Why Shifting To The Self Love Path Is SO Hard

Hello Beautiful!

For the next three weeks, I'm going to be sharing some of my thoughts around WHY switching to the self love path can be so difficult.

For so many of us, the idea of having compassion for ourselves, looking for our own innocence, finding where we are doing the best we can with what we know, figuring out what we need and to get those needs met feels intuitively right. It feels like a welcome break from the constant feelings of failure, not being good enough, pain and struggle that comes with the self improvement path - the path that's constantly having us look at where we're not good enough and need to improve.

This path feels intuitively right - until we actually attempt it.

Then, for some reason, we find that our resistance to this new way of thinking/relating to ourselves is SO loud, that our fear of the path of self love is so all consuming and our reasons to avoid being nice to ourselves come up in such a strong and defined way that we recoil from moving forward on the path.

Why does this happen?

Why do we feel like we are unworthy of love?

Why do we feel like this path of self love may be ok for others, but if WE were to do it that we would fall into debauchery and ruin our lives and the lives of those we love?

Why do our shame and guilt stories feel SO real?

Why do we feel like we will just be letting ourselves stay horrible forever if we love ourselves?

Why do we fear that if we love ourselves we will never become who we are supposed to be?

Why do we feel like if we love ourselves we will be stuck in whatever pain we're currently in forever?

Why do we resist self love so much?

That's what we're going to look at.

Our resistance to self love is deep and it's there for a reason. The more we can understand WHY we resist it, the more we can counteract the stories that are telling us that to love ourselves is wrong and dangerous - because we will be able to see THROUGH what we 'think' is happening to what is ACTUALLY happening. We will be able to confront our conditioning in a true and real way - and in THIS we are going to be able to make progress.

When we don't understand WHY it's so hard to love ourselves, and when we don't take the resistance that's GOING TO BE THERE into account - we're not going to be empowered to overcome the resistance. This information is true power.

It's 100% normal to resist self love, and to feel like you can't do it/shouldn't do it.

When you can see this resistance for where it's rooted, you can work with it, loving yourself safe so you can take steps forward.

Let's explore all of this together, shall we?

Shifting To Self Love SEEMS Like Such A Great Idea - Until We Try It:

The idea of switching from the self improvement path to the self love path may seem simple at face value.

It might sound like it should be SO easy to adjust from a stance of self improvement/working from a place of assuming that who and what we are right now is somehow lacking, incomplete, broken and in need of fixing, to one where we are moving from assuming innocence in ourselves.

To think that we could give up the idea that we are broken, shameful, to blame for all of our pain and past transgressions, that we could discover that there’s GOODNESS in all of the parts of ourselves - even those parts that are currently causing harm - may sound ideal.

It may sound like an obvious ‘yes’ in the sense of who WOULDN’T want to give up all that shame, blame, guilt and trying to fix in exchange for a life perspective where we feel like we’re inherently good enough?

On an intuitive level, I think that the self love path is something we all want to embrace.

The path where we believe that we are fundamentally good, and that all parts of self that may be hurting or causing harm, that may be confused and lost, that may be stuck or stagnant simply need to be nourished and nurtured into the light.

The path where we look at our pasts not with regret but with the eyes of compassion, looking to see the innocent reasons for us having been who we were/doing what we did.

The path where we look at our current scapegoats, coping mechanisms, self sabotage, addictions and other ‘bad’ behaviors not as signs of weakness or as proof that we are irredeemable but rather as tools we are currently using to survive in the best way we know how.

The path where we look to GROW all parts of ourselves through discovering needs and desires going unmet.

Again, who wouldn’t want to hold the foundational belief that everything we are is good?

But the reality of this?

Most will find that when we start attempting to be gentle with ourselves, when we start looking for innocence and when we begin considering that we may not be bad fundamentally - we are hit with a HUGE wave of internal (and sometimes external) backlash that convinces most of us to stay on the self abandonment/fixing train.

For most of us, when we start moving in the direction of true self love, we find that the voice in our heads starts to shriek. We start having thoughts like:

“Who do you think you are to love yourself? You’re not special, why would you think you’re deserving of love when you act so badly? Sure, everyone else may be innocent and good deep down, but me? No. No way. I’m terrible. Look at my actions. Look at how I sabotage myself. Look at how I can’t get my shit together. Look how lazy I am. How unhealthy. How undisciplined. Look at how little I’ve accomplished. Look at all the ways I hurt myself and others. There couldn’t possibly be goodness in my behavior - look at the chaos! Again, others may be deserving of love, but I KNOW myself, I know myself deep down, and I'm just messing up my own life. If I were to love myself, if I were to have compassion for all the parts of me - what would happen? I would clearly spiral into total chaos. That would be a life of total delusion. That would mean that I lose touch with actual reality, where I walk around believing I'm fine and great when I'm actually hurting myself and others. If I were to love myself, if I were to make myself safe, if I were to accept these destructive parts of myself - wouldn’t that mean I’d have no motivation to change? So I’d just stay horrible and destructive forever? I'd just stay in PAIN forever? Because how I am now, HURTS. If I love the parts of myself that are in pain and stop looking for what’s wrong - again won’t that mean I just stay stuck in pain forever? Won’t that mean I stop trying to figure out what’s wrong? If I have compassion for myself, isn’t that just letting myself off the hook? If I don’t keep trying to fix and change myself, I’ll never be better, and then I'll end up being alone forever. No one will love me this way. No one will want to stay in a relationship with me if I stay how I am. I have to change. How could I believe that I’m fundamentally good when I do all these horrible things? When I think all these horrible thoughts? This is dangerous. If we all believed we were good enough and innocent, wouldn’t that mean everyone would just feel free to go around murdering and raping and destroying the planet? Without guilt and shame, this world would be WORSE than it is. This may be fine for others, but certainly not for me. I know myself. I know how imperfect I am. I know how hopeless I am. I know how bad and shameful I am. Even when I try to love myself, it just FEELS so TERRIBLE and all the evidence for how I am undeserving of love comes to the surface loud and clear and I can’t ignore it. It’s all true, what others have thought about me, what others say about me, what I think about myself. I have to change. I have to reject these parts. I have to get rid of my flaws. I have to fix myself. I have to change my brain and my body. Otherwise I will be terrible forever.”

Any of the above sound familiar?

The fear that if we love ourselves we will be giving ourselves permission to stay stuck in harmful and painful habits forever, that we will be denying the ‘reality’ of how bad we are and will slip into a life of delusion, that we then won’t have any motivation to change the things in our lives that are painful and thus will stay stuck in pain forever, that we will then be giving ourselves permission to cause harm to ourselves and others and that we will spiral into the WORST versions of ourselves - losing all hope of love and connection in the process - is a pretty universal one. 

If these thoughts sound familiar to you, please know that I'm not a mind reader. I'm not in your head. Rather, these thoughts are simply NORMAL. Pretty universal. We all think and feel this way about ourselves. 

You're not the one person who doesn't deserve love, and who will spiral into total chaos if you love yourself. You're not the one person for which all of these thoughts are true. You're not the exception - even if it really feels like you are right now, and makes logical sense to you that you are.

 

We All Believe On Some Level That Self Love Will Be Destructive:

The idea that self love - ie fully loving and accepting the person that we are RIGHT NOW and looking for innocence - is going to lead to total self annihilation is the number one rebuttal I hear in this self love work.

The fear that if we love ourselves for who and what we are right now that we will spiral into self destruction and lose any hope of being loved in the process IS the thing that holds most of us back from ever attempting to walk this path. The fact that when we attempt to love who and what we are right now, our consciousness fully shifts to all the reasons why we are horrible, hopeless and in need of fixing, and in this process we FEEL like all those horrible parts of self are TRULY REAL and the reason we can’t be happy is one of the most universal experiences - yet it feels like it’s only true for us.

I want you to know that if this is your experience - it’s not because any of these thoughts are TRUE.

It’s not because any of the evidence you have for your irredeemable self is good evidence that you should avoid loving yourself.

It’s not because you’re the one person on the planet who is actually undeserving of love. It’s not because it’s true that if you love the you that exists right now you’ll be doomed to pain, destruction and loneliness for the rest of your life.

I know that it can really FEEL like this is true - the body can cease up, we feel that rush of anxiety/adrenaline/fear, we can feel that FAMILIAR feeling of shame/guilt/fear cropping up, attempting to keep us in line.

We can really feel like if others TRULY knew us, if they knew us the way WE know ourselves, it would be obvious that we are horrible.

It’s not because anything that anyone has ever said about your inadequacy, your shamefulness, your guilt and your imperfections is actually correct.

It’s not because you will actually end up alone and totally delusional if you choose to accept who and what you are.

Rather, you’ve been conditioned to think this way. You’ve got some natural instincts that are kicking in to try to protect you from the perceived threat of not changing. You’ve got generations of programming running in your mind that SOUNDS like you right now - but is actually something you’ve been TRAINED to think and believe vs. being something that’s actually TRUE.

You are afraid to love yourself because you’ve been programmed to fear loving yourself.

You have objections to loving who and what you are not because you SHOULD object to loving who and what you are, but because culture has been capitalizing on the natural inclination to blame and shame yourself when in pain and thus has been manipulating this part of you for your entire life.

What you feel when you try to love yourself is not actual evidence that you shouldn’t love yourself, nor is it actual evidence of your terribleness.

It’s a RESULT of a combination of things:

We live in a world that has convinced us so deeply that we are wrong, bad, shameful and in need of fixing. That flat out told us that to truly consider being good enough, we can feel like we’re doing something deeply WRONG. We’ve been so deeply conditioned by culture, families, institutions and other authority figures that to believe in our inherent goodness is to be blind to the REALITY of our faults and inadequacies - and if we live like we are good enough we will have ‘big heads’, be delusional, will hurt others and that all of this will lead to us never being loved or accepted.

Most Western religions are based on the narrative that we are fundamentally ‘fallen’ or ‘sinful’ and that we must spend the rest of our lives fighting against the broken and evil parts of ourselves and that we need some sort of savior/redeemer to rescue us from our inherently flawed nature.

Most of Western CULTURE is based around the idea that we are never doing enough, achieving enough, owning enough or loved enough - and this is how most products are marketed to us. Capitalism tells us on a daily basis that the reason we all feel so unhappy, unfulfilled, disconnected, inadequate, lonely and small is due to the fact that we aren’t smart enough, famous enough, rich enough, that we don’t have the right things, the right body, the right social life - and that if we could just ASSUME and CONSUME all the right things at the right time, while also PRODUCING and OFFERING more/better/more aligned offerings to the world, that we would finally be ‘good enough’ - except for the fact that what’s ‘good enough’ CONSTANTLY changes on purpose.

We live in a culture that constantly shifts the goal post for what is acceptable and worthy very intentionally so that we constantly have a reason to feel like we’re suffering due to something lacking in us. We’re told over and over again that to accept ourselves would be the worst thing ever, because it would make us lazy, unmotivated and destructive - making sure that we’re ever primed to obey authority and consume the next product. Self help, personal growth and spirituality materials all centre around ‘fixing’ the ‘flaw’ that is your love life, your body, your ego, your money situation, your location or whatever your particular ‘pain point is’ - telling you that if you just took enough responsibility, tried harder, worked harder, bought the next program and did the next level retreat - that you too could FINALLY transcend/fix whatever is broken about you - and the fact that you haven’t yet been able to ‘overcome’ your challenges is proof that you need more fixing.

Even non-westernized spiritual practices revolve around the idea that we are fundamentally disconnected from Source via our minds, our egos, our thoughts, our poor practices when it comes to interacting with nature and a whole host of other things. Sometimes we're told that we are inherently good, and we just have to get rid of the bad parts/untrue parts of self in order to access this original goodness - but the message that there's something inherently flawed about who and what we are is still there.

All of these materials tell us that we're broken based on the evidence that we're in pain/causing destruction. All of these theories rely upon the fundamental idea that if we were really being who we are supposed to be, that we would be perfectly happy and in alignment with nature/reality at all times - and therefore if we suffer, if we are hurting, if life is hard or if we aren't totally in harmony with all things - that we are broken. We are SUPPOSED to be perfect and living in a state of total peace at all times, thus if we aren't - we need fixing.

And since all of us have pain - we all fit into the category of not good enough.

The bottom line is, no matter where you look - whether that be to secular values and rules or to most kinds of spiritual/self help materials - the message is the same - you're broken and your problems and pain are a sign that your broken. 

We have childhood instincts to blame ourselves for pain thinking that if we can just figure out how we are causing it, this will be our ticket to freedom from it. Remember, in our childhoods we had no true autonomy in our lives. We didn’t have the cognitive capacity to TRULY identify where our pain/pleasures were coming from and we were in a codependent relationship with our caregivers where it looked and felt to us like they had access to ALL THINGS - and thus if they weren’t giving us what we wanted/needed, if they were rejecting us, if they were withholding attention, if they disapproved of a part of us or if in any way they weren’t giving us what we needed to be happy - we understood this to mean that we were doing something wrong and had to change in order to feel better. The ONLY thing we had control over was our own behavior.

We couldn't get food for ourselves when we were hungry.

We couldn’t regulate ourselves in our big emotions.

We couldn't express ourselves in our truth if it was rejected by our caregivers.

We didn't have the ability to curate our lives to fit what we needed - we had to fit into what the rules were in hopes that this would lead to us getting what we needed by our all knowing (to us) caregivers.

Next, from our perspective as a child being loved and approved of by our caregivers WAS survival, and being rejected by them was death. This is because again, we depended upon them for EVERYTHING.

Thus if they rejected us - we felt that we would be abandoned forever and that this would mean never getting our needs met.

We perceived that being loved and accepted WAS the way to being provided for - and thus we started to develop existential fear of parts of ourselves that were rejected/not embraced or acknowledged by our caregivers, as well as trying to conform our personalities and ways of being to the expectations of our caregivers, even when doing so felt terrible to us.

We couldn’t approve of parts of ourselves that were being rejected - because again we relied upon our caregivers for everything. If they rejected us, this was an existential threat to us at the time - and thus we felt we had to reject any part of self that they rejected - otherwise we would be doomed to going without what we needed.

If they rejected us, we felt we would die.

I'm repeating this point because it's such a deep thing that most of us don't see it - we don't see how we are still driven by our perceived need for approval within the structure of our early childhood and this is why we do so many of the things we do in our adulthood that don't seem to make any sense - and we don't see how we're living as though we need the WORLD to approve of us in order to survive either. It just makes sense to us that we need to be something that we aren't or not be something that we are, and we are in constant conflict with ourselves/in a state of having to cope with/numb the pain that comes with not being free to be our true selves.

If there was a part of self that felt good doing something or being something that got us rejected, we had to develop shame and guilt around these parts in order to override that pleasurable feeling of being true to self, so that we would conform to what was being expected of us from our caregivers - thus keeping ourselves SAFE.

If there was pain in doing what was expected, we had to develop shame and guilt over the parts that didn’t want to participate in what we were being told to participate in because again, in our childhood state being approved of was survival. Forcing ourselves to do what was expected felt like something we HAD to do to survive.

We were also so young and impressionable that we had no idea that there could be any other way of life than the one our caregivers and other authority figures were showing us. We didn’t know that just because our parents didn’t understand a part of us that this didn’t mean ALL of society didn’t understand. We didn’t realize that if the religion of our caregivers didn’t resonate with us, that there were millions of other options that might. We didn’t realize that what they were teaching us as THE WAY in any area of our lives wasn’t necessarily THE WAY. They were giving us the rulebook for life - they were giving us our base understandings of what we had to do and be, and what we couldn’t do and be in order to survive. What they were teaching us as right and wrong, to us, were the ONLY options available. We didn’t know that our caregivers were working with specific beliefs and patterns that may be wrong.

When we first started getting exposed to other ways of life, it was likely that we were being told that those other ways were WRONG, bad, shameful and harmful. We were being indoctrinated into belief systems and patterns that, to us, were just REALITY. 

As we grew, most of us never really learned that we can now in adulthood be rejected, be abandoned, not be understood and we can STILL get our needs met.

Most of us never recovered from the trauma of feeling so vulnerable to the likes/dislikes and rules of others.

Most of us haven’t been able to truly look at our conditioning, all the rules and customs and assumptions for what’s right and wrong - what we must do and be and mustn’t do and be - because that would mean questioning our foundations.

That would mean having to venture into the land of not knowing what’s right and wrong for a while - and THAT feels like total threat and panic to the nervous system.

We don’t really WANT to question our foundations - even if doing so would lead to a life of SO MUCH freedom - because that would mean going through a period of not knowing and feeling like we have no foundations AND it would mean going AGAINST our nervous system programs that are trying to keep us safe - which will feel like DEATH.

Most of us are stuck in the patterns we were handed because they feel most FAMILIAR to our nervous system. Because we were trained from birth that these were the right ways to be and the only way to survive. These patterns hurt, and lead us to feeling unfulfilled and to us needing to cope, numb and stimulate ourselves in order to survive - and then we look at those coping, numbing and feelings of dissatisfaction/anxiety/inability to thrive in the systems as flaws in ourselves rather than being the RESULTS of not being able to figure out a life that actually works for who we ARE - because again that would counter our nervous system programs and that feels like death to us!

We have guilt and shame around parts that were misunderstood or rejected as a protective mechanism - the more we could conform to what was expected of us, the safer we felt. The more we could align with what we were conditioned to believe about the world, the more we feel we have the ANSWERS when the unknown or challenge comes up. Our bodies jump in to remind us of our terrible nature/to force us back into alignment with our conditioning purely because our bodies believe this is what is REQUIRED to survive. Those shame and guilt stories were engineered within us to keep us from being rejected, and thus to keep us alive when we depended upon our caregivers for everything - provision and answers for how to face challenges.

We are stuck in loops of pain and shame, never able to understand why because our conditioning and our nervous systems says what we were taught was right and that we are wrong if we can't fit in. That not fitting in is death. Even if we've tried to rebel - if we haven't taken our nervous systems with us, we will CONSTANTLY feel like we're doing life wrong - even if we're totally aligned with our true selves - because our BODIES still think we are putting ourselves at risk by not conforming.

It hurts to conform and this leads to addiction, coping and self sabotage. It hurts to change because this triggers the nervous system into thinking we're about to die.

Is it any wonder we're in so much pain?

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Alright, let's take a breather here, and come back next week for part two!

<3