How To Love Yourself

The frequent advice to "love yourself" or the maxim that "You can't love someone else until you love yourself" sound like wise advice, but ring hollow to those who have a hard time doing so. Negative self-talk can be so deeply embedded in the psyche, often from childhood, and frequently reinforced by the way that we view the world, that it becomes almost impossible to imagine what any other way of being would look like. So how do you actually learn to love yourself? Where do you start? And what does that even mean?

I'm sure that there are many approaches one could take, but I will share a bit of what seems to be working for me. At first, when I decided to actually try to love myself, I started by trying to stop saying mean things to myself in my head. That did not work; in fact, I think it made me do it even more often because I was focused on it. So my next thought was that I can't just remove something without replacing it with something else. So any time I started saying mean things to myself in my head, I would substitute the opposite. For example, if I caught myself saying, "I hate you" to myself in my head, I tried replacing it with, "I love you," often a beat later. That didn't really help either. It was too surface level.

Then I recalled another rhyming problem that I have dealt with. I am someone who historically has ignored my own emotions. They were so repressed that I stopped being able to feel them in my body-- to the point where I was disconnected from hunger and thirst cues until they became demanding. I started addressing this problem by becoming a detective of my own emotions. I would notice, midday, that I had a lingering, strong feeling. It could be anger, sadness, joy-- anything. And I would randomly notice the feeling and have no idea where it came from. Then I would have to think back, and there was always a really obvious trigger in the not-too-distant past.  It could have been a client interaction, frustration over a task, an interaction with someone. But I realized I would move on from an emotionally arousing experience without giving myself the time to process the associated emotions. If I did pay them any heed, it was to force them into submission to rationality and then quickly move on. But I wasn't really moving on-- my body was still processing the emotions, but it was hiding them from the view of my mind. My mind and body had become separate processing units for information that did not effecively communicate with each other. It took conscious mental will to bring myself back into union to allow myself to experience the world as a whole person. I had to start sitting with my emotions and letting myself feel them and think through them at the same time. That takes time. And I started having a lot of big realizations about myself that I was blocked from having when I was not in union with myself.

So I decided to apply that understanding to the negative self-talk problem. I wasn't sure what that would look like but I had a fuzzy notion that I was standing at the beggining of the right trail. I just knew I needed to involve my body and my mind in the process of unpacking what was happening, and I needed to listen to both. So instead of viewing those spontaneously negative self-statements as a problem to be eradicated with brute mental force, I started viewing them as an invitation toward broad curiousity. When such a statement would arise in my mind, I would start backtracking through the mental process that gave rise to it. What event triggered the self-criticism and what memories did it bring up? I realized that there was always both an external trigger and a memory that gave rise to the negative statements, often from many years ago. 

I focused on the memories of old behavior and statements I had made that I was ashamed of. I began imagining my younger self during those moments that I was still punishing myself for, in great detail. I remembered what I looked like, how young I was, what I was dealing with at the time, what my intentions had been, how much I did not know yet. And I developed compassion for that younger self. I used my imagination to sit with that prior version of me and comfort her. I treated her the way that I had always wished someone would have treated me. I have done this so many times now that I have met a thousand prior versions of me and loved them all. 

The hardest task of all is to love yourself in the present moment. But I find that the more I love my prior selves, the less difficult it is to love myself now. My self-talk is much kinder than it used to be, and I can imagine the compassion with which my own future self will regard me now.