Self-Love or How To Find Peace

This post is about about how self-love helps us to get out of survival mode and avoiding coping mechanisms. It is about finding yourself and becoming whole where you always experienced separation for example in form of deep sitting sadness and depression.

What Is Love?

For me ‘love’, in no matter which form whether romantic, platonic or other way, is always about intrinsic motivation to build a relationship to another person, wanting to know more about this other person, learn from them, teach them, create common experiences. It’s a deep curiosity within us.

Hate on the other side is about a motivation to interrupt these kind of relationships, sometimes completely, sometimes only in some dimensions. It’s about burning down the bridges we have to them. And often we may do this out of fear.

The absence of love and hate would be letting the bridges rot over time. Not putting any energy into the relationship, neither to destroy these bridges nor to keep these bridges in a good condition.

In the same way as romantic or platonic relationships grow over time if we invest the energy, we will not only improve the bridges and make them more stable but we will also build new bridges. This means that over time we will learn about new dimensions regarding how we can relate to this other person. Our love to others becomes multi-dimensional.

We are able to build bridges in every area where we can find curiosity into this topic. That’s why we have relationships with some people only in context of sport, music, or politics. And that’s okay, we don’t need to have relationship with someone else that covers all our interests. It’s okay to have your different friends that you can talk intensely with about sports, music, or politics. … Imagine you had a friend that you need to talk with about all these topics. This may seems nice at first but what happens if one bridge starts to decay or be made unstable on purpose. Doesn’t this mean that all other bridges to this person may also be in risk to be destroyed? This of course depends on how this relationship to this other person is build but what I want to say is that it is good to have your bridges diversified to multiple people so that you don’t have a complete dependency on someone else and that no one else has a complete dependency on you. This dependency of someone else on you can create an unfair power ratio, you may dominate the relationship but also it may can costs you a lot of resources so that this relationship in general becomes unsustainable for you.

The only situation where you may have this kind of relationship naturally with higher dependency is when you are a care giver for your children.

No One Lives Your Life

No one lives your life. This means you are the expert of your own experience and also that you are the only one that can implement changes in how you perceive your life.

Please read this again: You are the only one that can implement changes in how you perceive your life.

This statement acknowledges that our influence and control on our environment is limited. Yes, we may have an impact, but it is not promised. Also, it acknowledges that our environment has influence on our perception of life. If we burn ourselves or are hurt by someone else, the pain exists, there is no denial of it. The question is how do we process it and integrate it into our reality perception. Is the pain dominating our experience of life? Is it something that we know will only be there temporary? Is the pain a reflection of something that lays in our subconsciousness? Will time heal this wound or are we scratching it up again and again so that it leads to scars? This is what I mean when I say that you are the only one that can implement changes in how you perceive your life.

Your experience of life seldomly changes if you do nothing. Creating new kind of experiences requires new actions. If you always do the same, you will stay in your realm of experiences. And yes, over time you learn to predict the things that will and can happen in this realm but it also means that you stopped growing. However, it doesn’t mean that you are resilient against things that happen in life. You are kind of running away from experiencing life by staying the same. However, sometimes you put so much energy into keeping your realm of experiences the same that at the same time you run out of resources because you didn’t adapt to changes in reality. Making your realm of experiences stable is not the same as making your realm of experiences resilient. Self-love will teach you the second.

Living in your static realm of experiences means you live in a predictable reality. Not necessarily a healthy or safe one! Also living in your static realm of experiences doesn’t tell you anything about how far you can predict the future. Sometimes it’s only up the next situation with an abuser. I.e., you are in survival mode. Or to say it in the words of Simon Sinek and his book “The Infinite Game”, you are playing an infinite game with a finite mindset and you are probably stuck in it.

At last, don’t get me wrong. When I say that you need to act to create new experiences. I don’t mean that you need to be visibly active. Observation of a situation is a valid action of patience. It means that you are still processing the input from your environment.

Judgments or How Separation Happens

When we start our life we don’t have yet awareness of a separation between us and our environment. If something bad happens we assume that it is our fault, the same goes for the good. We constantly synchronise with our environment. At the same time if we experience pain, we feel like the whole world is going down which matches our experience of the world at this point in time. Again, the same goes for being joyful. Through all this experiences we build are structure of how our actions, perceptions and impacts on our environment related to each other. Its a network of associations that is constantly growing. We experience in which situations we get attention and rejection, love and hate. We learn in which areas our curiosity is allowed and appreciated but also where we are judged. Co-regulation of our state through our environment tells us how to self-regulate our state in the future.

Judgment means that someone draws a boundary. This judgment can indicated that someone else is outside of a group, or that they are included. Take the example of bringing bad grades home. Your parents may compare you to your siblings and friends, they tell you that you are different, that you don’t belong to them, that you are an outsider and that they are disappointed and reject your for this. And example for inclusion would be if you break up with your partner and your friends tell you that you deserve better, that they always found your partner strange and that they are there for you and that this actually matches your feelings.

All these experience form us and our build up structure. Some of this structure comes up to our conscious and other parts stay in the subconscious if we don’t actively challenge it. While we can say that this created structure protects us as we have a map of how we behave in our environment and which kind of actions and reactions from us are expected, this also means that we identify with this structure and miss the point that we are more than it. We don’t need to take over the judgment we received when we were two or three years old when we learned that throwing stuff on the ground can have an impact but it doesn’t make us inherently bad.

However, sometimes we still believe the things we learned as children and teenagers. And we retell this story to ourselves again and again. Like, we are not allowed to be express our anger because we may could hurt someone else, we are not allowed to express sadness because our environment doesn’t give us the space, we are not allowed to express our emotions because they need a justification and a solution. Like, we are not allowed to take space because our care giver or sibling already takes all the space for certain emotions. Or we shout and cry so loud and still no one sees or hears us and yet it’s the only thing we know to do… We learned to burn down all bridges where we would express ourselves and therefore internalise our emotions. They are stuck within us. … Or sometimes we need to burn down the bridges because otherwise we would take in the anger, sadness and fear of other people and that would be just too much for us to handle. … We start our life with learning static boundaries. Dynamic boundaries are something that only come later.

Love Yourself But How?

Loving yourself can be done in so many different ways. I don’t think that no one completely doesn’t love themselves and yet they have trouble to love their whole being. Like some people may have problems to accept their body but not their fierceness, or they have troubles to love their directness because their environment showed them that directness and honesty isn’t appreciated but they don’t have problems with how they look. The ways how self-hate and self-love and also self-ambivalence can look like is basically infinite as they can not only be different regarding which attributes we love, hate and don’t care, but also the intensity about it and the history of these attributes.

Therefore, for some self-love can look like observing themselves in the mirror and creating sparks or bolts of joy within themselves while they see all their perceived flaws and perfections and learn gratitude towards their body and that it keeps them alive.

Others again may need to learn to sit with themselves and learn to be a ‘being’ instead of a ‘doing’. Learning to be valid not only through other peoples validation and what they can produce but just for existing.

Then you have people that need to learn to trust themselves and understand that their trust in others is often a missing trust in themselves to be able to handle the possible upcoming situation.

Self-love can also be about celebrating failure and to learn that it actually is an opportunity to learn and grow and that it is not something that we should feel ashamed of or shame others for.

You see, this list could be endlessly continued and still not meet your specific situation, and that’s okay. This post is about inspiring you, not providing you a matching solution.

Coming back to the metaphor of burning, building and deserting bridges. Learning to love yourself is about stopping burning bridges towards yourself, it is about bringing life back to bridges that you deserted years ago through avoidant coping mechanisms, it is about celebrating and being proud of the bridges you were able to establish.

Creating self-love is a little bit like building and restoring your own castle. You will see yourself and your relationship with yourself flourishing in such a way that you have a lot more resources available for building relationships and at the same time you know when to fight for your independence and set boundaries and burn certain specific bridges down.

I don’t say that building up bridges and relationships is easy. I know. Sometimes in certain areas of life we only learned to keep the bridge destroyed because it was never safe for us to relate to others in certain ways. Like, maybe you learned that your anger, sadness, fear, judging or happy emotions weren’t allowed and you were judged for it. That’s maybe why you run away from connecting with yourself in this area and yearn for someone else to fill this hole but the only one who can make yourself whole is you.

Additionally, burning bridges means not only to protect us from bad influence and energy but it also makes it impossible for others to support you through this relation. … if you yearn to be cuddled but don’t allow anyone to touch you you can see how you set yourself up for continuing this yearning, right? And maybe that’s what you need to feel safe in the sense of that you have a predictable outcome here and yet this will stop you from growing in the end.

I’m also aware that feelings are shown in our body through the state of our nervous system, e.g. we may are stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. That’s definitely something worth to also look into when you are on the journey. It is good to know that singing and humming, wind on your skin, drinking something and consciously breathing in different ways and consciously yawning more often can support your body to feel safe and to become actually aware that you are not lost in these survival states but can actually come back to rest and regeneration. Allow yourself to experience all states consciously and learn to not hate your body for being in one these states.

Conclusion

I’m really sorry that I can’t give you a list of steps that will definitely help you. I can only give you a personal example for self-love.

Six years ago I started my self-reflection journey. For me journalling worked the best. For two reasons. First, I felt finally listened to, I never trusted anyone else or felt deeply understood but when communicating to myself I didn’t had this problem. I was able to write down my deepest fears, anger, sadness, judgment and so one. Second, journaling allowed me to get out of doom loops. Externalising my thoughts allowed me to process the thoughts and experiences I couldn’t process in my mind alone. I found this especially helpful when processing fresh grief caused by death of close people but also when grieving my youth.

One of the first things I wrote down was multiple pages of memories where I felt abandoned by others. I took one of the memories and confronted the person in this context with my memory. They told me that they have no memory of it. In this situation it didn’t even matter to me if they may lied or not. This experience made me realise that you can carry all kind of positive and negative memories with you, but that doesn’t mean that other people will remember. It also meant that if they have hurt me and are not aware of it anymore that I most likely have done this to others. The result was that I don’t attach myself anymore for eternity to such experiences. I process them and it’s good, I won’t keep judgments towards them forever.

The funny thing is that while I was fast at learning to not keep judgements anymore towards others, I didn’t know how to stop judging myself, to feel shame about myself. This required more time and learning to see my complete whole and embracing my so called “flaws” which aren’t actually flaws but areas where I never learned to grow up because I was shamed for my perceived incompetence there.

To see all the other steps of self-love I went through the best thing you can do is to read my blog posts because each one covers in one or another way a little piece of self-love I found for myself. Sometimes mentioning self-love explicitly, sometimes indirect through reflection a certain aspect of life that I feared.

Besides that I guess if you want to find the starting point of your journey towards self-love is to start asking the questions you always avoided, and this may looks like obvious avoidance of running away from your sadness but it can also look like intense judgement towards certain things or people. Ask yourself multiple times ‘Why?’ until you have found enough new answers. I know this won’t be comfortable at first but it will teach you how to sit with your emotions, with your discomfort, with yourself and remember, the journey is the goal and will continue your whole life but it will be a good one, once you get into it, I promise.

Final Words

Once you love yourself you will also have resources to love others in all kind of ways. This will bring yourself a lot of peace because you won’t feel the need anymore to always be in control because you know who you are as a whole and that you can trust yourself and therefore also learned how to trust others. With these last words I just want to tell you as a reader that I love you and even if you never will reach out to me I think of you and wish you all the courage in the world to start or continue your journey towards self-love, it’s so worth it and fulfilling because you will be with yourself for the rest of your life.