Loving Yourself as a Gift

Extending the theme of new beginnings and a new year, I want to ask for participation in the topic of loving yourself. To me, you cannot love others without first loving yourself. There are so many people who would view this as downright selfish. This is especially the view in Christian or other religious circles. In those arenas, it is not popular to think highly of yourself because it is seen as pride or self centeredness. This teaching says that you “should” consider others more highly than yourself or that you should just consider others first - period.

Somehow, that thinking does not seem right to me because I do not see how it is possible to feel genuine heartfelt love for another without feeling love for who you are as a person. You should feel the law of self worth and esteem yourself as a worthwhile person, worthy of love. If you believe that you have a Creator, a Higher Power, or God who made you in the image of Himself, why would you not believe you are lovable? You were created and placed on the planet with just as much worth and value as anyone else. That means that you are worthy of love and that Something bigger than you gave you that inherent worth and value. Once that is established in your inner being, you can love the uniqueness of you without hiding or being ashamed of who you are, including your character flaws.

If you begin with this love of self in a healthy way, you can work inside out and be able to love others. Jesus said that one of the two greatest commands is to love others as “you love yourself” which means to me that you would first need to love yourself. In order to love yourself, you also have to know who you are and come alive to a deep knowledge of your own self. No matter what your religious beliefs, your identity is key to mature spiritual growth.

A basic need is to love and care for yourself. If your parents or teachers or others who had influence on your early life development did not encourage or nurture you to love who you are and to teach you that you are special and unique, you may have pushed self love away by acting the way others expected you to behave. Partly, that was okay because we all need to fit into societal norms, but the other part was not okay because it taught you to “cover up” or not accept all of you. It may even have taught you that only your “good” parts or your strengths are lovable.

If you grew up with rejection of parts of you or even all of you, it taught you to reject your own self in favor of others. It also caused you to not love yourself because your basic human need to be loved and accepted for who you are was denied. People who have had this rejection as children nearly always go through life attempting to have others meet these needs. They do not realize they are rejecting themselves just as the influential people in their lives rejected them as children. They also do not realize that the ability to meet the need of being loved could be met by themselves.

Lack of self love usually takes a toll on relationships in the form of depending on others to meet your unmet need for love. It is actually more selfish because the expectation follows that it is the responsibility of someone else to fill the emptiness inside of you. That is not the job of any other person on the planet. That is the job of your Maker and you in an intimate relationship with each other. After that, you move out to fulfilling relationships where there is a mutual giving and receiving of love. Of course, it is necessary to find your source of self love from the unconditional love of God. The Gift of loving yourself must first be opened and received as a gift from your Creator. It is an intrinsic part of your inner being.

Loving yourself also requires that you love ALL of yourself, not just those good qualities that you admire or the ones you self created. Loving yourself means accepting the angry and unloving components because in those you will stay humble and know you need a God bigger than you to transform those weaknesses into more loving behaviors. If you split off the parts you deem flaws or bad and don’t allow them to be changed into more loving responses, you will not be whole.

You will meet many people who seem to be one way at home and a completely different person with others. That is a person who is split. They are acting and presenting who they want or need others to see outside their intimate circle. Inside with intimate relationships, they may act the opposite. This is often referred to as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome.
Another way to tell if someone is not loving their whole self is if they are over reactive to certain situations or are easily triggered into extreme behaviors (for example, raging).

You must begin to learn to give yourself the gift of accepting and loving yourself just as you are and admitting that you have faults and weaknesses. Affirm that you are a work in progress or on a journey that will never be complete until your life on earth is over. You do not have to change you overnight (nor could you even expect to do that), but you do have to admit that you need to make changes. That is the first step. What most people do, however, is to either change to the other extreme or get rid of having the issue at all. For example, if a person is dealing with anger, they will often go to never allowing themselves to get angry or they will dump all their anger out on others saying it is just the way they are and you need to accept them as they are and love them that way.

A healthy way to deal with weaknesses is to first admit them. After that, ask for help from God to change them into more acceptable forms and to know what is at the root of the weakness. In the example of anger; it is okay to be angry, but it is not okay to dump it on someone else or vent it out to them. It is okay to ask what the anger is all about. Anger is a friend that tells you something is wrong and it is usually about unmet needs or buried feelings that are unresolved. That is why you need weaknesses. They help you grow and mature and love yourself through that process. Being a friend to yourself is the best gift you can give.

Starting today, as participants, begin to find ways you could love yourself more in a healthy way. Please post messages in reply to this about the topic of self love in general as well as how you feel it might apply to you personally.

Blessings,
Susan