Embracing Love’s Journey: How to Love Yourself
July 25, 2024 / Michael Wayne Regier Ph.D. / MichaelRegier.com / Relational Excellence Articles
Are you ready to embrace love’s journey? I believe it’s an integral piece of everyone’s personal hero’s journey. It begins with learning and practicing how to love yourself. It may sound like a cliché that loving others requires a capacity to love yourself. And yet it is true. It is impossible to allow someone to love you if you do not think you are lovable. You will sabotage their reach every time. Also, it is difficult to love another person if you do not love yourself. You will project your unresolved hurts onto whomever you get close to.
There are many effective ways to learn how to love yourself. Mindfulness meditation helps tune in to the thoughts and emotions blocking self-love. Journaling, focusing on parts work using the framework of internal family systems can be very valuable. Understanding the language of your dreams will give you direct access to whatever your brain is background-processing regarding your internal conflict. And psychotherapy is a true method for self-discovery.
Self-love has a major impact on relationships and wellbeing. It has been said that loving others is impossible if we do not love ourselves. Socrates said knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom and the path to discovering individuality. So just how is ‘knowing yourself’ an important part of the love-learning journey?
Emotional Connection
Love is connection. It is the alignment of our deepest thoughts, emotions, and motivations. It is searching for another soul who understands the drives and energy that keep us feeling alive. We feel seen and validated when we meet someone who resonates with our true selves. Your potential for a love relationship is ignited. We all want a soulmate who can comfort us during our deepest levels of distress and celebrate with us when we achieve the heights of success. This emotional and intellectual resonance bonds us. It creates what John Bowlby called a Safe Haven for a love relationship.
Our partner can’t know us if we don’t know ourselves. To be on a growth path we need to know what thoughts and feelings are important to us. The better we know ourselves, the more we can communicate how we need to be loved by our partner. Our partner desires to love us but often does not understand what we need to feel loved.
Loving Our Injured Parts
The better we know ourselves, the greater our capacity to love and be loved as we truly are. As we travel through life, we experience many ups and downs that create divisions inside of us. Those divisions can actually function as separate identities. The Internal Family Systems Theory developed by Richard Schwartz informs us about how these parts of ourselves often conflict.
Childhood trauma can cause us to develop parts of that fear of being hurt again. This can continue to surface when certain triggers present those parts of ourselves to us throughout our lifetimes. We can keep pushing these parts of ourselves down, and they will only come back to haunt us every time they are triggered. Denial never heals these traumatized parts. It is only by identifying and comforting them that we begin to calm and heal the fear that is inside of us.
Finding Hidden Motivations
About 80% of what motivates us lies outside of our conscious awareness. We are often unaware of what drives us toward a particular goal for which we want support. We all want to be loved and cherished for the individuals that we are. And for those things that matter most to us and motivate us to be the best version of ourselves. It is difficult to love ourselves when we do not honor our deepest motivations and desires. We can find ourselves on an unfulfilling path that can cause us sadness. Even though it is a path that might make another person feel alive and fulfilled.
Discovering ourselves requires deep self-reflection. It involves paying attention. Or as the spiritual traditions call it, becoming conscious or present to what is happening inside of us. There are several different ways we can learn to do this.
Practicing Mindfulness Meditation
Practicing mindfulness meditation is one of the best-known ways to learn how to love ourselves. Mindfulness meditation can help you learn how to allow your conflicted emotions or parts of yourself to surface. With mindfulness meditation you create new fear-free memories by allowing yourself to feel all your emotions without judgment. You learn not to fear and resist painful emotions. Instead to exist with them and speak compassionate words to these injured parts of yourself once you become conscious of them. Research has found that just 15 minutes of mindfulness a day can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Mindfulness involves sitting quietly, clearing your mind, and paying attention to your breath. You begin to notice the emotions and sensations deep inside that are trickling to the surface. By simply noticing these emotions and sensations, you become conscious of them. It is then possible to send thoughts and emotions of loving kindness to the parts of yourself that are suffering. And to become aware of how you might be triggered by others when they say or do things that trigger a past painful memory.
By learning not to judge yourself for having painful emotions, you can develop the capacity to receive support by expressing those emotions to others. You can also learn how to show up at work or in a relationship with a positive attitude. Even though you may not feel that way on the inside.
Expressing Our True Self
Brene Brown reminds us about the “Power of Vulnerability” and helps us express our true selves to others. And how we can best thrive in the world with the bodies, brains, emotions and circumstances we are given.
Our love for ourselves also grows when we experience others loving us in return. And here mindfulness meditation is helpful because we become more skillful in recognizing what we are actually feeling and communicating that to the people who desire to love us. That increases their capacity to give us the love we want.
Journaling
Journaling is another way of becoming more self-aware and capable of loving ourselves and being loved. Writing down what we are thinking and feeling, without editing to make ourselves look more socially acceptable, we are given the opportunity to objectively see on paper what is happening inside of our unconscious mind. Sometimes journaling can take the form of writing a poem. They can symbolize deep emotions that are crying out for expression.
If you get anxious about trying to verbalize what you are feeling, reading your journal to the person you care about can authentically express your internal reality. This is why poems and love songs have always been a way to communicate heartfelt emotions to the people we love. This kind of heartfelt, expressive journaling is a skill that can be learned. For some people it comes more naturally than it does for others. The key is learning how to write down what you are feeling and thinking without any self-judgment. The more you do this, the better your writing will self-organize and make sense to yourself and others.
The Language of Your Dreams
Understanding the language of your dreams is another powerful tool for self-discovery and increasing your capacity to love and be loved. Our brains constantly try to solve problems and the riddles of our lives in the middle of the night. When we dream, our brains try to understand what is frightening to us, what excites us, and what we need to feel loved. Our brains code this problem-solving in symbols and stories that often do not make sense when we look at them awake at first glance.
The first step in understanding our dreams is to write them down as soon as we awaken with them. The brain often erases these dreams from our memories as soon as we wake up, so we have to write them down quickly after we are conscious of them. It can seem embarrassing or troubling to record certain kinds of dreams that we do not want to identify with. Dreams often have an emotional impact on us and contain the greatest amount of content that can help us to know ourselves.
Carl Jung called this the shadow material that, at first glance, we want to avoid identifying with. Understanding our shadow material makes us aware of the most important parts of ourselves that need our love and understanding and creates new potential for expressing ourselves in the world. Robert Johnson’s book Inner Work is a great resource for beginning to learn how to understand the language of dreams.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a tried-and-true method of self-discovery. By working with a therapist who is trained to understand drives, emotions and conflicts, internal family systems, trauma, and the language of dreams, you will get invaluable assistance in taking the above steps to help you learn how to love and be loved. A therapist is a highly skilled objective person whose core motivation is to assist others on their learning journey. PsychologyToday.com continues to be a very helpful resource for finding therapists in private practice with specific kinds of specialties. I am a psycho-spiritual relationship therapist and would love to talk.
So What Now?
Embracing love’s journey is a courageous undertaking and commitment. But you are so worth it. You are so worth learning to love yourself in order to love others more fully. Looking at our injured parts and our hidden motivations is all part of our journey of growth and transformation. Journaling, mindfulness meditation, dream work and psychotherapy are all great places to begin your journey to a whole and healthy you. Are you ready to take the first steps in learning to love yourself?
I’m Michael W. Regier, Ph.D. I provide Emotionally Focused and Psychospiritual therapy. For 30+ years I’ve helped individuals and couples learn how to love self, others and the divine within each of us. Along with my wife Paula, I’ve co-authored Emotional Connection: The Story & Science of Preventing Conflict & Creating Lifetime Love.
