Before you start reading do one exercise. Take a piece of paper and write ten things you love the most in your life … Then watch the video below and continue reading to better understand self-love.
Did you write that you love yourself?
No? So it’s understood … or?
When you look in the mirror, do you want to see yourself or do you want to look away from the mirror… because what you see fills you with bitterness and discontent. If the latter is true, it means that you have problems within yourself. Maybe you don’t love yourself which means you are not satisfied with your
What does self-love mean and why is it important?
To love yourself means to have the following attitude towards yourself and to act in accordance with it – I am OK, I’m WORTHY and MY NEEDS ARE IMPORTANT.
To love yourself does not mean that you will hate others and that you do not need their love. On the opposite, just like we love the people around us in different ways – our children, our parents, our friends or colleagues – we can love both ourselves and others.
Self-love and love for others must exist in balance to have mental health. Any turning out of this balance – like if there is no love for others, or there is no love for ourselves meant a certain kind of problem that reduces the quality of your lives.
Many people think that to love yourself means to be selfish or narcissistic.
Self-love = selfishness, self-love = narcissism
This equation is not true at all.
Egoism means putting your needs and wishes in the center, looking at only personal benefit and neglecting others, as for others we do not care.
Narcissists believe that they have qualities that are exceptional and unrepeatable and above other people’s qualities.
The behavior of a narcissistic person is nothing but the reconstruction of what happened in childhood – in the same way as the father and mother treated the child: without complacency and with amazement to satisfy all wishes and needs.
How do you know you have self-love?
A person loves him/herself in the same way as his/her parents loved them in childhood (or some other significant figures who had been present in her life). So, childhood is the most important period for structuralize self-love.
When you tell someone I LOVE YOU, it means the same as telling them YOU ARE VERY IMPORTANT.
When the mother and the father express their love to the child in a verbal way, telling him I love you very often … and in an unverbled way – hugging him, kissing him gently and so on., they actually create his sense of personal worth.
Many parents are afraid they will spoil their child if they act this way. But there is a difference. Showing love to the child will not spoil him. You will spoil him if you let him all, you fulfill every wish, you admire for every simple thing or do things instead of your child, although it is able to finish them.
The same mistake is made by parents who criticize their children a lot and extend the criticism of the single unwanted behavior to the whole person, such as:
The child has not managed to solve the task and his parent says, “You’re stupid, you can not understand anything” instead of “You did not understand this task, I’ll explain it to you, you just need to practice a little more” or
The child spilled the juice,”You’re all fighting” instead of “It’s nothing terrible, just be a little more cautious.”
As a result, when this child grows up, he will continue to criticize himself as the parents criticize him and he will begin to believe that he is not good enough to love himself or to be loved by others.
The child should never doubt the love of his parents towards him. A parent should show love to his child even when he limits and disciplines him: showing patience, reasonableness, and love. In this way, they will open the way for developing his sense of personal worth, self-love, self-esteem, and self-confidence.
How can I practice self-love?
See the video again to remember how much self-love is important in your life!
If you do not know whether you love yourself, think back to your childhood and see if you felt loved by your parents or another close person. What kind of love did they give you? And you will find out immediately … that the love for yourself is the same.
But whatever it is, it can be cured.
What should you do?
The first step in developing love for your self is accepting that it is good and desirable for our mental health to love ourselves and that it is not egoistic or narcissistic.
The next step is to treat ourselves in the same way as treating someone we love. We have to realize that we are more than our behavior and we are allowed to fail, because we are not programmed robots but human beings.
Let’s take care of what makes us happy, and fight for ourselves and our needs. It’s not enough to just say “I love myself”. What creates the difference between I love and I do not love is the little things we do for ourselves every day.
Before falling asleep, try to recall how much love you gave towards yourself that day? Reward yourself for every little step. Be patient and persistent until you realize for yourself that you are worthy of love and that you deserve to receive and give love both to yourself and to others.
Read next: How to Stop Being Obsessed about the Past
