Ten Step Towards Loving Yourself

Today is Valentine’s day: the day on which people traditionally express and celebrate their love for each other. But what about loving ourselves? Many people have had the idea of self-love beaten out of them through early life experiences, so here are Ten Steps Towards Loving Yourself:

1. Accept That It’s Possible

It’s going to be hard to love yourself if you think that you’re fundamentally unworthy of love or if you don’t think it’s even possible. Early life experiences such as having narcissistic emotionally unavailable parents or childhood bullying can leave us feeling unlovable. So the first step is to believe that you are lovable, and that you can love yourself.

2. Believe It’s Desirable

I remember an early childhood playground taunt was “He loves himself!”, as if it was somehow a bad thing. Many of us also receive family and religious conditioning that the object of our love should be another person, deity or savior; not ourselves. Other people’s insecurity can get triggered when we love ourselves, so we get taught that loving ourselves is bad or wrong in some way. We don’t want to upset anyone else. Insecure parents are particularly good at conditioning self-love out of us as they believe there won’t be enough love left for them.

3. Eliminate Negative Thoughts

Negative thoughts about ourselves is a fast way to diminish self-love. Even seemingly insignificant negative self-talk like thinking: “I’m so stupid” when we make a mistake gradually erodes our sense of self-respect. It’s hard to love someone you don’t respect. Break the habit by being relentless in challenging negative self-talk and replacing it with something positive. Whenever you find yourself thinking something negative, replace the thought with something positive like: “I got it wrong, but at least I had a go”.

4. Validate Yourself

Seeking external validation from other people is like installing a black hole to suck out our self-esteem. We become dependent on other people for our self-worth. Other people are fickle, and most people’s lives don’t work particularly well. Trying to keep such people happy will inevitably limit our own happiness and mean that our own life goes poorly too. Learn to validate yourself and stop looking for love and acceptance from other people. When we learn to validate ourselves, the irony is that we tend to end up getting the validation that we used to crave from other people; but we need to learn to meet our own need for acceptance and validation first.

5. Acknowledge Your Emotions

Our emotions are the deepest experience that we have of what is going on inside us and in our life. If we had parents who withheld their own emotions from us, or who punished us for expressing emotions that they were uncomfortable with, we may have learned to distrust, ignore and suppress our own emotions. Many schools and other institutions are also unsafe places for the free expression of emotion. Even just acknowledging how we feel can be a challenge when we haven’t been educated in emotional intelligence. We may lack the vocabulary or awareness to even identify our own emotions. It’s impossible to love ourselves until we acknowledge and accept what is going on inside us.

You need to love yourself if you want other people to love you too.

6. Express Your Feelings

Once we have acknowledged how we feel, the next step is to express it constructively. Emotions that aren’t expressed tend to linger in our nervous system and can build up over time until we become overwhelmed or explode in some way. This often leads to us later feeling ashamed of ourselves and how we acted. We need to express how we are feeling continually so that the pressure doesn’t build up inside us. Fear, sadness, anger, guilt, shame, peace, love and joy can all be expressed in ways that release the emotion and build connection and trust with other people. If it felt unsafe to express our feelings to another person when we were young, finding an empathic therapist or coach to work with can be invaluable for learning to acknowledge and express our emotions.

7. Heal Your Inner Child

The complicating factor in expressing our emotions is that any unhealed trauma from the past will magnify our emotional reaction to whatever is happening in the present moment. It’s hard to love ourselves when we are feeling overwhelmed by the emotion from a traumatic childhood event. Emotional abandonment causes a particularly insidious wound to our inner child. Healing childhood trauma so that we can be free of the pain from the past is essential for our own self-care and so that we can live the life that we were meant to live as an adult.

8. Forgive Your Parents

Our parents’ love for us is the model on which our own self-love is based. If we had parents who were attentive, emotionally attuned and empathic, we would have learned to love ourselves innately. On the other hand, if we had parents who were emotionally neglectful, narcissistic and dismissive of our feelings, that sets us up to craving emotional validation from anyone willing to do so, so that we can feel loved. We become needy, dependent adults and prone to easy manipulation by others. Continually seeking emotional validation from our parents keeps us stuck in a state of emotional infancy and prevents us ever developing true independent adult self-love. Once we learn to acknowledge, express and heal our feelings and those of our wounded inner child, we set ourselves free by forgiving the parents who failed to teach us self-love effectively in the first place.

9. Forgive Yourself

Forgiving other people is one thing, but forgiving ourselves can be a whole other challenge. Life is complex and fraught with challenges and inconsistencies. The best choices are sometimes only obvious in hindsight; and even then, often not entirely clear. We make mistakes despite the best of intentions. Sometimes even our intentions aren’t the best. Religious traditions invariably have a way of offering forgiveness, but it is often based on some external entity or some moral bargaining and sometimes the process creates more guilt and shame than it resolves. Ultimately if we are to learn to love ourselves, we need to be able to forgive ourselves and take full responsibility for the consequences of our actions and the results that we get in life.

10. Work Towards Your Mission

It’s hard to love ourselves if all we do is navel gaze, watch TV or play video games all day. We need to be out there, engaged in life and working towards some kind of mission or purpose for ourselves and our lives. Have a reason to get out of bed in the morning and to look after yourself physically. Life has plenty of ups and downs to deal with but knowing that you’re heading somewhere meaningful and taking practical action towards doing what you love every day reinforces the other mental and emotional strategies here. Over time, we learn to trust and love ourselves as we work towards our goals and in the process grow into the best version of us that we can be.