The first step to loving yourself is acknowledging the need to love yourself. This means admitting not only that you don’t love yourself, but that love is a necessity. Loving yourself is largely necessary because it keeps you emotionally healthy. Without love, it is all too easy to lapse into depression or other severe emotional pain. Falling into this kind of melancholy often entails not only a lack of loving yourself, but a belief that you are unworthy of love. In addition, it is more difficult for others to emotionally care for those who don’t care for themselves. They often feel overwhelmed by the task and have to give up. Because of this, it is difficult to find someone to depend on when you can’t or won’t love yourself. You need more help emotionally than anyone is capable of giving, since then they would basically be taking care of two people’s emotional well-being. In addition, if people who try to help repeatedly give up and leave, this could result in an intensified feeling of love-unworthiness for you.
After you realize that you need to love yourself, you have to come to terms with the fact that no one is perfect – even you – but that this doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be loved. Think of other people you love – undeniably, they aren’t perfect either, because no human is perfect. Everyone has flaws. However, you are able to love them despite their failings, so you should be able to love yourself despite your failings as well. In addition, if you set unrealistic standards for yourself, such as perfection or near or near-perfection, then you will repeatedly let yourself down. This will only serve to further convince you of your love-unworthiness.
The last thing you have to do before you are ready to take real action is to know what is important. You need to know what traits matter in a person for them to be loved. A good way to do this is to figure out what kinds of qualities make another person you love make them so lovable to you, or why you find them so worthy of love. These are qualities that may make you lovable or love-worthy in your own eyes. In addition, you shouldn’t allow less significant traits distract you. Things such as appearance, ability and inability, or financial well-being are a few things that are superficial and should not affect whether you love others or yourself.
By this time, your mind should be in the right frame of thinking that you can start to take action. One of the first things you have to do is to identify the positive things, which would be the things that make you feel loved or worthy of love, in your life, and nurture them. Some of these things will be people that make you feel loved or love-worthy when you are around them. When you identify these people, you should spend more time with them, and also do your best to make them feel loved and love-worthy in return. Other positive things you might find that need nurturing are positive traits that you possess. There is a slight distinction between your positive traits and important the afore-mentioned important things. Important things apply to everyone; your positive traits are unique to you, and not everyone may possess them. It may be willingness to help people or your desire to enforce the law, everyone has different positive traits. You have to find your unique qualities and find ways to help them grow. If you’re having trouble, a good way to identify these traits and qualities is to ask the people who know you what some positive things about you are, and start from there. Once the parts of your life that make you feel loved and worthy of it have become a more active part of your life, you their effect on your life will become more evident as well.
After you’ve strengthened the positive areas of your life, it will be easier to tackle the negative areas. As with the positive areas of your life, you have to first find and identify the negative things, which keep you or discourage you from loving yourself. You will need a lot of support when dealing with this. This can be dispiriting and hurtful, so it is better to build up the supportive people and qualities that you have first. This is so they can help sustain you when you are working on the negative things in your life. Part of what makes this step so painful is that once you’ve identified the people who make you feel unloved or unworthy of love, you have to stop associating with them, or at least associate with them less. This is another reason it’s good to have strong relationships with helpful, encouraging people – to fill the void left by the people who were hurting you. You’ll also have to make an effort to stifle the traits of yours that make you feel unworthy of being loved. These will also generally be person-specific. They may be anything from insensitivity for others to an inclination towards needless violence. This step is very difficult, but once you start to distance yourself from things that discourage love or that make you feel unworthy of being loved, it allows more room for love to take root.
Now that so much has changed with so many people, there will be a lot of actions and feelings from these people. After you’ve started to encourage things that encourage you, and discouraging things that discourage you, you have to avoid letting the actions and feelings of others affect your feelings for yourself. For one thing, some people don’t realize how their actions will affect you. Many people act without thinking how their words or actions might seem to others, because they don’t think about what they might not know. Also, self-consumed people are usually so wrapped up in themselves that they might not realize that they affect others at all. Some of them might be consumed with self-love, which might make you feel insignificant for not being like them; many others will be consumed with self-hatred, which might make you feel guilty for not being able to help. In either case, however, these people don’t often realize they guilt or other feelings that they are imposing on you. Even though it is difficult, you shouldn’t take it to heart – neither of these feelings, or any other feeling that you get as a consequence of someone else’s actions, should be relevant to your feelings of love-worthiness. Not all people, however, are so self-consumed that they are oblivious to the effects they have on you – some are deliberate in the pain they try to inflict. However, these people are insensitive and cruel and unworthy of your consideration. Their actions rob them of the right to hold any power over how you feel about anything – especially yourself. That isn’t to say that you should ignore anyone who tells you anything seemingly negative about yourself. There is such a thing as constructive criticism, and you should listen to it. However, the people are trying to manipulate and hurt you are the people who will be trying to offer this constructive criticism and are not the people you should listen to.
You should also find and surround yourself with other people who care for and love you. These people will make it easier for you to find and encourage positive traits. When people care for others, they often make a point of telling the people they care about uplifting things whenever they get a chance. People who love you also care too much about you to let you fall into ruts and bad habits after you have worked so hard to get yourself out of them. In addition, when you are surrounded by people who care for and love you, it is easier to care and love yourself. Often you can’t keep yourself out of emotional ruts yourself, and because they care about, they are able and willing to help keep you out of them. Because they keep you from falling into these emotional ruts, you can more easily see the helpful effects of love, and will be more encouraged to love yourself and others. They are also able to keep you from forgetting how lovable you are. These people that love and care for you are one variety of the positive people that were supposed to take place of the negative influences in your life earlier, so they also help by making you feel loved by just being around you. If the people around you can love you, then you should be able to love you, too. If you are feeling unloved or unlovable, then people who care about you are willing to convince you that you are otherwise – both loved and lovable.
The next big, and possibly one of the hardest steps for some people, is forgiving yourself for past mistakes, but this step is absolutely mandatory. Dwelling on mistakes you’ve made in the past is a huge source of feelings of love-unworthiness in people. If you aren’t willing to forgive yourself, you can suffer from an overdose of shame, guilt, humiliation, and many other emotions that can be a result of these. Sometimes it is easier to forgive ourselves is someone else forgives us first, but this isn’t always possible. Either way, a mistake doesn’t have to be a regret. If the fault is uncorrectable, then you should learn what you can to avoid similar errors in the future, but you have to be able to move on. Not everything will be able to be fixed, and even if something can be fixed to some degree, it will never be good as new. However, something new will always come, and it will be affected by anything that happened before it. When something can’t be fixed, you should at least try to make the contribution as positive as possible by taking away a lesson and applying it in the next situation that comes. This will also help you forgive yourself when you aren’t able to get forgiveness from another person.
Doing good things whenever you get the chance and doing the best you’re capable of in everything you do is another thing you should do that will help you learn to love yourself, because it helps you develop a stronger sense of love-worthiness. There are ways in which this is true. For one, when you are helping others, it helps you feel wanted and needed. In addition, if you are doing your best, then you are usually rewarded with a sense of satisfaction at the very least. These feelings and others that can come from them are strongly related to love-worthiness.
The most important step, and probably one of the hardest to grasp, is to remember that you are the only in existence and that will ever exist – which makes you extremely valuable. Think how much effort put into taking care of their cars – things that are mass-produced – and think of how much more effort should be put into taking care of you – something that will only be created once in all of eternity! You are a completely unique individual that never be repeated. No one will ever be in positions or situations that you are in again, meaning that you are capable of helping people in ways that no one else will ever be able to – completely worthy of being loved.
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