When we talk about self-love, it can feel like a foreign concept that we don’t know how to apply to our lives. How can we actually learn to love ourselves? In what tangible ways can we implement self-love in our lives? How can we incorporate self-love into our healing and our recovery process?
Self-Acceptance
A huge part of self-love is learning to accept ourselves. We tend to believe that our faults are failures on our part, that what we consider to be our weaknesses make us inadequate and unworthy. How would it feel to accept ourselves not despite our flaws but including them? Everything about us, including our differences and imperfections, makes us unique and special. We are perfectly imperfect beings. When we love ourselves, we love every part of us. Self-rejection can morph into self-hatred which can crush our spirits, but we can grow and heal when we allow self-love to be our guiding force.
Compassion
When we are hurting, our minds often default to treating ourselves with blame, criticism and judgment. Let’s choose instead to give ourselves compassion when we’re hurting. Comfort yourself, soothe yourself, nurture yourself. Speak to yourself the way you would to a child who is hurting. Remember that within each of us lives our inner child, and for many of us that child was traumatized. Hold that child and offer your love and compassion. Being kinder to ourselves is so important in learning self-love for our recovery. How can we heal if we’re beating ourselves up, speaking to ourselves unkindly, denying ourselves our love? We essentially have been neglecting and abusing ourselves, often without realizing it. Now is the time to change that!
Self-Forgiveness
We use our mistakes as evidence of our unworthiness. We cling to our regrets and form our identities around the belief that we are bad people. When we think of our wrongdoings, we not only feel guilty for them, we feel an inherent sense of shame and inadequacy that inform our thoughts and actions. Self-forgiveness is how we stop that self-destructive process in its tracks. How do we forgive ourselves? We can remember our humanity. We can try to understand that our mistakes are an inevitable and natural part of life. We can remind ourselves that we are like every other human being on this planet in that regard. We can choose to soften the harsh perspective that we need to be perfect in order to be lovable. We can see ourselves with the forgiveness our higher power has for us. We can meditate on self-forgiveness and accept our mistakes and wrongs rather than trying to fight them.
Self-love is a journey, and we’re here to help. Call (800) 871-5440.