Many of us have never had the experience of being truly loved by another.
Many of us have grown up in situations where love was very much conditional.
Where we were trained to believe that we had to perform in some way, hide ourselves, change ourselves, become someone different, get rid of our emotions, or otherwise EARN love in order to receive the safety and comfort that we needed.
Many of us grew up in situations where even when we changed ourselves, performed or did whatever we thought we had to do to earn love, it still never came.
Many of us grew up in situations where what we believed to be love was actually not.
We were erased, ignored, made to feel like who we were was too much, not enough or otherwise in need of fixing - and we then grew into adults who took this narrative forward into life with us.
Many of us are still in a state where we believe that love comes at a cost.
We believe we aren’t worthy of being loved for who and what we are, because we’ve only ever had the experience of NOT being loved for who and what we are.
This is truly a painful reality, and for most of us it’s shaped our core beliefs about ourselves and it’s shaped the way we interact with others and the way we interact with ourselves.
The painful reality is that when we aren’t taught how to perceive healthy love in our childhoods, when we aren’t provided with a safe, secure connection where we know that no matter what happens we’re going to be supported and shown compassion - we learn that this is the way things are ‘supposed’ to be.
Which then informs how we’re going to treat ourselves and how we’re going to allow others to treat us for the rest of our lives - unless and until we do the hard work required to change our definitions of love from within, and then change how our nervous systems are programmed to seek love.
Changing our own inner belief system to one where we actually believe that we are fundamentally worthy of being seen, cared for and respected as we are, where we genuinely allow ourselves to receive love and care from others and where we are able to discern true, healthy love from painful, harmful dynamics is NOT easy work - and there’s no shortcut to making this happen.
The purpose of this article isn’t to provide a complete prescription for how to fully change your ‘love map’ and how to come into a place where you’re ready to fully live in a healthy space - but what I do want to offer is the idea that we can start to make our way towards having a healthy perception of love and our own worthiness by starting to shift how WE see ourselves and interact with ourselves.
We will likely need other tools, we will need other support, we will need other processes - and that’s totally reasonable and legitimate - AND if we can start from THIS foundation that I’m going to present in this article, we may find that the process can be easier than without this approach.
Deciding On Yourself Is Hard
It’s my belief that fundamentally, if we are going to permanently shift the way we perceive ourselves and the way we perceive our worthiness to be loved, we DO have to do the INNER work of learning to give ourselves permission to feel loveable.
From my experience, most of the time when we are in our adulthoods and are operating in an adult world where perfect love is never going to exist and where we are likely never going to find that ‘ideal’ external loving relationship/relationships that provide us with everything we need to feel perfectly safe, there’s never going to be enough external love to totally override our negative stories about being unworthy and being unlovable.
Those of us who grew up in situations where we weren’t loved, where we weren’t provided with that secure connection we needed, likely grew in either one of two ways:
- We became the kind of people who are constantly seeking external love, approval and validation, while at the same time continually finding ourselves attracted to people who mirror the lack of capacity to love us that was demonstrated by our caregivers growing up. We distrust love when it happens and assume that people are just ‘being nice’ or otherwise placating us, and are accustomed to being ignored, shamed, blamed, erased or otherwise told that we can’t be loved or accepted because of being flawed or not enough. We perpetually try to earn love and find that we constantly feel that others not loving us is justified. We tend to be extremely self critical and believe that the reason others treat us badly is because we are deserving of that bad treatment. We justify the shitty behavior of others by looking at ourselves and seeing that we aren’t perfect and thus are deserving of that treatment.
- We become hyper independent and walled off from others. We believe that love is only ever going to hurt so we are incredibly quick to sense or even OVER sense that we’re being rejected or abandoned and instead of being able to communicate about this or even see where we may be projecting, we shut down, wall off and reject others before they can reject us. We move from a place of assuming that others are going to let us down and are often deeply critical and judgemental of others and their flaws. We protect ourselves from harm by either not engaging with people, or only engaging with people who are going to let us down - as a kind of vicious cycle of proving to ourselves that love isn’t real and no one is capable of actually caring for us.
Some of us may notice that we flip-flop between the two - going through phases of intense people pleasing followed by phases where we clamp down and close ourselves off - only to repeat the cycle over and over again because we don’t know how to find a balance of interdependence and mutual love and respect. Which again, is NOT our fault, it’s what we grew up with most of the time and were trained to be and do.
Either way, we tend to live in a world where we believe that ALL people are like the people we grew up around.
We believe that ALL people are going to reject the things in us that our caregivers and other authority figures and peers rejected in us.
We believe that what others saw as bad about us are the things that everyone will always see as being bad about us, and we believe that the whole world has the same perspective as those we grew up around.
We believe that we are fundamentally flawed any time we aren’t able to hold ourselves ‘together’, any time we have a need, any time we aren’t able to be what others expect of us, any time we are scared or down or in need of support and reassurance. We believe we must constantly be providing something to the other person in order to be worthy of attention and care.
We are again, only attracted to people who mirror and mimic the kind of love we received in our childhoods - and when we encounter people who love differently - maybe even better and in healthier ways - we find ourselves NOT attracted to them and actually deeply distrusting of them and their intentions. We find that our BODIES respond to the unhealthy love of our childhoods in a way that makes us think ‘this is what love is supposed to be’ and that anything else feels foreign and wrong.
We circle around the same patterns of behavior in our own way of loving others and find that again, we have this self reinforcing cycle at play where the only people we are attracted to prove the beliefs we have about our unworthiness right, because those who love differently feel wrong, bad and foreign to us. Which leads to the perception that EVERYONE is the way our caregivers and other authority figures are and thus that our beliefs about our own worthiness MUST be actual fact - not a perception or story that could be challenged or questioned in any way.
It’s a very painful thing, and it’s especially painful because it paints our perception of self and love in a way that we DON’T choose, that then has a massive impact on our life experience.
So the VERY first thing I want to invite you to do on this path, when you are noticing that you didn’t receive REAL love and that this has shaped your perception of yourself and others in a way that has had an impact on how you relate to yourself and others is to allow yourself to have COMPASSION for you.
You are not doing this to yourself. You did not create your filters. You did not set your nervous system to be attracted to people who are going to hurt you or to putting up walls that prevent you from being loved how you want to be loved.
You didn’t do this to yourself.
You are not to blame.
You are not broken.
You’re allowed to be upset that you weren’t loved and that THIS is why you behave how you do.
Can you allow yourself to simply be upset at the past, upset at your programming, upset at your caregivers and upset with what happened to you, instead of blaming yourself or seeing yourself as fundamentally broken/unworthy of love?
Can you see that this is NOT a reflection of YOU - but a reflection of your EXPERIENCES and what you’ve been through?
Can you open up to the idea that while you did not CHOOSE this and are not choosing this, that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck in this forever?
YOU are not broken, you are not to blame and your situation is not your fault.
Can you let yourself start with JUST that?
Moving Into Permission To Love Yourself
From here, the next and most important step is going to be learning to give yourself permission to love YOU the way you weren’t loved by others.
Meaning, I’m not asking you to shift or change anything you do or don’t do in your external relationships.
I’m not asking you to change how you feel about what you think you deserve from other people.
I’m not asking you to set boundaries with anyone, to change how you relate to others or even to change what you expect from others in terms of their love and treatment of you.
We’re not going to focus on the externals, but rather we are going to focus on the one thing you have power over - which is how you interact with and respond to YOURSELF.
You see, in order to start to shift your love map to something healthier, in order to start to change the way you interact with others, what you’re attracted to, what your nervous system seeks out and so on, we need to start with shifting how YOU see YOURSELF.
How you treat yourself.
How you show up for yourself.
Because again, we can’t change the people around you, and we can’t, right now, change the way you interact with others because it’s likely that those patterns are going to take work to see, to understand, to have compassion for and then to slowly shift over time.
But what we CAN start to work on is the love you give YOURSELF permission to give to YOURSELF.
That is the one thing no one can take from you, no one can stop you from doing and no one can actually affect.
So again, although you did not decide what your love map was going to be, you did not decide what your filters and perception of love were going to be, you did not put yourself in a situation where love is hard, complicated and painful for you - you CAN start to choose to love yourself in a new way.
With this, I want you to understand that it is NOT going to be easy to shift the negative narratives you have about yourself.
It’s not going to be easy to start to give yourself compassion, to start giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, to start saying that you are allowed to love you and be nice to you even when you’re in pain, even when life is hard and even when others are not being kind or loving.
It’s not going to be something that the world reflects back to you and it’s not going to be something you necessarily see in the behaviors of others - at least not right away.
So don’t be surprised if there is a LOT of resistance to learning to be kind to yourself.
In fact, I would encourage you to actually EXPECT that it’s going to be hard, to expect that you are going to have parts of yourself that resist your love and to expect that you are going to have to work on learning to be kind to yourself. This way you’re not surprised when the work is the work.
Next, again, I want you to really understand that this is not a call for you to try to change the way you perceive OTHERS and their love.
Learning to be kind to yourself from within isn’t going to have the immediate effect of changing how others treat you or changing what you tolerate in terms of treatment from others. It’s not going to change the way your caregivers treat you, the way you interact with your friends and your partners, the ways you navigate your bosses and co-workers.
This isn’t about the outside world, and it’s not about trying to look for evidence that other people are safe or that you can start to see others in a new way. That’s way too much first thing out of the gate. You will learn those tools as you go forward with this path. That’s not where we start.
Rather, we need to just start with the inner dialogue. With how you treat and speak to and talk to yourself.
So with that, the ONE thing I want to invite you to start to do from now on is this:
Every morning when you wake up, I want to invite you to take a few moments to simply pause before you start your day. To close your eyes and place your hand over your heart, and to consider how you would speak to yourself, how you would carry yourself, how you would treat yourself if you believed yourself to be someone who was fundamentally good enough.
Just that.
Just start to consider what it would be like to live as though you ARE worthy of love right here, right now.
- How would you treat yourself when you’re hurting, if you believed you were worthy of love?
- How would you treat yourself when others are hurting you if you believed you were worthy of love?
- How would you treat yourself when you’re in a pattern that hurts if you believed you were worthy of love?
- How would you show up for your emotions if you believed you were worthy of love?
- How would you speak to yourself when you made a mistake if you believed you were worthy of love?
- How would you eat? Dress? Carry yourself? What kinds of things would you say or not say about yourself?
- How would it FEEL to believe that you are worthy of love, just as you are, right here right now?
That last one is the one I want you to focus on the most.
How would it FEEL to believe that you are worthy of love, just as you are, right here right now?
Can you start to practice that FEELING?
THAT is going to be the turning point.
Opening your mind to the possibility that your pain isn’t your fault, and opening yourself to actually pondering and considering what it would be like to FEEL your own love, and to treat yourself with love.
I know this sounds incredibly simplistic - and it is. Again this is a FIRST STEP on the path, it’s not the whole path. It’s not the whole journey.
It’s an inquiry that will lead you down a new path, a new route, a new way of being.
Opening up to this alternative perspective IS how we shift ourselves from the self hate path onto the self love path.
Because if we never take the time to CONSIDER a new path, we can’t eventually start to WALK a new path.
It all starts with our own minds being open to a new way.
So again, all I want you to do is practice CONSIDERING what it would FEEL like to believe you are worthy of love just as you are, and to practice considering how you would treat yourself if you believed yourself to be worthy of love just as you are.
Then you can start to see if you can eventually begin to act on those thoughts and feelings - and then see where the path leads you.
Open yourself to the path first.
THIS is the most important choice you will ever make in your life - so take it seriously.
From here, have a watch of the following videos to help you move forward more:
How To Get On The Path Of Self Love
Why Getting Upset At Caregivers Is So Important
Why You Can’t Hate Yourself Into A Better Life
Why Shame Blame And Guilt Are Lies
When Self Love Feels Dangerous/Bad/Wrong
You're Worthy Of Love RIGHT NOW
Start with this.
See how it feels.
Practice it for a while and see what doors it opens. Because it WILL lead you to seeing things you never saw before and to considering things you’ve never considered before.
This is a seed to plant - and the longer you water it, the more it will grow and nurture you.
What if you are worthy of love just as you are? What if you were to ACTUALLY take that idea seriously?
THIS is the new foundation for the rest of your life.
<3
Want more tools like this?
Check out The Mystery School Here
