Is taking care of your nails, dressing nice, taking bubble baths self-love? I would not say that someone who does all that necessarily loves themselves.
I would say it’s self-care, which is only a layer of Self-love. Just like an onion which has layers to peel, I consider Self-love working the same way. So, what is the definition of Self-love?” Love of self”.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I work with a range of mental health challenges and I could say in one word that it is to, help/guide my clients to loving themselves profoundly and reaching deep Self Love.
Wanting to create better relationships is self-love, wanting to work on decreasing and managing your negative thoughts or anxiety is self-love. Working on setting and upholding boundaries is Self-love. In therapy we work on making mental health and self-growth the number one priority and consequently help clients find true happiness and take on life’s different challenges without becoming bitter or hopeless but instead come out of challenges as if Phoenix rising from the ashes stronger and more beautiful than ever.
Self-Love is a process that begins with approving of ourselves. Self -Love is to completely see ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses and doing our best to be the most magnificent best friend to ourselves. This does not always come easy and needs intentional work on many levels.
Self-Love is also about having the courage and embracing our vulnerability to some extent.
To be able to reflect on who you are and who you want to be and be persistent enough to put in the work it requires. The result of elevated Self-Love is than that we can be our authentic selves.
In this article my aim is to try to operationalize it to some extent, so you can easier do a check in and see which layer you need to tend to or work on to increase and deepen your level of Self-love and to be consistent in this great but essential process in life.
Taking care of your needs without sacrificing your wellbeing to people please and upholding boundaries
Early in life some of us get reinforced in the behaviours that has us always saying yes because we feel obligated.
Saying No seems too difficult or leaves us with feelings of guilt. Often people pleasing starts as parent pleasing and with time people pleasing can also lead to betraying our own needs, sacrificing our own wellbeing in order to be accepted and loved.
Saying No to others means saying yes to you. It’s not always that we are bad at having boundaries, sometimes it is more about not letting others stretch our boundaries, especially in close relationships where it’s much easier to do that in the name of love.
Deciding not to engage in your worrying thoughts or Self-critical dialogs/Thoughts
Let me clarify this one, it’s not really about forcing yourself to think positive thoughts, because let’s face it as human beings we have loads of thoughts and sometimes they are of pretty negative content. Instead, it’s about choosing to let those thoughts come and go without focusing on them and dwelling on them, this way you choose to love yourself so deeply that you don’t let these thoughts take over or be anything other than thoughts. I know a lot of you are thinking easier said than done but in the time we are living now there are evidence based therapies for exactly this. The one I would recommend is without a doubt Metacognitive therapy.
Taking help from another when the need surfaces, Ex seek therapy, ask a friend to help you and so on
How come this has to do with self-love you may wonder, well taking a lending hand from someone or asking someone to do something for you is really saying I am worthy of someone else taking the time to help me. It´s allowing yourself to receive help in order to make life less hard on yourself.
Becoming emotionally available
I know this one may seem like a surprise, and I would say this one really needs an article for itself, because it’s a big topic. But being emotionally available, being able to hold space for your own feelings and being in contact with your own emotions is such a big part of loving yourself. If you truly love yourself, you also have an inner self-trust that can help you to be emotionally available, that is to be able to feel deeply, being able to sit with challenging feelings both your own and others without minimizing, hiding or getting into avoidance behaviour. An important reminder about being emotionally available is that it’s not something you are or aren’t. This can vary depending on who we are interacting with and on our level of self-love among other things.
Walking away from people who don’t value you, manipulate you or disrespects you
We all have at some point in life met people who we thought had our best interests in mind only to notice that in their company we feel drained, we get sad more often than not and we give more than we receive. That is really the time to pause and revaluate why we keep on interacting and don’t walk away cause loving ourselves truly means that no matter how difficult it may be, we must walk away from those people.
Giving yourself compassion and love when you need it the most
It’s pretty easy to be satisfied with ourselves and feel good about ourselves when we have done things we feel proud of or when others validate us the most, but when we don’t think or feel we have accomplished things to feel proud of or feel we are achieving our goals the way we expect from ourselves, that’s when we need self-compassion the most. That’s when we need to say ” it’s ok dear, you did your best today” or ” I approve of you and love you no matter what”.
Forgiving yourself for past or current mistakes
I know, this one is a tough one depending on the mistake but also the one that can ruin us for a lifetime if we don’t take it seriously. As much as we want to, we can not change our past and erase mistakes done in the past. The only thing we can do is to stop beating ourselves up and try to learn from the lessons and wisdom we gained from them. When you reach a point where you decide to love yourself more than hating the version of you that didn’t manage to do better in the past then you have elevated your self-love one more step.
