Understanding Self-Love: The Truth About Self-Love (And Why You NEED It)
YouTube Video :
Defining Self-Love
Hi! My name is Joel Black. I am a social worker and a psychotherapist, and I own a business called Redemption Counseling. I wrote a book called Mindfulness Workbook for Self-Love. I’m going to talk about topics in the book to give a little more context, maybe go a little bit deeper. This is chapter one: Understanding Self Love.
So, the reason I wrote the book is because I’ve noticed it’s real easy to get down on ourselves. We all make mistakes and it’s natural to feel bad after we make those mistakes. Most of the time we may get motivated after that and we may decide alright hey let’s go back and try it again. But unfortunately, sometimes it can turn into harsh criticism of ourselves and if this persists it can develop into negative beliefs, negative feelings about who we are, and our self-worth. The outside world is also constantly giving us messaging that doesn’t help. It tells us that our value is tied to external things like wealth, or possessions, how popular you are, good looks status, or stuff like that.
This constant comparison inevitably leads to discouragement because we’re always going to find somebody better than us at something and if we tie our value to that well it’s not good. Even worse sometimes we internalize a negative view of ourselves because of messaging we got from people who are supposed to love people who are supposed to trust. Maybe some adults in our life growing up used negativity to try to motivate us. Or maybe they weren’t taking the best care of themselves, so their unhealthy habits led to negativity and harsh criticism. And when we’re growing up and trying to figure out the world we could really take that on and believe that internalize it, and it could still show up years and years and years later. If the people in our lives raising us weren’t taking care of themselves then, well, it would have been very difficult for them to model what a healthy self-image looks like, so how could we learn if they weren’t modeling it for us having thoughts about yourself persists like this can lead to a lot of serious mental health conditions. Depression, anxiety, if it gets too serious self-harming behavior, suicidal ideation, and other real serious things. So, developing and nurturing a sense of worth and value for yourself I feel like it’s very important.
So, what do I mean by self-love? I break it down into 2 parts first is a belief of your value and appreciation of your worth and virtue this is all up here how you think about yourself how you talk about yourself second is actually taking action to create happiness joy fulfillment and peace within our lives so that involves actively engaging and fulfilling activities taking care of ourselves putting energy into the relationships that matter to us and so on when we fully accept ourselves flaws in all we are able to make mistakes and respond to those mistakes with a feeling that hey this is a chance to get better if not that we can open ourselves up to constant criticism and blaming ourselves after things
Self-Love is Simple, but not Always Easy
So, self-love is simple, but not always easy, right? So, it’s simple in its execution. The process of doing it isn’t complex or difficult. I want to say it’s not easy. One, we must keep doing it.
So doing it at 09:00 a.m. doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to do it at 09:00 p.m., for example. It’s a constant moment-by-moment focus that we have to be able to develop and sustain.
And then, as I mentioned before, personal history. The things that we’ve experienced throughout our lives up until now, they have an effect on our ability to think this way. And sometimes we have to untangle some beliefs that we may have developed over the years and that could have come from the way that we’ve been motivated in our lives up until now. A lot of times, people try to motivate other people with negativity, criticism, harshness, threats, or aggression used in the hopes that will motivate a person to do the right thing. And sometimes that works, but if that happens too much, where it’s not balanced with positivity, encouragement, and a belief system that promotes self-worth, then some really detrimental beliefs can be developed. Those are hard to overcome because they become ingrained and then start operating in the background.
That causes you to have that automatic response to situations. So, in times when you make mistakes, times when things don’t go exactly the way you want them to, the instinct may be to have harsh criticism and use the same type of harshness and negativity that was used on you to motivate. So those are the type of things we have to overcome. And if it’s operating beneath our awareness, we have to put some extra effort into noticing it when it happens. That’s where the mindfulness piece comes in. Breaking that cycle seems like an onerous task, but it can be broken. The first step is awareness and setting the intention to put effort and energy into this and say “Hey this is important!”, so that’s where we’re going to start in this book.
Are You Longing to Love Yourself?
Having self-love can affect many parts of your life, levels of satisfaction, feelings of contentment and fulfillment, seeing yourself as even worthy of having fulfilling experiences, or having positive relationships. Feeling good about yourself makes believing those things a lot more likely and it also gives you the motivation to put effort and energy into having those things. It affects our relationships, especially those that are closest to us: family relationships, romantic relationships, or any other type. Any type of relationship works best when 2 people are bringing their solid selves into the relationship, knowing how to achieve their own fulfillment, regulate their emotions, and meet their needs. Then the 2 people then decide what kind of compromises and tradeoffs are we going to make for each other to make the relationship work. But at the very least, they each have a floor of self-regulation that they can fall back on during difficult times. Conversely, if we’re looking for somebody to fill in those gaps somebody to make us happy or make us whole, typically it inevitably falls short, and then bitterness, resentment, or disappointment, because it didn’t work out, can be the results of that. Longing to love yourself is what’s going on whenever you are noticing that you’re not quite getting the results that you want in those areas of your life
Self-Love for Your Own Betterment
You’re the only one that knows all the reasons why working through this workbook would be good for you, but needless to say, it’s probably because there’s a lack of satisfaction or a lot of lack of positive feelings that you have about yourself, and you want to get different results in that area. So good job on choosing to do some work on this. And the good news is that increasing the amount of self-love you express will help reduce the amount of time you spend in self-doubt, criticism, or worry.
All those things are draining on motivation. We got to get up every day, we got to do our responsibilities, and take care of the things we need to take care of. It all takes energy; it takes willpower for us to be able to get up and do these things. The things that motivate us to do it are the benefits we get out of it. If we don’t feel good about ourselves, when we feel down on ourselves, it takes away from the amount of positivity we can get from doing these things, and after a while, if the balance tips toward the “I’m putting energy into things but I’m not feeling good about it” side feeling like we are not getting anything out of it, our motivation can go down right. Conversely when we feel good about ourselves, when we feel positive, when we feel like we can have good experiences and good results out of life, then we’re more motivated to try new things, put extra effort into things, and take on things that seem a little challenging. Believing that the payoff might be worth starts inside, starts with you, and starts with that belief that, first of all, you deserve to have some positivity in your life, and feel good about yourself. That you’re the type of person who deserves it and is capable of it, and hopefully that positive feeling will lead to taking on more challenges. Getting positive results out of that and taking that good feeling you get from that and using it to go into the next challenge, and to the next challenge.
You Deserve to Prioritize Self-Love
This discouraging mental image of yourself – not being able to see yourself in a loving and positive way – naturally that leads to beliefs where a person can feel they’re not even deserving of positive things. Getting this workbook, and making a commitment to your mental health, I’d say those are good first steps worthy of congratulations on your part. Also, I want to give you the reassurance that you do deserve love, and positive regard for yourself, and you also deserve to have time to make it a priority. We talk about this in a lot of different areas of life: making time to get to the gym, making time to cook food for yourself instead of eating out, or making time to spend with family and friends. This is time to prioritize something else that’s really important: you’re mental well-being.
I’m sure everybody here has a long list of things to do today or any other day for other people, which is perfectly okay and encouraged. We have our employers, our businesses, our families, friends, responsibilities, and obligations, and that’s all well and good. If we were not attending to those things, we’d feel even worse. I’m just encouraging you to say hey part of this time in a day belongs to me, belongs to the things that I need to do for myself, the things that are important to me. Being able to have that time, protect that time, and treat it as any other appointment you would make. If you had an important doctor’s appointment you would make sure you made it to that appointment. Treating things you do for yourself, the really important things you do for yourself, the same way. When I started and I went to business for myself I named my business Redemption Counseling because I feel that we’re not defined by the worst things that we’ve done in life. We’ve all made mistakes; some pretty bad mistakes and we feel bad about them as we should. What we shouldn’t do is make an identity out of what we did. We made a mistake, and hopefully, the bad feeling motivates us to make a repair, change behavior, and learn new things so that there’s less chance that happens again, but after that, that’s all we can do. Holding on to it, carrying it around, making it define us and who we are, that’s not helpful. After a while, you want to be motivated to fix mistakes and change behavior, but we don’t want to be identified with the things that we don’t like about ourselves or mistakes that we made, times that we haven’t lived up to our values, or times where we hurt another person intentionally or unintentionally. We’re all going to do that throughout this journey so hopefully, we can learn to change our behavior and forgive ourselves which allows us to move on.
Today is the Day to Start Loving Yourself.
So that being said, it’s important to set yourself up for success. If you’re going to have success and try this out so you want to create time and space to be able to do it. Like I said, you want to protect it, you want to treat it like an appointment. This is time for me to sit down and work on this so I will let everybody else in your environment know that this is my time. I would appreciate less interruptions, less distractions so I could work on this. We all know that’s easier said than done and sometimes you have to get other people used to us using this time and protecting it. At first, they may test the boundary, so you really want to make sure that if it’s important to you, you set aside time to do it. Be gentle with yourself throughout this whole process. The whole idea is not to be harsh with ourselves and not to be discouraged and say negative things about ourselves. Then second, we start on something, and it doesn’t quite go exactly like we planned, we miss a day, or we not getting something, or we give into some of the distractions that come up, and we can start feeling bad about ourselves again. So, when I say be gentle with ourselves I mean refraining from criticizing ourselves for making a mistake. See if we could just say, “hey, alright yesterday I didn’t do as well, but let’s do the best job I could do today.” And let that go. Yes, you want to do the best job you can, but you also want to forgive and let go when things don’t work out great. Have some patience, be practical. All those things I listed before as important obligations in our life they are important, and life is unpredictable. Life happens at a fast pace, and things change all the time, so having strict standards where you say, “Hey, I can’t possibly come off of this rigid regiment of doing things or else things won’t be successful.” is not useful. You’ll need some flexibility, you’ll need some ability to adapt, and then see how things are.
Self-Love for a Fulfilling, Nurturing Life
So, this first chapter was just an intro to kind of talk about why read this book, why do the workbook, what am I trying to accomplish, and what am I trying to address. Hopefully, you can think about some of the goals that you have, where you’re coming from, and what you want to get out of this. I want to offer encouragement and make a point that this takes work and effort, time, energy, and dedication to do it, just like anything else that’s worthwhile. I believe this is worthwhile because this is really the path to finding fulfillment in our lives. I think if you go out there, wherever this person is, and find the most fulfilled person in the world, they’re not going to be somebody who never had a struggle in their life, never made a mistake, never did anything wrong, or felt hurt or pain or anything. What you’ll find is a person, I’d imagine, who had a significant amount of those things and figured out how to keep bouncing back; how to keep bringing themselves back to some sort of positive and motivating belief system about themselves and the world around them, which is what results when we start having a positive belief system about ourselves. There are going to be challenges, there are things we need to put work into, there are challenges we need to face, and problems we need to solve. That’s not going to stop as long as we’re breathing. We can still feel satisfied and fulfilled by the way we approached those, handled those, and what we do afterwards. In those struggles, we also develop the tools that we can use next time, and next time. So having a belief in ourselves that we can do those things, that we are capable, and we are deserving of the fulfillment and positivity that comes from that is very important. So my encouragement to you is to keep going and do work piece by piece, take it slow, take your time, but also keep pushing. Keep pushing if you feel challenged, if you feel difficulty, if the motivation goes up and down. Talk to people who are on your side, who you trust. Review your motivations for doing this in the first place, what type of things you believe could be different if you turn this around. Things like that can help keep you focused, keep you encouraged, and keep you on the right path.
Podcast :
Dealing with Trauma: 10 Responses You Need to Know About – Redemption Podcast
- Dealing with Trauma: 10 Responses You Need to Know About
- EP 4:Beginner’s Mind is Open to Self-Love
- EP 3: Using Mindfulness to Foster Self-love ( How Mindfulness Can Help You Develop Self-Love )
- EP 2: Turning Into Mindfulness : How To Live In The Moment
- EP 1: Understanding Self-Love: The Truth About Self-Love (And Why You NEED It)
Instagram :