Love Yourself

What do you think loving yourself is about? Not taking care of your feelings? Is that what loving people do with babies that need love? When babies feel tired, do we wake them up and play loud music? When they feel hungry, do we remove any bottles of milk close to them? These questions might sound silly, but we do these things to ourselves. When babies cry because they are in an uncomfortable position, unable to move themselves, do we allow them to suffer. No. Why? Why would you treat your feelings different from how you would treat a baby‟s feelings? Self-love is caring for your feelings.

Love is something we need from other people as a baby and something we need to give ourselves as an adult. Do not depend on someone else to love you as an adult. Someone else loving you as an adult will not be enough if you do not love yourself. Find love in yourself, and anything more you get will be “icing on the cake” so to speak. Do not say you are powerless to love yourself because then that will be exactly right. It will be your fault you are loveless, and you will deserve exactly what you get. This ma y sound offensive, but it is the perspective you need to acquire in order to stop your insatiable quest for love outside of yourself. I‟m on your side.

If you do not believe you can love yourself unless someone has loved you before, you are absolutely correct. That someone is yourself. Guess what . . . you were born loving yourself. It has already happened! Someone has loved you in your lifetime. You have no more excuses not to start loving yourself. Think of an infant you know. That infant does not deny its feelings. It is able to express its feelings. If it denied its feelings, it could not be cared for by its parents; for the parents use the infant‟s expression of feelings as a cue as to when and how to care for it. The infant could not be loved unless it was first capable of loving itself. It cries or gives some signal when it is hungry, and a parent feeds it. It smiles and giggles, and a parent encourages it. It shows an unhappy face when it needs to be held, and a parent picks it up and holds it. The baby feels, trusts, accepts, and expresses its feelings. It naturally loves itself, and you were that baby at one time.

Now, I‟m going to drill home some points that have been covered before so prepare your heart.

You have to be yourself in order to love yourself. If you are not being yourself, your self is not existing for you to love. If you do not acknowledge your feelings, you cannot be loving yourself. If you are not caring for your feelings, what are you caring for? Nothing else about you needs caring except for your feelings. Think about it. Does your intellect need caring? Do your job-skills need caring? Does your body need caring? What for? What would happen if you did not care for them? You would have certain feelings if you didn‟t care for your intellect, job-skills, or body, perhaps discontent, hunger, or pain. What is really happening when you take care of your intellect, job-skills, and body is that you are indirectly caring for your feelings. What else could it be? Nothing else about you has power to motivate you.

If you still think something besides your feelings needs to be cared for, why can‟t your feelings be that important? What hurt are you suppressing in which part of the fabric of suppression is to believe feelings can‟t be so important. If the previous comment made you feel disturbed, what hurt could it have pricked and so released? Do you have a fear that you do not love all of yourself? What does that mean to you?

Being yourself takes energy, but if the energy you expend is with things you love, you will get back energy from having taken care of yourself. As you fill yourself up with love, the empty feelings inside you become filled, making you feel whole. A whole person has more energy than a half person. You please yourself when yo u do what you love. You may be tired after pleasing yourself from the work which goes with that, but you will feel better. It is like when you are hungry and eat a big delicious dinner, making you feel satisfied but perhaps tired. Later on, the food from that dinner gives you energy. 

If you had not eaten, you would feel weak and unable to give all that you could. Pleasing yourself can give you more energy to continue doing things for yourself and others. 

If you find that you are lacking the energy to take care of yourself, you need to act more loving towards yourself. You have not been “eating” enough self-love to nourish yourself and give yourself energy. You are being depressed from past unloving actions toward yourself, disrupting your present energy. Take care of yourself, damn it! You may have entered into a destructive, vicious cycle in which held-in pain decreases your energy level so much that you do not feel energized to care for yourself. Old hurt has turned into anger directed towards yourself, depleting your energy. This anger makes you feel that you don't deserve to be loving towards yourself or that you are not worthy of taking care of yourself. You don‟t deserve that punishment. You are not bad. Stop doing what you have been doing, for it has not been working. Start doing things differently. The motivation to help you move will come from being honest and acknowledging that you are a good person. You have just been through experiences which produced painful feelings. Accept the painful feelings lying underneath the depressed state. This will motivate you to love yourself. Openly state the truth out loud to yourself, "I feel down, like I have no energy today. I must be feeling hurt. I wonder what hurt I'm feeling that I‟m not admitting?" Then allow the answer to come to you so relief can follow. If the answer does not come right away, continue to be consistently open with this approach, and the answer will come. 

Love your self that exists in each moment. This means you need to get in touch with your feelings in the moments they occur. You have to stop denying their existence and start feeling them. That is what feelings are for, to feel. Why do you think we call them feelings? You start loving yourself by asking yourself what feelings you have not been caring for. What feelings have you been pushing away? You care about these feelings which were so difficult to care for before. Whatever your feelings are, you care for them. Whether you are feeling happy, angry, depressed, guilty, anxious, or hurt, you care. You stop pushing them away and accept them. (The journal exercise discussed at the beginning of the book can help you become more in touch with your feelings.)

Knowing when a feeling first occurred helps you care for it. Consider the metaphor of a stranger. Because you don‟t know him, it difficult to care for him. As you get to know more about him, you are able to care for him at deeper levels, closer to the level of an intimate friendship. Make your self a friend not a stranger. The more you know about when you had a feeling, the more you can understand it and integrate it into yourself. When you know the time, you will know more of who or what was responsible for the feeling and in what way. If you don't know the time period of your feeling, you need to continue caring through finding approximately when it began.

Trust your feelings. Your feelings are not bad. Your choice of not expressing them is behaving badly towards yourself. If you cannot trust your own feelings, you cannot truly trust anyone. The greatest pain and punishment, no matter how much abuse you have experienced, was your choice to stop loving yourself as long as you have done. No one made that choice for you but yourself. When you took your self-love away, you became the abuser, which made it even more difficult to love yourself. Forgive yourself; you are not perfect; no one is. Grow, and start loving and trusting yourself

Even if your feelings are old, are out of context, seem crazy and foreign to you, you need to accept them as yours. Perhaps they seem distasteful to you . . . guess what, they are your feelings! You are the only one around to feel them and who is supposed to feel them. This is your chance to love yourself. Do you need to let yourself down again? Why? as punishment? Punishing yourself for having your feelings is not loving yourself. Punishment for your feelings is probably what the abuser did to you. If you feel you still need some punishment, "punish" yourself by facing the pain that comes with accepting painful feelings. It is easy to love and care for your comfortable feelings, now try caring for them all.

Caring for your feelings does not mean you need to keep them alive or dwell on them. Life will dish out plenty more pain to feel and deal with besides your present pain. Feel the pain, accept what you are feeling, and when the feeling has had enough time with you and desires to leave, allow it to leave. As you feel, give the feeling a name tag, "Oh, I'm feeling afraid of my old Mom's anger and rejection right now. That's what it is! Whew, I wasn‟t sure what was going on. I must not have felt it all as a kid, and so now it's coming back up for me to feel and grow." You might even add, "Boy, even though its painful, I'm glad I'm open enough to finally be able to experience it." In connecting these old feelings where they belong, they will make more sense. They will seem more familiar and justified, allowing you to trust and accept them with greater ease.

Labeling old hurt and anger where they belong will help keep you from overreacting in situations which bring those feelings up in the present. When you do find yourself overreacting to people you care for, declare the truth, "I'm sorry; I was feeling pain from when ______(past situation), and I projected it onto ______(present situation)." 

You may choose to experience old hurt and anger as if watching a movie, feeling along with the movie, but knowing you are not in that situation. You really are no longer in the situation of your past-self anyhow; you are just feeling the feelings of that past-self. Using this movie watching paradigm gives you more distance from the potency of your old feelings. The distance puts you more at ease so that you feel freer to feel the feelings to a greater extent. This may not sound like an authentic way to be yourself, but it is. Any replay of your past is no longer real except for the feelings you have from it. Similarly, a movie is not real except for the feelings you have as you watch it.

No matter how painful your feelings are from past horrible experiences, your feelings are exactly right. Your feelings are not horrible; the experiences that brought them on were horrible. Your feelings were just your self existing in those horrible situations, a self that cannot be denied. Love your self; it deserves to be loved, if not for just being you, then for what you had to go through. Embrace your feelings to release the destructive power that denying incurs.

In feeling the depths of your old feelings, you may become inspired to express yourself. This expression may consist of confronting someone who hurt you with your hurt, then releasing it so that you feel better. This process—making something positive out of something painful—is essential to integrating feelings. It is your job to find an expression that gives your painful feelings a positive impact in your life. Come! Your self is calling you. 

Take responsibility for the integration of your old feelings, and get to work. It is your life, not your mother‟s, your father‟s, or anybody else‟s who have hurt you. They are not responsible for you anymore, no matter what they did in the past. You are the one who has to live with yourself now.