How do you learn self-love and stop emotionally sabotaging yourself? What tips and techniques can be used to learn better self-care and learn to emotionally nurture yourself? Join us for Ten Steps to Self-Care and how to love yourself more. This article will explore:
- Let Go of Self-Defeating Thoughts
- Own Up to Things
- Seeing Meaning in Self Love
- Distance from Toxic People
- Removing Other People’s Hurtful Voices from Your Mind
- Find the Love You Seek
- Embrace Self-Love with The Law of Attraction
- Be Your Own Best Friend
- Follow Tips for Broken Hearted Times
- Stop Focusing on Other People’s Advantages
“ The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.” Diane Von Furstenberg.
If you are like a lot of people who have been wrongly told they had no value or that they were unworthy of love, you might begin to believe it and abandon hope of being happy with yourself. The people who plant these toxic things in your heart and mind will rarely own up to it, and rarely apologize or admit they were wrong. So, you will have to be the person who admits what happened should not have, and that you deserve to heal yourself.
That’s easier said than done. Especially when pop culture tells us that everything that somebody else does that hurts us is something we deserve. Don’t we manifest everything in our lives even without meaning to? The author doesn’t think so and telling yourself you deserved abuse won’t do much for helping you to embrace self-love. So, before we share tips to take better care of yourself emotionally, set aside any toxic messages people sent you indicating that you deserved to be hurt, because you didn’t deserve any of that. Victim shaming is a tool abusers use to avoid responsibility and keep their victims down, and the “positivity” community can be just as toxic when it victim shames.
As you walk your path of healing and nurture a positive relationship with yourself, one of the most important things you can do is to accept that you are worthy of love, happiness, and when people hurt you, it is THEIR fault, not yours. You were not too sensitive. Their mistreatment of you was not a punishment for something bad you did, and all it shows is the fact they committed hurtful acts against other people and felt no remorse. What are some things you can do to nurture more self-love and self-care, without the help of people who hurt you or validation from other people in general, and how can you do that starting now? Read on to learn more.
10 Steps to Self Care
This article is in no way a replacement for therapy that many of us need to help us overcome hurtful things we experienced. Author Sharon Pope eloquently describes how easy it is to recognize physical abuse, but that emotional abuse is more socially acceptable- because your abuser is not hitting you. She explains that after being told you are lacking beauty, intelligence, or any other quality your emotionally abusive loved one states that you lack, you can begin to believe them, and tell yourself nobody else will love or want you because you are just not good enough. When Pope was healing from abuse, she had something that not everybody has- a supportive friend. She writes:
“ When I was in the middle of mourning a repeated broken heart within an emotionally abusive relationship, I was fortunate enough to have my best friend by my side speaking truth to me. My very wise and loving friend gave me a precious gift when she told me, “Sweetie, don’t you see…he’s stealing your light.” The gift changed everything for me that day and I carried it with me into subsequent relationships. Self-Love is never allowing someone to dim our light.”
If you are not as lucky as Pope was and have to work through healing and learning self-love on your own, we have some simple steps you can take. This advice on love includes some things you can ponder, journal, and meditate about, and include in lifelong self-love improvement exercises. Some people trying to be helpful with love life advice say you can’t love anybody else until you love yourself, and that is the reason to embrace self-love, but that’s not true. Self-love is valuing yourself enough to say you deserve to be happy and be treated properly, and plenty of people who struggle with self-love still love other people and treat them well. Learning how to treat yourself as well as you treat others and expecting to be treated well by other people is self-love.
Some things you can do include letting go of self-defeating thoughts, accepting that you deserve self-love, severing ties with toxic people, and silencing other people’s criticisms that you have internalized. We have included ten tips, and these are not the only things you can do to increase self-love. Never underestimate the value of joining support groups or seeing a counselor. Sometimes the best love advice does not come from a love advice column, but from other people who have learned how to love themselves better and can share their experiences.
1-Let Go of Self-Defeating Thoughts
“The negative patterns that form as a result of this self-defeating behavior actually symbolize the negative belief that we nurture.”- Stephen Richards
If you grew up being told you were ugly, stupid, annoying, or any other undesirable quality, the more you hear it, the more you believe it. While it is true that nobody is perfect, and we all grow and improve all of our lives, learning to stop telling yourself that you have some unredeemable quality that makes you unworthy will give you the strength to be the best version of yourself. Almost nobody has some quality they cannot improve, and the best thing to accept is that we are usually our own worst critics. What we feel is a nasty flaw about ourselves is usually something other people don’t see as a flaw at all. Never tell yourself you are not good enough, because you are.
2-Own Up to Things
“ We have to invest our thoughts instead of wasting them. “ -Joyce Meyer
Owning up to the fact that the voice inside our head tells us things that are not true can be difficult. When we get used to not loving ourselves for whatever reason, changing our thinking can seem wrong. It can seem to us like we are being arrogant or selfish. However, Christians have a scripture where their god is basically asking humanity to love ourselves. “Love your neighbor as yourself” reminds us that we, too are worthy of love, and while we love other people, we have to love ourselves as well. Own up to the fact that you are just as good as other people and just as worthy of love.
3-Seeing Meaning in Self Love
“And if I asked you to name all the things that you love, how long would it take for you to name yourself?” -anonymous
Beyond accepting that you are worthy of self-love, do you know how valuable it is to love yourself? When you don’t love yourself, you are more likely to let other people mistreat you, and that makes your heart hurt. You will be less likely to set personal boundaries and more accepting of abuse. You may feel you are not as deserving of happiness and won’t refuse to come in to work on the weekend you really wanted to go to a festival you have saved and planned for over the course of months. You can be less likely to take care of your health, and in the long run, suffer for it with illness that could have been avoided. You might hide yourself under too many cosmetics or change your personality to please people who don’t care about you and over time this will break your heart. Seeing that self-love causes you to make decisions that improve your life will help you to practice self-love. Yes. You deserve it.
4-Distance from Toxic People
“Toxic people will pollute everything around them. Don’t hesitate. Fumigate!” -Mandy Hale
Detaching from a relationship that tears you down and hurts you is one way to embrace self-love. Toxic people do not care about you. They may keep you around, and you may even have some good times with them. However, their behavior, fun aside, chisels away at your self-esteem. If they make fun of plus sized people in public in front of you, and you are plus sized, pay attention to how it makes you feel. If they get mad if somebody flirts with you and not with them, they are asserting that you have no right to a romance, and they want whoever is interested in you for themselves. There are unlimited things toxic people do to hurt you and make you feel unworthy of love. Don’t put yourself through that kind of suffering. Here are some clues that you are in a toxic relationship: 10 Signs of Toxic Person & How to Stay Away From Them | Mysticsense
5-Removing Other People’s Hurtful Voices from Your Mind
“ Don’t let negative and toxic people rent space in your head.
Raise the rent and kick them out!” -Robert Tew
So, you had the strength to remove a toxic friend, lover, or family member from your life. Great job, but now, every time you look in the mirror, you repeat to yourself the ugly things they said to you. “Maybe she is right. Maybe I need plastic surgery because nobody will ever love me with this face!” She’s not there to tell you those awful things anymore, but her words repeat over and over again because you have internalized her words. It becomes automatic and it’s not unusual. Every time it happens, catch yourself and simply remind yourself that what was said is wrong, and you can even replace their words with a positive affirmation like “ I look like my father’s side of the family and I am so proud to have their beautiful features. People love the way they look and will love my looks too because I like looking like dad!”
6-Find the Love You Seek
“If you loved the wrong person that much, imagine how good it will feel to love the right person. “ -Karen Salmansohn
After being involved with people who don’t love you, it is clear what you DON’T want in relationships, but it might be confusing as to what you DO want in relationships. If you have to, start with what doesn’t work and think of what the opposite of that is. For example, “ I don’t want to be best friends with somebody who makes me pay all the time when they have plenty of their own money. So, what I want is a friend who wants to spend time with me, not use me for resources.” Or “ I am tired of dating somebody who just wants me around for sex. So, what I want is somebody who goes places with me, and spends time with my friends and family, and who sees sex as only one part of our relationship.” Make it very clear what you refuse to accept in relationships, setting boundaries, and sticking by them. You might lose some people, but you will gain other people who care about your feelings and will respect those boundaries.
7-Embrace Self-Love with The Law of Attraction
“The law of Attraction is always working whether you believe it or understand it or not. “ -Bob Proctor
Is it true that you attract what you are ready for in love? Sometimes, we do, but sometimes things happen that we did not bring on ourselves. Being abused as a child is not something we manifested, and child abuse is highly likely to make us have difficult relationships with ourselves. However, if we know a lover is bad for us, and we stay with them, even though we know we are better off without them, the consequences are what we knew were going to get. Even then, though, what you were ready for was for things to be better if you just stuck by them. You were not asking the Universe to make your relationship fail.
When things don’t go the way you are wanting them to, accepting that you did not make it all happen is necessary. When other people in our lives basically ruin the relationship, it can be tempting for people who have never suffered a similar heartbreak to quote pop culture and claim we made it all happen on our own through negative thinking or wrong action. Not quite. What can happen, however, is that we talk ourselves into believing that we don’t deserve a better relationship, and we stay in a relationship that hurts us so badly, we believe we deserve to suffer. No, we don’t, and saying the Law of Attraction is responsible for all suffering, and that we deserve that is misunderstanding of how it all works. To learn how The Law of Attraction works, read here All About The Law of Attraction | Mysticsense
8-Be Your Own Best Friend
“Sometimes in life you have to be your own best friend. “ -Taylor Swift
Learn to be your own go-to person- meaning be the person who always looks out for yourself no matter what. Sometimes, we can count on other people, and we would be up the creek without a paddle without family and friends who come through for us when we need help. However, we will come through for them just as many times, and while human beings need one another in life, the number one person we need to be able to count on is ourselves. Sometimes, nobody is there to tell us to do what is best for us and that we deserve love and happiness, so we have to remind ourselves of that. That’s not to say that when we can tell ourselves those things that we will never ever need anybody else for any support ever again, but being able to do that for ourselves helps make sure that if somebody tells you that you don’t deserve love, the second they say it, you will respond to them by refusing to believe it even if a supportive friend is not there to reinforce the fact you are worthy.
9-Follow Tips for Broken Hearted Times
“What better advice to follow than your own?” -Sayuri from Memoirs of a Geisha
How to mend someone’s broken heart differs. Each of us heals from heartbreak differently. Have you found yourself giving excellent advice to people whose hearts have been broken? Have you given emotional support to people who are hurting? Give the same tender loving care to yourself. We have all given emotional support to uplift other people.
While some people think it is greedy to support ourselves emotionally, it’s actually beneficial for other people if we can do that. It will make us emotionally stronger people who other people learn from by example. When they see us being confident, and loving ourselves, they see that as the best way to be, and they will emulate the behavior. So, if you initially feel guilty following the good advice you give to other people about embracing self-love, until you get used to loving yourself more, simply remember that other people who are hurting can learn great self-love skills when they see you loving yourself.
10-Stop Focusing on Other People’s Advantages
“ I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change.
I am changing the things I cannot accept. “ -Angela Y. Davis
Seeing green, meaning being envious of things other people have that you have not been fortunate enough to have will break your heart years after people who have hurt you are gone from your life for good. It’s only natural to wish for things you don’t have, and to wonder how your life would be easier if only something in your life was different. However, keep in mind that everybody suffers heartbreak, tragedy, and pain, and we never know how much somebody is hurting inside when they are pretending that everything is perfect. Sometimes, you can rework your own life to combat misfortune, and other times you have to accept some situations are something you cannot fix. Just do the best you can with your abilities and situation, even as you work to change something you feel is unacceptable.
Perhaps the best healing factor to attain self-love isn’t reading tons of self-help books or paying thousands of dollars for counseling, although plenty of people benefit greatly from doing those things. The most important thing you can do to love yourself more and win the heart of yourself is done with no tools, magical operations, or complicated things. It’s the presence of seeing meaning in your own value as an individual. At the end of the day, it’s all about love- self-love. It’s okay to acknowledge that we are not perfect, because nobody is! It’s also okay to love ourselves despite imperfections and care enough about ourselves to believe we deserve happiness, and to be treated well.
While you walk your journey of self-love you are not alone. Surround yourself with friends, lovers, peers, and family members who are emotionally nurturing and wise elders who share how to love yourself. If you need counseling, please remember how many people benefit from it and a lot of people have improved their lives greatly because of it!
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