5 Wrong ways to love yourself!
Introduction
You must have heard this statement from many , “If you do not love yourself , how can you expect others to love you?”
The Self-Love movement is at its highest & rightest best. With gurus, healers, therapists, psychologists, authors, counsellors, career coaches, all preaching self-love & they in doing so are absolutely right. If there is one thing, that you can gift yourself is SELF-LOVE. But what is SELF-LOVE actually. In this article I am sharing from my own experience. It was in 2016 that someone told me the above written quote ‘ How can you expect others to love you when you don’t love yourself, I assertively replied “What are you saying, I am my favorite, but it took me 3 years to actually fully understand the meaning of Loving yourself.
I am condensing my 3 years of gradual revelations on learning to love thyself in this article.
1. You are projecting Pseudo-confidence
You are a girl boss, achieved great in your career, have the money , & you are super confident, but that does not replace for an authentic feeling of worthiness or being deserving. Your power position to out-lash people, your confidence to go on the dice & speak in-front of 200 people, is all good but that does not mean you are a woman or man with healthy self-esteem. and number one belief underlying in rightfully loving yourself is that no matter my position, what job I do, where I live, what I wear, i deserve to be loved & am worthy of happiness. The confidence & pride that you wear is good , but do not mistake pride, for loving yourself. Pride is more of an explicit stimulant that we experience in ourselves on the basis of our achievements or actions. “Pseudo-Confidence is not Self Esteem”. So don’t be Phoney Confident (PoCo). Sometimes we mistake our worth to material success & in its absence we question our worthiness. Deep inside we feel “ I am wrong” “ I am undeserving” & being oblivious to that we try & cover up looking for love outside and mask ourselves with phoney confidence, but deep inside we are hiding our deepest hurt & insecurities.
Someone rightly said superiority complexes are actually inferiority complexes, because when you have tendency to see yourself superior to others, you have inferiored down yourself already, because you lack humility. Humility is a sign of true confidence and it is in compassion what makes us loving & lovable. Under that garb of superiority complex you are hiding those hurts, and that needs healing.
Living in the joy of existing is the core of healthy self-esteem
2. Over spending money on yourself — with a feeling of “ I deserve it”
Oh totally, I love myself , why not, I read self-help books, I go for regular facials , spas , body massages, spend so much on organic food, I celebrate myself and give myself enough self-treats by buying my-self expensive gifts. I pamper myself enough — Sahana — Age 35 Profession Media executive Location India (name changed for confidential purposes)
I am not saying your fetishes for clothes, shoes and branded stuff or any other act of hedonism is bad or incorrect, but just superficial & inadequate to truly loving yourself
A mindset that my worth is a function of how others see & evaluate me is not a healthy one. Self care with reading the right books, talking to people who can help you, going for healing therapies is the right way to nurture yourself, it is a better way of loving yourself. Plucking the weeds of deep seated remorse, resentments including justified resentments, self loathing, blame, past hurts, fears, jealousy, envy is essential to rightfully loving yourself.
Wear the grace of self-esteem rather than just a veil of of phoney confidence which gets bruised easily, & this grace comes from working inwards. One having a healthy self esteem is not in the quest to make oneself superior to all others & neither is genuine self-esteem expressed by self-glorification at the expense of others or by diminishing others so as to elevate oneself. It is the understanding of one simple fact that your worth is not because of the clothes you wear, how you look, what you have achieved, your material possessions or your success in comparison to others.
3. Being in Denial
Go back in time, you are in school, & your are bullied by a bunch of dominating, arrogant, bossy girls in your school. You feel humiliated in front of your friends, you have tears but your are hiding them because you don’t want to show that you are weak. You don’t say a word to anyone & suck up that feeling of being not good enough & not being socially adequate. You deny that you are feeling bad or not so good. You wear a shield of phoney confidence that its OK , everything is OK with me. I don’t care & that very moment you make a shift into a wrong notion that being arrogant with such people is the write way to safe yourself else they will keep pulling you down. You in order to protect yourself from such shameful incidents , start to compare & become who you are not.
You get bitter towards those girls. You deny the very fundamental of your existence & in that very moment you deny who you truly are & silently start to believe that may be you are not good enough or less than others. You from that day promise yourself that no matter what it takes you would become & do everything to be the most popular & liked girl anywhere you go. You install a false belief that its only external looks & success that makes you likeable & from there on other people’s validations carry a huge weight for you to be happy.
You insist every night by affirming “ I love myself” “ I am wonderful”, “i am lovable” however deep down the belief of low self-worth sabotages your life. This fragile coping mechanism or defense mechanism is more than often less capable of handling the weak foundations of low self esteem. Self-esteem is not something you can not have , you have to claim it back because its just that you lost it somewhere, you had suppressed it & have to rebuild it by loving yourself the right way.
I believe A healthy self-esteem is as important as your other biological needs. If you find it missing then a very necessary vitamin from your well-being is missing. you need to build it. How? I have tried to list down the most relevant books for you, to not only read but use them as a workshop to get your self-esteem back.
4. You believe being vulnerable is a weakness
As teenager I was naive very naive & neither were I sassy nor cheeky. Far from being assertive, I was a docile, shy teen, who felt socially inadequate.
I use to feel socially awkward & use to shy away from saying a word even in a small group. Outwardly I behaved confident and behind this pseudo confidence I was hiding my vulnerabilities. I was always in fear that I would be mocked at, laughed at. I very mistakenly attached my self-worth to how much socially I was getting accepted by groups that I admired, the girls that bullied me.
Being likeable for who you are is different from becoming everything to please others. Having a sustained & genuine interest in people is different from compromising your self-esteem to make others happy. Hiding your vulnerabilities considering them as your weaknesses was my biggest mistake. But then Brene Brown happened to me and her amazing book book “The Power of Vulnerability” changed my life. I would suggest your hear the audio book and you shall enjoy it a lot, feeling a close friend is talking to you. You could also watcher her TED talk here.
5. Waiting for a perfect lover or a job or an external event to make you feel happy & lovable — No it’s not going to happen.
No One Can Make You Feel Deserving Of Love, No Matter How Much They Say, “I Love You”, , no matter what position you hold or what pay-check you get, no matter whom you are married to. If you don’t love yourself the right way, and have low self-esteem issues, you need to start to correct it. You are worthy of each & every bit of happiness & the standards of your happiness better be high, but you have to calibrate the right foundations deep inside you.
Self-esteem plays a very very important role in loving yourself in the right fashion. Happiness is an inside thing. Nothing external of you, & no one other than you is responsible for your happiness. They can share your joy & happiness, but its your relationship with you that you have to sort out.
Conclusion
These words written above are not just words, these 5 points are the essence of my learning’s which came out of deliberate learning & correcting myself over years, enough corrections over the of years, from bio-feedback that my inner self use to give me when I needed more work. These learning’s came after enough of new learning’s , many unlearning’s , unmemorizing the shadow beliefs that I am damaged, undeserving & unlovable & other limiting beliefs regarding my self-worth. Like many I consciously was in denial of this knowing, but deep down unconsciously I had these self-sabotaging beliefs, that had to leave. I have endured much over the past few years to breathe life into this supposedly biggest life lesson to love myself unconditionally the right way. Hope you benefit from them too.
I swear by these principles today of genuinely loving myself
- I am worthy of love because I exist not because of my title, my skin, my looks or what I do or achieve.
- I need not prove anyone anything to be worthy of love, happiness & joy.
- Happiness is an inside game, never was it dependent on anything or anyone outside of you.
- My happiness is my responsibility.
- I don’t have to dominate others to be loved or love others. Neither do I have to feel superior or inferior to anyone to feel happy & content.
Hope you benefit from my experience & learning’s I shared. Do share your comments & feedback :)
Share your experiences of self-love with me. Please will you?
