Common belief of the collective “them” would have you believe that you have to be a perfect and flawless version of yourself in order to actually love yourself. I would argue that in subscribing to this school of thought, you’ll be waiting forever to love yourself, and I don’t love that for you.

What is True Self-Love and Acceptance?

I, on the other hand, believe that truly loving yourself means accepting yourself in your entirety, warts and all. It’s learning to live with the parts of yourself that you may not like while finding balance in trying to continually work on your own evolution.

If all you do is constantly get down on yourself, you’ll miss out on all the wonderful things that make you, you. And you’ll be so busy loathing yourself that you’ll miss out on connecting with other people who just might have been able to love you for you too. 

You don’t have to hate yourself. Crazy, I know, but it serves no one, least of all you. Hating yourself won’t make you better or stronger or make people love or accept you more. It won’t help you process hard feelings or embrace hard parts about yourself, it will only lead to a rejection of you by you. 

You Decide: The Bottomline

Ultimately you’re the one who gets to decide what you believe and how you’re treated by yourself and others. Rejecting who you are, or being nasty to yourself isn’t going to help set the bar all that high, the person you’re hurting is you and your inner child. That’s who this is really about. You’ve been programmed since childhood to hate yourself, to want to tone down the parts of you that you feel like are too loud or too much. 

When you’re unnecessarily cruel to yourself, it consciously or subconsciously invites others to be cruel as well. So in this way, you determine your worth and how others perceive you. If you can learn to approach yourself with compassion and respect, that will inform how you approach the world, and how the world perceives you. 

It’s a self-sustaining cycle of respect and kindness, and it starts with you and the way you talk to yourself. So speak gently. 

Thank you so much for reading! Be sure to connect with me more over on Instagram, I’d love to hear what you thought of this post and what your major takeaways were! Or head over to my website to learn more about how we can work through your relationship journey together.

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See you back here in the next one!