? Because that’s when our first relationships took shape: the relationship with our parents, siblings or other important adults in our life (grandparents, educators). And that is when we are deeply vulnerable to any information we receive from the outside, deeply impressionable.

How our childhood shapes the way we relate today

Most parents have the best intentions at heart and do their best to give us love. However, for different reasons, that doesn’t always happen – think about when they come tired from work, or when they have financial problems, or when they have troubles in their relationship.

Since we are deeply impressionable at that age, the moments when we don’t receive the attention, care, appreciation, encouragement that we need leave strong imprints on us. For a child it’s painful to be cut off from love (almost as being cut off from air) and that wound stays with us. And on the other hand, we create little strategies to still get what we want – like smiling even when we don’t feel like, being quiet, becoming the little clown of the family, the pleaser or the “achiever” always good at school, or on the contrary - getting attention by being the rebel all the time.

These imprints create the map of how we relate with people (especially with a love partner), in the present. And as you can imagine, this map is not very useful.

In my experience, until we take a look at these imprints, we cannot change much in our present way of relating. For example:

• If we have been often compared with siblings or colleagues, it will be difficult for us to be self-loving.

• If we had to fight with our siblings for our parents’ attention, no matter how much we learn relationship communication, our words will still carry the fighting energy in them.

• If being afraid or insecure was not allowed (or even scorned) in our childhood homes, we will find it difficult to open up and be vulnerable with our date or partner.

• If we were not encouraged to think on our own and make decisions for ourselves, we will not feel much self-esteem.

• If the parent we loved the most was absent from home or absent emotionally (or addicted), we will tend to choose partners who are unavailable.

So what is the work about?

Over the years, I came more and more to realise that we all land into this world with all we need to create connection, love and intimacy.

It's just that this ability gets muddled up on the way by the hurts we experience as we grow up. As we saw, we all get wounded, even if unintentionally.

Inspired by the work of Learning Love Institute, I look at our past through the lens of the three main wounds which impact our relationships today: Abandonment, Engulfment and "I am not enough". And I show my clients how to do it too.

Part of the work is to look at our biography, to understand how these wounds appeared, as well as how they then manifest in our grown-up life.

But then a bigger piece is to learn how to deal with these wounds in the very present: in the discussion at the breakfast table, in the middle of a quarel, or as we come close in physical intimacy.

If we start realising what are the moments when we are under the influence of such a wound, and know what to do in those moments about it, our muddled vision gets cleared and we return to our natural capacity to create connection. It's easy then to find the "right" thing to do, the one that enhances intimacy and vibrancy, rather than separation and dullness.

Ultimately, it is not about becoming self-loving, vulnerable, good at communication or boundaries, authentic, self-confident - we are all good at all these things originally. Instead, it is about removing the obstacles which keep us from being “that”.

Once we start that process, we naturally start seeing our relationships becoming more harmonious, more alive, we start meeting people who suit our longing more and we are able to maintain and deepen intimacy in our life.