Learning to Love Ourselves

I often talk to clients about the impor­tance of “lov­ing our­selves.” They often nod their heads in agree­ment –after all, it sounds good — but, if the truth be told, most of us have no idea of how to go about doing this thing called “lov­ing our­selves,” and for many of us the whole idea sounds a bit ego­tis­ti­cal and ego­cen­tric besides.

So what does it mean to “love ourselves?”

To love our­selves does, in truth, mean to put our­selves at the top of our own pri­or­ity list. Loving our­selves means to under­stand that we are the ones in charge of the qual­ity of life we expe­ri­ence, and there­fore it is up to us to ini­ti­ate the life we want.

I have come to see that lov­ing our­selves IS the sin­gle most lov­ing thing we can do, not only for our­selves, but for those around us too, for if we don’t love our­selves enough to take care of our­selves, then there’s a good chance some­one else will have to take care of us instead! It’s that sim­ple. For this rea­son alone, I am a great believer in being “self-centered,” i.e. “cen­tered in ‘self.’ ”

So how do we go about lov­ing ourselves?

The pri­mary way we love our­selves is by assum­ing com­plete respon­si­bil­ity for our­selves, our thoughts and feel­ings, for our atti­tude, our health, AND our behavior.

To assume self-responsibility is to free our­selves from Vic­tim­hood. There is no greater act of friend­ship towards our­selves, or oth­ers, than to take respon­si­bil­ity for our­selves because it paves the way for per­sonal free­dom and happiness!

We are the only one who can live our own life. No one else can do that for us and we can’t live any­one else’s. This aware­ness seems fairly obvi­ous, and yet many of us seem to fail at truly get­ting it.

We seem to think instead, that if we take care of oth­ers long enough and good enough, then they will return the favor. That’s our idea of how it’s sup­posed to work! Only it doesn’t work like that at all. When we neglect our­selves to take care of oth­ers, nei­ther of us profits.

Usu­ally because we think it is self­ish to make choices based on what’s best for us, we tend, instead, to base our deci­sions on what oth­ers want, “need,” or on what we think they will approve of. But then we end up feel­ing unap­pre­ci­ated or resent­ful towards them when they don’t appre­ci­ate the sac­ri­fices we made for them (as if they “made” us do it). And we blame them when things don’t work out the way we think they should.

But when we “take care of” oth­ers at our own expense, we are not lov­ing our­selves. Instead, we uncon­sciously teach those we sac­ri­fice our needs for to treat us with the same lack of dis­dain and unim­por­tance with which we treat ourselves.We model to them how to dis­count and neglect us, so why, then, would we be sur­prised when they mis­treat us too?

Make a deci­sion to start treat­ing your­self bet­ter by lov­ing you first, and you may find that the love you feel inside for you over­flows into your rela­tion­ship with oth­ers in ways that are mutu­ally lov­ing to you both.

Remem­ber, when we do what is truly right for us, whether or not they agree with us, every­one wins!

Try it and see for yourself!

Bless­ings, Lynne