Boundaries

If you search online for how to love yourself, you will see a lot about setting healthy boundaries for others in your life. In my experience, self-love comes before the setting of boundaries, and not after. I don't think boundaries are the stuff self-love is composed of, but a natural consequence of it. 

When you are in state of viewing yourself compassionately, you come to understand your own complexity, imperfection, and inconsistency with warmth and patience even as you work to improve. You understand that you will never be perfect, because no one is, and that you, like everyone else, are nevertheless lovable. When others then treat you with consistent patterns of disregard, lack of respect, or even hostility, you come to understand that they are acting out of their own wounds. They lack self-love. And because I too once lacked self-love, I understand it and feel true compassion for them. 

But when someone treats me poorly now, I know that their treatment of me will affect my ability to love myself if I accept it, and I refuse to accept anyone into my inner life who will compromise the warm self-regard that I have worked so hard to achieve. The door closes pretty firmly. That does not mean I do not have love for those people, and it also does not mean I would not accept them back into my life, in due time, if they show with their behavior and their words that they have changed. But until then, I love myself too much to go down with them. 

Self-love is a journey that everyone has to face on their own. It is only through doing so that genuine union with others becomes a possibility.