“Self-love” is a big concept in today’s world. Most of us, particularly women, grow up with an understanding that self-love is a good thing and we need to somehow be able to love and respect ourselves, no matter what. It’s very much present in the mainstream cultural narrative: “You’ve gotta love yourself first before you give love to someone else”, “You are the love that you are seeking”, “Love yourself and others will love you” and all that jazz.
I was convinced that I should love myself many years before I consciously embarked on my healing journey, probably as early as in my teenage years. What I did not know, was that the concept of “self-love” was also one of my greatest enemies at the time. And in fact, I believe that for many people it IS an enemy, a destructive internal force, rather than an ally.
Image by Kat Jayne
Coming from a person, fully committed to self-love it may sound absurd. How can anything to do with love be harmful? But here is my story.
Up until just a few years ago, I was someone deeply ashamed of myself. I did not like myself, I found fault in everything I did, I had a terrible self-image, I would speak of myself badly, without a blink of an eye. I clearly sucked at self-love. At least that’s what I believed. This is what I could tell others. And I perceived my inability to love myself as yet another failure of mine. It was something that I was clearly supposed to do and I just had no clue how.
I tried my best. I read self-help books. I did affirmations. I did some trainings where the term would come up. I did try to force myself to love myself, standing in the mirror and saying the right words. Trying to fake it till I make it. But nothing changed. I still didn’t feel able to do that little thing called “self-love”. And I felt deficient. I couldn’t find my way in. I felt powerless. I felt stuck.
Image by Engin Akyurt
It didn’t help that people around me would often say: “Ah, if only you could love yourself”, “But why are you being so negative about yourself, you don’t have any reason?”, “Ksenia, you just need to love yourself more!”. These words would confirm for me that I am not coping and falling short. Again. I felt helpless and hopeless. Pathetic in my perceived disability.
So, what was wrong with that whole self-love thing? Well, many things. One was that aiming for self-love as a mental concept, I wasn’t quite sure what love ACTUALLY was. No one had taught me this. I did not have an embodied experience of it. Or rather, I knew love, but in its conditional form. When some parts of me were accepted, encouraged and praised, and others were rejected, shamed, suppressed and abandoned.
Those parts I had no idea how to welcome, let alone how to love. Actually, I was not even aware they were there. What I learnt to do was to reject, shame, suppress and abandon those parts when they would show up as my thoughts, feelings or behaviours. To judge them as “too much”, “too angry”, “too self-centred”, “too indecisive”, “too sad”, “too lonely”, ”too evil”, “too greedy”, “too passive”, “too negative”, “too fearful”, “too confused.”, “too lazy”, “too weak”, “too needy”, “too excited”, “too stupid”, “too self-conscious”. The list goes on and on and on.
I did not have an experience of those aspects of me being lovingly embraced by another being. So I was hiding them, from myself and even more so from others, until they sometimes would just suddenly jump out, without asking my permission. They would show up with force as actions or expressions that were not of my conscious choosing. They would hurt others or myself. And then, I (or the part of me I tended to associate with my self) would have to face the disastrous relational consequences. Which would then confirm my understanding of those unwanted aspects of me as evil and horrible, to be further suppressed. Giving love to them? Nonsense. How would that even look? I had no relational model for that. No wonder I was failing!
Another thing was that at the time, I was solidly operating from a “should” mindset. All of my life choices were very much driven by external expectations, whether it was in a form of conforming to these expectations or rebelling against them. If the culture and people around me said I needed to love myself, I had to try to comply. That was my way to belong, to be okay, to be normal, to be accepted.
Another “choice” was to rebel. “I hate myself, I want to die. I refuse to love myself and that makes me different and cool, deeper and better than you self-loving lot” - I lived with this story too, when I was in my late teens. I did not know any better.
I did not know there were other choices available. I had no idea that I was living in a “should mindset” (had no clue what the hell that is). And I was not aware that there are other, very different ways of approaching life. Free from ‘shoulds’, free from pressure, free from expectations and performance anxiety. I did not have it modelled to me.
And I didn’t yet discover the part of myself that knows how to love, nurture, and be unconditionally kind to myself, that is inherently free from any judgement. The sad and funny thing was that trying to “do” self-love from a place of a should (“I SHOULD love myself more”) was mission impossible. I would doomed to fail, as this was the wrong place to approach it from.
So I believe there is often a HUGE piece missing with all that self-love narrative. Actually, three things come to mind.
The understanding that self-love is something that most of us will need to cultivate, step-by-step, as a life-long practice, and it will take a lot of patience.
The understanding that we will need a lot of relational and mental support on that journey, we will need warm, caring and compassionate others to reflect our essence back to us, to show us what true love feels like and to hold us in the many instances of grieving, which are part and parcel of the self-love journey.
The understanding that in order to love ourselves, we will need to embark on a journey of getting to know ourselves, getting to know different parts of ourselves, which we may have no clue about. Including the part of ourselves that is wise and compassionate. Including the part of ourselves that is divine.
This is the introduction to the topic of self-love and understanding ourselves as highly complex beings, consisting of many unique parts, that are often in conflict with each other. In my next post, I will expand on the three missing pieces and share 3 KEYS to turning the concept of self-love into an ally.
P.s.: Much love on your self-love journey
Image by Evie Shaffer