When You Love Yourself

The act of simply loving someone through our actions, our intentions and our thoughts cause us to actually fall in love with the person. With time, you will find that you are, once more, truly in love with them. And, as usual, the opposite is true. If you act as though you hate or despise a person, you will grow to despise them. This is very common in abusive families. The other members of the family seeing this one individual being abused begin to join in too. The abusive family member has through their abusive and demeaning actions taught other members of the family to see the scapegoat as an object of scorn. This further reinforces the idea that the victim is not deserving of love but, instead, is only worthy of being abused. It is an opportunity to give your inner child the love you were not able to receive from your support network as a child. Gabor Maté, presents this belief in our worthlessness as an unconscious belief that we developed from our childhood trauma. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. You will have noticed that some people in life don’t seem to be negatively affected if they find out that somebody does not like them.

Courage Doesn't Always Roar

Perhaps they shrug and smile when a potential partner rejects their offer for a date. Or maybe they are able to stand up to their parents in a healthy and respectful manner when their parents overstep their boundaries. They do not try to get others to like them and will be perfectly fine knowing there are people who do not like them. Despite all the abuse you have gone through at the hands of your parents/family, you may still try hard every day to win their approval. You can’t do anything or make a decision if they do not unequivocally approve of it first. If a person you were considering romantically rejects you, you feel defeated and severely worthless and take months and maybe even years to recover from their rejection. You may have trouble respecting their decision and spend a lot of energy trying to change their mind just so you don’t have to feel worthless anymore. Instead of being true to who you are, you spend time studying people who are popular with others so you can emulate them. You hope that this will also make others like you and approve of you. If a person describes a characteristic about you that they don’t like, you spend considerable effort repressing it and hoping to change the person’s mind. Alternatively, you may just not try to ask anyone out or try to form close relationships with others because you tell yourself it is not worth it and you will not demean yourself only to be rejected anyway. The difference between the securely attached and insecurely attached person is clear! The securely attached person is free from the need to win people’s love, while the insecurely attached person is trapped in a hamster wheel, spinning faster and faster, trying to keep up with who you are supposed to be just so that you can be loved.

If It Makes You Feel Good

If you are the person who just never tries, you are also trapped in the hamster wheel without realizing it because you too cannot go anywhere else. So you numb your heart and repress your longing for human relationships by staying on the hamster wheel of repression. Feeding your ego at the expense of your heart is a trap. We all need love because we are all human. True love has a way of attracting itself and repelling the fakes. When you love yourself, you have very healthy boundaries in place and are able to weed the latter from your life. You are free from becoming trapped in a cycle, searching for love desperately. If you have a friend who constantly calls you horrible names no matter how many times you ask her to stop and yet you continue to support, care for and love her, it sends the message that you think you are only good for being a doormat. If a person was abusing a person who you loved dearly, you will not hesitate to call out the abuser to protect the person you love. You will also encourage this person you love to stay away from the abuser. What if the person you loved dearly was you? You will obviously stay away from the abuser unless they make an effort to change permanently and to be and do better. You are no longer allowing people to treat you with disrespect, and you are only making room in your life for people who also love themselves and treat others with respect.

Shadows and Tall Trees

These conditions are also the perfect antidote against your lifelong feelings of worthlessness, insecurity, vulnerability, guilt, shame and anxiety. Instead, you will assess why you allow an abusive person like that in your life in the first place. And rather than internalize their words, you cut off the problem at the source. That can either mean a serious talk with your partner about the behavior or even a breakup. Hence, you no longer require the validation of others. If they reject or abandon you, you do not internalize it because you love yourself too much. It doesn’t matter what they said, and it doesn’t matter what they did. They couldn’t see how amazing I was because they didn’t love themselves either. It encompasses all the ways in which you can love yourself. It teaches you that you are intrinsically good enough. You can regain the freedom and joy that abuse stole from you. When you have firm boundaries, you don’t give people a second chance to abuse you. You disallow people the ability to begin a cycle of abuse with you. That is to say, what will heal you physically will also heal you emotionally, spiritually and mentally.