Learning to love yourself

Princess Diana once said: ‘Every one of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.’

Learning to love yourself is an important skill to cultivate because without loving yourself, you cannot seek to love others. When you hate yourself, you deny yourself so much. You tell yourself that you are undeserving of kindness and even of having your basic needs met. Not feeding yourself properly, not staying clean or living in a clean environment, and immersing yourself in distractions are all the hallmarks of someone who is struggling with self-love. Author and speaker Byron Katie said that she spent over a decade trapped in depression and self-loathing to the point where she was sleeping on the floor because she didn’t feel that she deserved to sleep in comfort. People do awful things to themselves when they hate themselves, things you would never dream of doing to anyone else. Why? Because no one has the capacity to hate anyone more than they hate themselves.

Your journey with yourself is a long one and unlike your spouse or even your children who can leave at any moment, you are with yourself for life. A lifetime of experiences that only you will experience, and every moment should be a teachable moment, good or bad. At the end of it, every experience should bring you closer to yourself. It should be an opportunity to learn more about you; your thoughts, your feelings, and your reactions. It should teach you how to handle yourself and understand yourself, as negative and ugly as this can be at times, taking ownership over your feelings and actions allows you to know yourself enough to figure out a) how to accept yourself and b) how to change it should you need to.

Total acceptance starts with identifying both your strengths and weaknesses. You then teach yourself to believe your good points and accept your bad points and love yourself anyway. Simple right? Sure, but it’s not easy. Everyone judges themselves harsher than they judge others and making yourself comfortable with your negative traits and loving yourself in spite of that takes time. It takes years of daily practice and effort to cultivate a loving relationship with yourself. The task may seem daunting, especially when you are starting from a very low place, but it is a task that must be undertaken. Many people are able to function without a shred of self-love. However, this is like being a bottom high addict. Despite keeping up appearances, you are still poisoning yourself. Little by little, day after day, as you slowly smother yourself with self-loathing, you will be setting yourself up for a big fall and for a state of potentially irreversible damage. This can have a profound impact on those around you. Self-loathing is visible to other people. Seeing someone slowly deteriorate through self-hatred can be too much for people to bear because just like watching a loved one slowly kill themselves through a heroin addiction, self-loathing will eat away at yourself and those around you. It is selfish and resistant to love from others. It’s like loving someone with a void inside of them…you can’t give love if you have no love for yourself.

The best place to start is with a plan of action. This is going to be a daily exercise. See it almost like studying for a degree…that lasts for the rest of your life. There is no end point to this, and it must be practiced every day. Here are 5 important things you can do to start loving yourself today:

1. Make a list of all your good and bad points – this can be very difficult to do at first. You may find that the list in the ‘good points’ section is significantly shorter than the points in the ‘bad’ section. Keep a journal and write this on the first page. The point is to force yourself to accept yourself completely. By learning to believe your good points and sitting comfortably with your bad points, you put yourself into the headspace of acceptance. There is nowhere to go so the only options you have are to either run from it (which causes the situation to get worse) or change it. But the first step to changing is acceptance. Accepting who you are in this very moment and learning to love the process of self-improvement is how you learn to get better and achieve self-love.

2. Do CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is really effective for building self-esteem. It requires you to work through it and as long as you stick with doing your homework, it can be transformative. I would recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for dummies and supplement this with counselling or psychotherapy sessions. Yes, therapy can be expensive and can take a long time but is worth it in the long run and can offer you a perspective that you never previously thought of. For more information on the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy on changing your mind, check out Ruth Parchment’s post on ‘The link between CBT and neuroplasticity’

3. Keep adding to your journal – daily journalling helps to alleviate stress and allows you to examine your thoughts and feelings objectively. It is a perfect way to keep up with your CBT homework and provides you with some comfort when you feel you have no one to talk to.

4. Keep your affirmations where you can see them every day – take a whiteboard marker and write on every mirror in your home reminders and affirmations. Use ‘I am’ and ‘I can’ statements like ‘I am a kind person’ and ‘I can achieve whatever I put my mind to’.

5. Help others – contrary to popular opinion, self-hatred is a more selfish mindset to have than self-love. People who hate themselves obsess about their perceived bad points and unintentionally push people away. When you love yourself, you don’t question it. It is evident in everything you do that you are not thinking about yourself because you don’t need to…you already know. Altruism is a wonderful antidote to self-loathing because you are willingly giving yourself over to a selfless act of helping others. This earns you appreciation, esteem and favor among others as well as a sense of pride and purpose within yourself.

There is only one of you and there is no escaping that. Your life is worth living and you are worth loving, the most important factor in that being you loving yourself. No one can provide the love and support you need day to day. No one can meet all of your needs. Expecting anyone to is relying on them as a life support system and will eventually burn them out. Only you can love you unconditionally. It starts today.