The Self-Love in "If We Don't Love Ourselves, Nobody Will"

Every now and then, I meet people who ask “How can I love myself more?”.

What they really want is a beautiful relationship, but they’ve come to see that they cannot have that unless they love themselves.

I cheer for them inside because I know, from my own experience, what a turnaround point that can be.

It might be a woman who is tired of dating men who would not commit to a relationship.

Or a man who has been loving and giving in his relationship, only to find himself rejected again and again.

Or simply someone who doesn’t seem to ever find a partner.

In my case, it was the moment I realised I dated one too many unavailable men.

I don’t know what it was exactly but at some point the coin dropped: “all this pain, all this rejection, all this distance from the one I love is happening because I don’t love myself… that makes me compromise and pine after him and kind of vibrate neediness, and that … hm, invites rejection”.

It was painful to see but also hopeful, because I started to feel I can do something about it, it is in my hands.

From that realisation until I could finally say “now I got it, I finally cracked this self-love thing” many years passed. And this was not only because it normally takes some time, but mostly because I got lost in misconceptions and misunderstandings about this – which can be many.

Because I don’t want this to happen to others (and also because this “self-love thing” is at the core of how I work with people on their relationships), I decided to put it on paper.

So if you are at such a point in your life, you are welcome to read on. You may gain precious years and actually start creating the love you want now.

Misconceptions

The first thing I assumed was that self-love was all about giving myself massages and bubble baths, eating healthy and taking care of my finances, taking breaks and having long walks in the park.

So I started with that… It did change something in me but over time I came to see: this is more like self-care, something we need in relationships but it is not the self-love we are looking for.

Later, I also confused self-love with the ability to set boundaries or to speak lovingly to myself – again, two very useful qualities in relationships but, if we are to be precise, they are more about having esteem for ourselves to say “no” when need be and having a sense a value about ourselves, enough to not attack ourselves in our inner chatter.

However, not close to the self-love in the famous adage “if you don’t love yourself, nobody will”.

So what is it?

The self-love we are looking for feels more like self-sufficiency, more like “I am enough in myself, I don’t need someone to make me feel whole, I am already whole”, “I don’t need to run for love, I don’t need to chase it, I don’t need to earn it or to fight for it either, love is here”.

When we come from this kind of self-love in a relationship, we don’t need our date or our parter, we simply love them. We don’t come from “I need you, I cannot live without you” but from “I love you, I am ok on my own and it’s nice to be together”. Can you feel the difference?

And can you see how the response we get from the other will be different?

Why many of us don’t feel like that?

I found it pretty illuminating and helpful to understand why we don’t feel like that.

You see, when we are born, we do have this “enough-ness” about ourselves.

How could we not?! In our mama’s belly, we always found comfort and nourishment and didn’t even have to ask for it. So we had no reason to doubt we deserved to be protected, and nourished, held and loved.

But then, as we landed on this earth, things started to happen. And they were not always smooth.

Because our parents have jobs and problems, limitations and their own life history.

If we are lucky, those are not too big and they don’t affect us much. Then what we receive from the adults in our life are mostly warm looks, gentle touch, loving words, their constant presence, our feelings are understood and accepted, we are encouraged, supported, soothed and nourished.

Then we get to grow up feeling trust - love is always there and the question of whether I am enough for it does not even arise. As adults, this feeling continues and we are less prone to become dependent on someone’s love, we don’t jump at any sign that our date or partner might not love us and we don’t take long periods of time to recover after a break-up.

On the outside, we have an air about us that we are ok on our own and a spaciousness which allows people to come and go, without feeling restricted (which actually makes them more inclined to get close).

That is if we are lucky… extremely lucky.

But many of us are not.

Most parents are not able to sustain a constant flow of love and support. Even if they love us, they are just people. And we, as children, are immensely sensitive.

In this sensitivity, we recognise and feel hurt by every angry look (no matter how short-lived), every harsh tone, criticism or comparison, any limit set with less than loving energy. It is even more so when our life is affected by divorce, physical or verbal punishment or if we were separated from our parents (like being in a hospital or sent for the summer to our grandparents).

We experience these situations as abandonment and what we feel at such a time is deep panic and mistrust. We start doubting ourselves (“I am not enough to be loved, I have to work for it, I have to fight for it”) or we start doubting the world (“love can disappear at any moment”, “love is hard to come by”).

As adults, on one hand, we crave connection and we unknowingly put pressure on others (dates, partners) for giving us that. On the other hand, when we do have connection, we are also prone to panic at any sign that it (the connection) might disappear.

We become the ones who, when the phone doesn’t ring, go into an abyss of fear. Also the ones who react quickly when our partner seems to disconnect from us in small ways (like being absorbed in work or in their thoughts, giving us less touch or attention, disagreeing with our tastes and so on). And the ones who find it extremely hard to get back on track after a break-up.

On the outside, we give out a vibe of pressuring – you need to come, you need to stay connected with me no matter what, you need to be there for me – and that is what actually pushes people away.

How do we get back to self-love?

Yes, the big question.

Now that we’ve seen that we had this quality, then we lost it ... and that this often creates rejection in our adult life, the question is: can we recover it?

Can we reach again this sense of self-sufficiency, of being whole in ourselves, of being relaxed about love?

And my answer is: definitely YES. Not only that we can, but it is a necessary journey for all of us if we want to have deeply connected, fulfilling, juicy relationships.

The first step is to acknowledge that what happened to us as children is not a little thing. All the small (and sometimes big) abandonments we went through made an impact on our deeply sensitive hearts and minds. In psychology, this is called the Abandonment Wound (one of the three big wounds responsible for how we relate with people as adults).

It is also good to realise that this impact stays with us and that later, as adults, we get this wound reactivated every time we feel even slightly neglected or rejected by someone, in dating or in our relationship.

And this is the gold!

Because while these moments are painful, they are also our doorways to recovery: as the band-aid is removed and the wound is out in the open, it can now heal.

Let’s take the example of dating.

We all know how it is when he says he’d call but then he doesn’t, or when she doesn’t respond to our texts.

This is an iconic moment when our abandonment wound gets reactivated, which means we will again feel panic, fear, insecurity (just as we felt as children when our parents were not there).

To protect ourselves from feeling that (the pain of the wound), we might tend to text him, check his social media accounts, invent an excuse to stop by his house, ask his friends about his whereabouts, call our girlfriends to analyse his behaviour and decide on a course of action and so on, text him again.

This is how we keep ourselves in the wounded state. And with that, in the insecurity, in the feeling that “I am not enough for love” and that “I need someone to make me feel whole”.

The move I suggest is different. If we want to start healing the abandonment wound, then we will need to do exactly the opposite.

We will stop any doing, any fixing, and fighting, any wanting the situation to be different. We drop everything and turn our whole attention to how we feel.

It is a courageous move, because how we feel is not great, right? There may be a lot of pain that we feel at that moment, mixed up with fear, with insecurity or confusion.

But our growth lies exactly in sitting with that discomfort. Giving all our attention to our breath in that moment, to the aching in the heart, to the shrunk stomach and in general to any body sensations we can pick up on.

The longer we can stay with our feelings and with our body, the bigger the chances for healing our abandonment wound.

I am not saying it is an easy task, but it is also not the most difficult thing you have ever done in your life either, I promise you. In the beginning you might manage only a minute or two, but then you will get the stamina to stay with this discomfort for longer.

I wish this for you, because I’d like you to have the experience of getting all the way through it, through the pain, through the panic. It is possible and it is beautiful. Because at the end of such an experience, you will find that the discomfort melts away slowly, slowly and leaves room to a feeling of peace, of solidity, of “I am enough in myself”.

That is your sign that healing has happened and that the quality of self-love has started to rebuild.

When we are in a relationship, the move is similar: from DOING and GIVING FOR LOVE, EARNING LOVE and FIGHTING FOR LOVE, to just sitting with the discomfort of not having it in the moment, with the feelings of pain and insecurity.

The situations which trigger the wound will be different though: he looks away, she dislikes our taste in music, he seems critical, she cuts us off, he doesn’t clean the dishes as he promised, she doesn’t listen to us or is attracted to another guy.

They seem small, but we all know they feel huge in the moment when they happen. That is our sign that abandonment resurfaced and we are called to uncover a little bit more of the self-love we lost as children.

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This is my take on self-love. It is a dear topic to me and I will write some more (also a course will come soon).

In the meantime, feel free to write me with any question you might have, I promise to write back.

With love,

Radha

Photo by Rafael Barros (Pexels)