Self-love: You Are Who You’ve Been Waiting For.

Self-love is one of the biggest gifts we can give ourselves. It is the life force of healing and will send you down a path of exploration into yourself that you never thought possible. To heal we must have a burning desire to reach our full potential, this requires us to love ourselves. We must choose to shed old patterns in favour of the new, creating healthy habits within our inner and outer world by endeavouring to love all parts of ourselves. The more of you that you give love to, the more pain you will heal inside of you, gently revealing a new version of yourself emerging from the ruins of who you used to be.

Human beings are always in search of love, but what we fail to understand fully is that the true love we are looking for is the love we can offer ourselves. As a trauma survivor, the idea of loving myself felt entirely impossible. I had received so many negative messages throughout my life that love felt contingent on the approval, care and attention of others and beings that I had, had so little of all of those things in my formative years, it felt like I didn’t deserve love at all, let alone my own. Stepping out into the world of self-healing took me on a journey into myself and it was on that journey that I finally found the elusive self-love.

What Is Self-Love

Self-love is the act of giving all the love you have for others, to yourself. It is finding a home inside of yourself that fills you with the warmth you feel from others when you experience their love. It is putting yourself at the centre of everything you do, operating for yourself, fulfilling your own needs and working to fulfil your dreams.

It's often easier for us to focus on our positive traits and offer encouragement to those parts of us, but these are not the areas that cause us to self-sabotage. Loving ourselves means we must learn to love the most flawed (which I refer to as our wounds) parts of us, no matter how dark they may feel. It is this darkness that needs the most love from us, even though it may be the hardest part of us to give love to.

Self-love is learning to accept our wounds and requires us to show the world our most authentic selves boldly, without venturing into the realm of comparing ourselves to others. It is understanding our value and worth without falling into unwanted traits, staying grounded and aligned with humility.

What Self-Love Isn’t

Self-love is not self-care. Self-care is an important part of cultivating self-love but the two are entirely different, yet easy to confuse. Self-care is a physical action; running yourself a hot bath, going to the gym or spending quality time with friends. Self-love requires us to have a positive relationship with ourselves. An internal process of building emotional connection with the parts of us that need to feel loved.

Self-love is not arrogance and it is not selfish. By offering love to ourselves we naturally start to show up as the best version of ourselves for others. Showing love to the areas of ourselves that need it the most opens our hearts and minds to new ways of thinking, heightening our awareness of the struggle of others, enabling us to have a higher level of understanding and therefore, connection.

Self-love isn’t being fake. Showing up authentically allows others to see us for who we truly are, creating more trusting and reliable bonds. Self-love allows us to identify where we might be creating unhealthy relational patterns by mistaking attention for love, encouraging us towards building connections with those who we do not align with. Instead, it opens us up to what true connection is, once we connect to ourselves and recognise our needs, we can more safely see what we need from others and how we can bring ourselves to them.

What Blocks Self-Love

As trauma survivors, we often struggle with multiple internal battles. Low self-esteem, comparison, feelings of guilt and shame, people pleasing, repressed emotions, negative self-beliefs and Perfectionism can all block the ability to connect to self and offer ourselves self-love.

Seeking external Validation often leads us down the path of putting our value solely on what others think of us, but with the ever-changing abilities of those around us to meet our needs we will inevitably find ourselves coming up against a wall of uncertainty. This is the primary reason why we must learn to love ourselves. It is both impossible and unhealthy for us to rely on the validation of others to fill our hearts with love, alone. We must foremost, fill our own hearts. Everything else, while important and beautiful, is supplemental.

How To Give Yourself Self-Love

When I started the journey of learning to love myself, I started with a very simple yet incredibly powerful and emotional technique. I would look at myself in the mirror, pause and take some deep breaths to regulate my breathing (an important part of mental processing) and say out loud to myself “Danielle, I love you”.

The first time I tried this I felt immediately triggered, something inside me felt repelled by the act. I found it very hard to connect and immediately burst into uncontrollable tears. I had never said these words to myself and it hurt. I stood for several long minutes looking at myself in the mirror thinking "What could be so wrong with me?!".

That night I decided that I would say it to myself again but maybe this time, I wouldn’t use a mirror. I lay in bed alone in the darkness, steadied my breathing, placed my hand over my heart and gently whispered the words “Danielle, I love you” as if I was speaking to someone I loved very much. This time something softened, I felt my heart sigh and tears began to flow. Somehow this act had tapped into the part of me that was able to receive it the way it was intended. It was then that I realised the part inside of me that felt triggered that morning was the part of me that needed my love the most.

In that mirror, I saw a representation of something I had come to hate, staring back at me was a person I rejected, someone I never wanted to be. I was rageful, bitter and full of resentment. So, why had I become this person? What brought me here? The act of looking at myself in the mirror, seeing everything I was and believing it to be unlovable sent me on a mission to understand myself. I knew I could be more than this and a desire to feel that heart-softening experience that I had on that first night but while looking at myself in the mirror, lit a fire in me to push on.

Regardless of the pain I felt when I would look at myself in the mirror and utter those important words, I carried on, each and every day until one day, it wasn’t so painful. I realised that the repulsion I felt was not my adult self, but my wounded inner child.

Our adult self knows we are worthy of love, it is rational and can reason well with reality. But there is a child (or multiple children) inside of us that feels unlovable and that wounded child speaks to us at every moment of our day when negative thoughts and self-sabotage take hold. It is our inner child that needs our love like no other.

Finding our inner child is a process unto itself which I will detail in my next blog but in simple terms, it starts with a search for who we used to be. It requires us to look back on ourselves as children and find the traumatised ages that needed love but didn’t receive it, exploring how that child felt and what we can do to soothe their pain. A process of re-parenting ourselves must begin. We must learn to offer this wounded child within us the stability, validation and comfort we did not receive from our parents when we most needed it. We need to give that child love and it comes from ourselves.

Loving yourself starts with showing loving kindness to the most wounded parts of us by bringing the best version of ourselves to our inner child, being sure to send positive mental messages to them when they cry out to be seen. They will resist in the beginning but as with all children, consistent action leads to trust and slowly your young self begins to believe you are being true to them. We must follow this up by doing acts that inspire joy within us, things that our inner child loved to do, this is relief for the wounded inner child. These are often creative tasks such as dance, art and music but can be anything from sports, walking in nature, spending time with animals and loved ones or taking a bath. This is how self-care inspires self-love but as you can see, self-love is a deeper process that requires a more internal approach.

Looking deeply at our wounds and making a conscious decision to love that part of us frees us from a world of inner pain. We must offer love to all parts within us by choosing to honour and accept our joy, sorrow and everything in between. We must choose to do this bravely and without exception, deciding to return to that gentle part of us when we are in pain time and time again, no matter how hard it may get.

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Love should primarily be felt through the lens of your own actions, not someone else’s. Through consistent kindness towards ourselves we slowly start to realise we are worthy of love, our hearts open and we receive not only our own love but the love of others with much more stability and a deeper sense of security.

The love you give yourself is the most important love of all, it is here that you learn the true meaning of love by meeting your own needs first and foremost, in turn, you can openly offer love to others in a healthy and more balanced way. The act of self-love is nurturing on a level that no one else can meet. Only you know how much love you truly desire. We often rely on others to deliver our sense of love but they can never know how much we need, leaving us feeling insecure. Meeting your own needs is vital for healthy connection and it starts with self-love.

Self-love is a lifelong process, a never-ending journey that reveals the highest version of ourselves to us and others. It brings a sense of worthiness and validation that we no longer require externally, allowing us to show up authentically within our world, naturally leading to a calmer and more balanced us. We become more whole with every loving word and action we offer ourselves, slowly returning to our true selves and our hearts. This is the you you’ve been waiting for all of your life.