How we do NOT love ourselves

“Make peace with yourself” or “love yourself” are phrases you might have heard frequently, especially if you have already embarked on a journey of self-discovery and personal development, read books specific to the field, or are in a process of psychotherapy.

Yes, it is very important to be at peace with ourselves and to love ourselves. Many people come to therapy when they feel they can no longer cope, when they have reached their limit and wish for all their problems to be resolved as quickly as possible. They would like, if possible, for the therapist to have a magic wand to transform them miraculously, not necessarily because they are uninvolved, but because the fear of confronting themselves is great, because their defense mechanisms are strong.

I gave this example because in psychotherapy, in general, people begin to realize what their problems are and how these problems have affected their lives, how much or how little they love themselves, what limiting or dysfunctional beliefs they have, and what attitude or behavior patterns need to be changed to free themselves from the prison they feel trapped in.

A common point of all problems, regardless of their nature, is the lack of self-love. Somehow, you must not feel valuable or worthy enough to sabotage yourself , to accept people in your life who treat you disrespectfully, accentuate your vulnerabilities, and make you doubt yourself and your potential.

You must somehow have a strong insecurity and a lack of self-love to cling to other people, hoping they will offer you what you feel is missing inside.

We are talking here about parents who cling to their own children because, through them and through their role as a parent, they try to fill certain inner voids. They overprotect their children and incapacitate them to always feel close, under their wing, because they feed on this dependency and feel safe with the "baby" as close as possible. They do not realize that in this way, they are only trying to run away from their own insecurities and wounds, excessively focusing on their children. They feel hurt if told that they incapacitate their children because they have only good intentions.

A child whose parent clings to them and lives through and for them is a child who learns to feel responsible for the parent's life and happiness. Later, as an adult, they will feel responsible for the happiness of others and guilty if they fail to meet their expectations, no matter how unrealistic they may be. In this example, the difficulty relates to the child's incapacity in setting and maintaining personal interaction boundaries once they reach adulthood, but also with the emergence of a sense of insecurity - they will feel unconfident being on their own, taking responsibility for their own life, and will seek dependence in relationships with those around them.

An overprotective parent is an anxious parent, a parent who is emotionally dependent on their own child is a parent who fears loneliness, who has a lack of self-love that they try to compensate for through the love and affection the child offers them.

This parent sees in the child a solution to their own anxieties, and because they see the solution in the child and not in themselves, they will continue to behave and make decisions based on this - if they have a deep fear of loneliness or abandonment, instead of working on themselves to heal and overcome this fear, they will act quite the opposite - meaning they will increasingly monopolize their child because distancing from the child would force them to face this fear they do not want to confront.

Such a parent is capable of making countless sacrifices or compromises "for the sake of the child," but will always expect those sacrifices to be repaid, expecting the child to sacrifice themselves in turn. This martyrdom of the parent is, on an unconscious level, their own safety net - it can be interpreted as a glue between parent and child, an imaginary bond that "forces" the child to remain indebted to the parent, to put them on a pedestal, to make them feel loved, appreciated, and valued, and to sacrifice for them, despite this sacrifice potentially destroying their life.

We do not love ourselves when we sacrifice for others or become martyrs; we merely "lend" what we do not have ourselves.

We are talking about men or women who accept humiliation, abuse, and feed on their partner's crumbs, who believe that enduring all this proves love, as a deeply dysfunctional belief is "the more you suffer, the more you show you love." Well, no, that is not what love means. Love means peace, harmony, and wellbeing. It means respect and acceptance, but a person who grew up feeling they had to please their parents, who felt they should not make mistakes to be loved, or who believed they had to work hard to earn that love, will apply the same principle in their later relationships.

A person who has been abused, mistreated, or neglected by their own parents, the same parents who should love them, will unconsciously associate love with abuse - "if he/she hits me, he/she loves me." Nothing could be more wrong.

When we talk about toxic relationships where the "victim," although abused, cannot detach from the "aggressor" , we are also talking about a dependency that is primarily emotional. It is the same insecurity, lack of confidence, and lack of self-worth that push the person to cling even more to their partner, hoping that one day they will receive from them the validation and love they cannot give themselves. It is about their effort to convince their partner that they are a loving person because they stay in the relationship despite the abuse and that all they want is to feel loved in return. Practically, the more they sacrifice, the more they expect to be loved. But in reality, the exact opposite happens.

And in this case, as in the example where the parent clings to the child, the person, instead of confronting their own beliefs, fears, and wounds, runs away from them by clinging more to their partner, thus feeding the vicious circle in which they find themselves. If we have certain inner voids, the solution is not to cling to people or external things to fill those voids, but to work on ourselves to fill them from within. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, "it is hard to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else."

We are talking about people who work hard all their lives to achieve certain goals, but at the last minute, they give up. They find, of course, well-argued explanations for why they gave up, but these are nothing but rationalizations and justifications. They give up because, on an unconscious level, they do not consider that they deserve to be happy or successful or because they believe that they must work hard, suffer, or that only some people are lucky, and no matter what they do, they will remain victims of destiny (https://www.ursula-sandner.com/ce-mesaje-iti-ghideaza-scenariul-vietii/). In fact, they are self-sabotaging. They find scapegoats for their failures or various excuses.

Again, instead of questioning their own beliefs and behaviors, they focus their attention outward. They say it is not at all that they do not want to succeed (after all, who wants to fail?), but on an unconscious level, something entirely different is happening. They declare that they deserve to succeed, that no one has struggled and worked as hard as they have, that they have self-respect and certain values, but... deep down, self-love is missing.

Self-love is like a seed that needs to be constantly nurtured, watered, and fed to develop later. Unfortunately, people have not been taught to love themselves because self-love has been and still is viewed as a sign of selfishness. Some people also say, "yes, you are a narcissist, you only love yourself." In fact, narcissists do not love themselves; they suffer from an acute lack of self-love, which is why they try to compensate for this through their vanity and selfishness. Self-love has nothing to do with narcissism or selfishness, as is commonly believed.

Self-love is, among other things, about becoming aware of the dysfunctional beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors we have, about becoming aware of our wounds, traumas, and fears and healing and integrating them. How can you nurture your self-love if you remain attached to a belief like "I am good for nothing," "I do not deserve to succeed," or "I must please others to be accepted"?

How can you nurture your self-love if you still tell yourself how powerless you are and how unfair life is to you because ten or twenty years ago, you were hurt by a person you had high hopes for? If you remain caught in victimization and resentment?

Regardless of our past and what happened to us, it is within our power, more than we think, to make peace with that past and take back our power . To get out of the victim role, to free ourselves from beliefs that limit and harm us, to choose differently from now on.

We do not show self-love if we remain in the same dark "zones," if we keep telling ourselves that we cannot change anything, if we repeat the same patterns and stubbornly refuse to break out of them, and then complain and suffer because "we never have luck." It is not about luck, but about awareness and accountability. About the decision to ask for help and the decision to overcome the imposed and self-imposed limits. Without making this decision, nothing happens.

To love yourself is not enough to tell yourself every day how wonderful you are if you do not believe it deep down. It is not enough to leave a toxic relationship only to enter another one and perpetuate this pattern; you need to solve the exact issues that underlie this pattern.

This seed of self-love exists in each of us, but it is extremely important what we choose to do with it. And if we have not felt loved or valued, and if most of our decisions were made out of fear, and if we made many mistakes regarding our lives, it is never too late to break the "walls" that limit us and to envelop that seed in a new light. Choose wisely!

Dr. Ursula Sandner

 

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