Why You Need to Love Yourself in Order For Others to Love You
The truest and most important love you will ever have is the love you have for yourself.
It is the foundation for all other love-filled relationships. In order to find any type of fulfilling love, you have to develop the love you have for yourself first.
Deep and pure love for yourself and for others develops at the soul level. It surpasses surface levels and is felt at the deepest part of your heart.
It can be difficult to give and receive love like this when you have no love for yourself. This is because people who often think very little of themselves believe they are unworthy of pure love. This can be a conscious or unconscious thought.
Have you or someone you know ever said something along the lines of “I will never find love” or “my relationships never work out”?
If so, don’t be a victim to your love life. Rather, find out why this may be happening, the root of it. Part of the reason might be because you don’t love yourself and find it hard to believe anyone else could. Of course, this is just one possibility but it is what we are focusing on today.
There are three major effects that not loving yourself can have on receiving love:
- It is harder for others to love you when you don’t love yourself
- It is harder to let people in and break down your walls when you don’t love yourself
- It’s harder to love others when you don’t love yourself
It is harder for others to love you
Not loving yourself means that you don’t like who you are or don’t like certain parts of yourself. You might find it difficult to understand why others seem to like you or find it impossible for another person to ever love you.
When you feel this way it is hard to feel like you are worthy of love from someone else. You might even push people away who get too close out of a fear that they will realize there is nothing to love about you once they really get to know you.
However, these are not real facts. These are false statements that you feed to your mind. These could also stem from someone else from a previous relationship or in your family that made you feel unworthy of love.
If you hate yourself the world around you will reflect that inner feeling. You may come across people who are rude to you, talk down to you, or treat you like you are trash. If you accept this treatment it means some part of you agrees you are as unworthy as these people say.
It is hard to find love in the world and from others when you can’t even love yourself which is why it seems to be nonexistent.
It is harder to let people in and break down your walls
Say you find someone so special. Someone that just seems to make your heart skip a beat and you can feel it deep down that you can develop that deep and pure love with them.
The thing is you don’t love yourself. You want this to work but how can someone ever love you that way? It might seem impossible.
This can go one of two ways. One way is that you decide that you are worthy of being loved and work on yourself to be able to let that person in, which may take a lot of patience and commitment with yourself.
The other way is that you really can not get past how impossible it seems for someone to be able to love you. You might be afraid that letting them in means you will show them all there is to hate about you and they will change their mind and leave. So, to avoid that, you keep those walls high up to the point where it drives them away to “avoid” getting hurt.
The second way is done unconsciously by most people. You may know the superficial reason that you push people away but the root of it often gets overlooked. It is much easier to go this way rather than face the reason why you feel you are unworthy of love.
This goes for any type of relationship you have not just with a significant other. The bottom line is that it is hard to let anyone in and let them get to know you if you don’t love yourself.
It’s harder to love others
This also goes for any type of relationship where you can form some sort of loving bond.
As I mentioned earlier, the love you have for yourself is the foundation for all other relationships that have love in them. Therefore, with little love in your foundation, there is not much more that can be given to others, or at least not that pure love we are talking about.
However, it’s not just about how much love you have to give but also knowing how to give it to others. When you know how to love yourself it is easier to understand how you can spread that love to others. Without your own love there may be a disconnect between what you know to give and what others need.
Overall, it is very important to learn how to love yourself if you don’t at this moment. It can be difficult to rewire your thoughts at first and find those first few things you love about yourself.
Learning to love yourself also includes challenging what people have told you in the past about why you are unworthy of love. It may be painful to go back to those comments but it is necessary to grow your self love. You can go as slow as you need to and just start one at a time.
An example of how you can challenge those comments would be to refute it:
The person’s comment: “No one will ever love you because you are useless.”
Possible challenge: “I am not useless, people rely on me. I am worthy of love and I love myself.”
Even if your statement feels completley wrong, the more you repeat it to yourself the more you will imprint that way of thinking into your consiousness. It will become a fact you believe, with consistency, and not an impossible reality.
You can also make a habit of finding small things you love about yourself in each day. For example, “I love that I know how cook”, “I love how I sleep with a bunch of pillows”, “I love myself for remembering to take the trash out”, “I love how I look in those jeans”.
By changing the way you talk to yourself you will change the way you think about yourself and that will begin to change your perspective on love and life.
Take it one step at a time if you need to. As long as you continue to work on loving yourself first so that others can love you second you will see progress.
Sincerly,
Skylar Rae❤️🌻
Follow my Instagram for more soul enlightenment, mental health, and personal development — @skylarraeblog
