How to Love Yourself Unconditionally

Can You Love Yourself No Matter What?

Self-love is more challenging than it is to be unconditionally loving and compassionate with others. Truth be told, it is much easier to pick yourself apart—ruthlessly—for all your failures and imperfections than it is to be your own ally, cheerleader, and source of strength and compassion.

Why is it so hard to love yourself? Oftentimes, it’s due to a deep and enduring core narrative that is rooted in shame and criticism, particularly early in life. People who experience self toxic shaming often feel the need to overextend themselves just to make others like them. 

Over the years as a therapist and online life coach, conversing with hundreds of people about this issue (and making this topic a primary focus of The Happiness Class), I have come to the conclusion that difficulty with self-love and harboring feelings of unworthiness are largely brought about by the negative thoughts and “stories” that people started to tell themselves as children and teens.

Why It’s So Hard To Love Yourself

The tendency to beat ourselves up is often simply an unhappy byproduct of the psychology of children. Children are inherently narcissistic in the sense that they only know their own experience and have limited insight as to why other people behave the way they do, and even extending to a larger context of situations. Because of this, when kids experience shaming, criticism, rejection, or hostility from peers or parents (but especially peers), it boils down to one central takeaway: “I’m bad / wrong / unlovable / unlikeable” and they carry that message with them into adulthood. This further leads individuals to develop a great deal of distrust, hence making it harder for them to create meaningful relationships with others. 

Can you relate?

How Difficulty Loving Yourself Impacts Your Life

If you’re among many people who have a hard time accepting themselves and are not feeling generally good about who you are, it may negatively impact many areas of your life. Not being able to love yourself is damaging to your other relationships because you tend to struggle with beliefs of low self-worth. This pushes you to look to other people for affirmation and acceptance in order to feel good about yourself. You might even start linking your intrinsic “goodness” to other things, like what you achieve, how you look, how much money you earn, what you weigh, etc.

This can turn into a roller coaster of chasing perfection that you can never quite attain. You might work so hard to do everything “right” and drive yourself into exhaustion, attempting to prove to yourself and others that you really are good enough as evidenced by all the amazing things you’re doing. [For more on this, read “The Problem With Perfectionism“]

The truth is that life doesn’t always go the way we want it to. If you strive, you will fail sometimes. As a fellow human, you are just as imperfect as the rest of us. Not everyone will like you, much less love you. A lot of living is not really that fabulous, just the day-to-day slog of adulting, interspersed by peak moments that may feel long in between. You will occasionally make bad decisions. You might even get fired or laid off. Time will come for you, too, changing your body, the way you look, and eventually, your mindset.

Life is a mixed bag and things are going to happen. But when your feelings of self-worth hinge upon achievements and how you’re viewed in the eyes of others (because you struggle to do it yourself) it puts you in a risky position, emotionally and psychologically.

How Difficulty Loving Yourself Impacts Your Relationships

While struggling to love yourself seems to only impact the primary target (you), it actually does impact others too. Here’s why: as we have discussed, people who don’t fundamentally feel good about themselves on the inside tend to seek affirmation, acceptance, and positive regard from others to regulate themselves. They often need a constant stream of praise and validation from other people in order to feel okay about themselves.

When their partners turn out to be individuals who also have complex needs, rights, and feelings (they even complain and get upset sometimes too!), people who struggle with low self-worth often feel anxious, criticized, and unloved. When their partner can’t always be kind and patient and is not overly loving and approving of them, they tend to fall apart, feel pretty anxious, and even get furious.

Because they are unable to support themselves emotionally from the inside out whenever their partners are upset with them or are needing something from them, that situation turns out to be very threatening to them. It is not uncommon for people who struggle to love themselves to be emotionally reactive, lashing out at their partners, or withdrawing emotionally from relationships as a form of self protection. Thus, a thorough and trusted individual therapy for relationship issues might come in handy. 

Furthermore, because people with low self-worth will often twist themselves into knots to be pleasing if not perfect, they can struggle with authenticity and vulnerability. Since they struggle to love themselves and doubt whether they’re good enough or not, they fear that if people really get to know them deeply, they will be rejected. This can make them withhold their true thoughts and feelings from others, and make them feel like they need to maintain a “perfect” façade that, while helping them feel safer, truthfully deprives them of the ability to connect on a deep level with others.

In other words, even in sadder situations, people who struggle to love their own person can find themselves in bad relationships with people who do not treat them well at all. People with low self-worth may end up staying in these toxic relationships for too long, because the criticism, shaming, and bullying they experience with their partner match the abusive inner dialogue they have inside of themselves. It’s difficult for them to believe that they deserve better, and they have a hard time leaving the toxic relationship they feel stuck in. 

How to Love Yourself Unconditionally

Healing these wounds and developing authentic self-love and self-worth is a process, not a decision or an event.

People are damaged by toxic experiences and relationships with others, but they are also healed by good experiences and healthy relationships. The first step in being able to love yourself is often to cultivate a supportive, unconditionally positive relationship with a great therapist who is able to be emotionally safe and affirming. This emotionally safe relationship creates the crucible whereby the person who struggles with low self-worth can finally feel safe and accepted enough to begin revealing their true selves and the old core beliefs about themselves they’ve been carrying for long.

Over the months, sometimes years, this precious, fragile person and their therapist can begin to evaluate some of those beliefs (carefully, so as not to trigger too much self criticism and shame) and explore — from an adult perspective — the fact that there may have been other explanations for their life experiences besides their being inherently bad and unworthy of love. They can begin to create a new narrative about themselves and new core beliefs that include a deep sense of security, rooted in the fact that they are actually good people, worthy of love and respect… and they always have been.

Self Love = Emotional Strength

Over time, healing happens. People working through low self-worth often need to process a great deal of anger and pain in later stages of healing. But in doing so, they begin the process of learning how to validate themselves. They begin unhooking their sense of self-worth from how other people view them, as well as their achievements. They acquire the ability to decide, for themselves, that they deserve to be angry when mistreated, and that they have the right to set boundaries.

Most importantly, they develop the ability to internalize a self-supporting inner dialogue that coaches them through challenging moments and reminds them of their inherent worthiness, even when other people are upset with them whenever they fail or are not as perfect as they’d like to be. Through the development of this self-supporting adult core, they are able to finally feel okay about themselves and become emotionally stable no matter what is going on around them. They develop self-compassion, the ability to forgive themselves, and often start practicing good self-care. They are now capable of assertively advocating for themselves, making healthy decisions, and not falling apart when other people aren’t mirroring admiration back at them.

As they become more self-stabilizing, their relationships also strengthen. Over time, this creates a positive spiral up where they start feeling good about themselves, and genuinely have a great life and healthy relationships — all of which supports the new narrative they internalize which says, “See? You are worthy of love and respect.”

The path is long and hard but it is indeed worth it.

If my sharing of this perspective has resonated with you, I sincerely hope that you seek the support of a great therapist who can be a safe person for you as you embark upon this journey of growth and healing. You truly deserve it.

xoxo,

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby

PS: When you read this article, it may have made you think not of yourself but of someone else in your life. If so, I hope you share this with them so that these words might provide them with clarity and direction, as well as hope and affirmation. On behalf of them, thank you for supporting their growth and personal evolution…. LMB