There are many variations of love. We can express it with a kind word, a hug, a bouquet of flowers, or even a box of chocolate. But what about the way we love ourselves? It has a lot of ways as well, but not all of them are healthy.

Some people habitually think nice things about themselves (e.g. how beautiful, handsome, or lovely they are), whereas others criticise themselves all the time. In this post, I’m going to explain why all these examples can be categorised as love, what difference it makes when you take the lead in loving yourself and how you can do this with as little pain involved as possible.

The only person responsible for loving you

Many people think it’s others’ job to love them. Some of them enter a new relationship hoping that their new partner will love them more than their ex(es). Others do this simply because they don’t want to feel lonely. However, unless they are resolved, they carry all their hurts they experienced in the past into their new relationship.

I’ve had more than one client who got married young so that they could move away from their parents, keeping a distance from them. But their spouse eventually turned out to have the same sort of behaviour as their parents. (Or we can also say that they had the same love style.)

As for loneliness, that’s a skill, too: if you’re good at it, you can feel lonely even when you’re together with somebody. (And even in a room full of people if you’re very good at it!) It all boils down to this: if you want to experience being loved by others, you need to love yourself first.

Resistance to positive change

You’ve probably met people who are virtually always complaining about how bad it is for them, sharing their misery with others, and wallowing in it instead of asking for help. For these people, the constant practice of the same problems must have some advantages… even if they’re not aware of it. It’s possible that complaining gives them a sense of being in the centre of attention, or if their problems were gone, they would lose their identity and “bubble” that have kept them safe. So even though they say they don’t like it, they will continue doing it until they release the programs inside them that hold them back from making positive changes.

There’s love behind everything

Whatever you do to yourself or others, you do it out of love… even when it hurts. You may be following the rules of people that have been close to you. After all, we tend to imitate them as a way of showing that we love them. (And if we rejected them, that often wouldn’t feel good.)

As I’ve written earlier in one of my posts, we learn a lot from our parents both consciously and unconsciously: like sponges, we suck in information that form the basis of our programs operating us. Whether they have taught you “good” or “bad” things, they’ve done so out of love… they loved you and themselves the way they learned from somebody else.

You may also have “bad” experiences when someone got close to you and you got hurt, and since you don’t want history to repeat itself, you’d rather do something to push others away from you. So, the most common reason of doing bad things, even if they (seemingly) don’t serve you anymore, is to protect yourself from pain.

A wiser way of loving yourself

I’m going to say that you’re worthy of love, wonderful, and perfect just the way you are. Your past experiences and the hurts attached to them may prove you otherwise. If you let them go, consciously treat yourself nicely, think, breathe, move, and act as if my statement about you was true, you will become such a person.

Don’t wait until someone else proves that you’re loved. Be the one who makes the first step, today!

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. Henry Ford

Conclusion

If you want more love in your life, start with loving yourself differently! One of the best ways of doing so is making peace with what you have inside you. Then, people around you will treat you differently and you’ll experience more love coming from them.

And if they’ve ever done harm to you (either emotionally or physically), that was only about them, not you: they had their own problems, whatever they did was done out of love, and they expressed their love about others and themselves the best we they knew how.

You don’t have to act like them anymore. Choose cleverly, clean up what’s inside you, and be happy!

Update (14th July 2018): Stylistic improvements