There is so much guilt tied up in loving yourself, and more specifically ACTING like you love yourself. Self-love has become this big new catch phrase, but there is still a lot of guilt tied up in how to practice self-love.
I've talked about self-care before, and though I often refer to my self-care activities as self-love, I do think there is a subtle difference. When we practice self-care, that is the physical aspect of acting on our self-love. Self-love is the emotional side, the part of you that actually feels the love for yourself. Sometimes, this prompts self-care (because when you love something you care for it), and sometimes you have to work it from the other angle (you practice self-care in order to help learn to love yourself).
Self-love is something many people struggle with, for many reasons. You might have grown up being told you weren't good enough, or you may have had a bad relationship where your partner, the person who is supposed to love you, told you that you weren't worthy of love. Or, you might just struggle with confidence and worth, and no matter how many times other people tell you how wonderful you are, you can't quite feel it yourself.
The really ironic thing is that many people who struggle with self-love are very kind, caring and devoted people. They love everyone except themselves. Or they may even love themselves, but they don't put themselves first...they love everyone else first, and then love themselves with what's left.
Love isn't really like time. There isn't a finite amount of it. You can absolutely love yourself along with everyone else in your life....and even total strangers! It may take work to shift things in your brain, and that may take prioritizing your self-love at times. You may also need to rethink your boundaries, because if you truly love yourself, you don't always sacrifice yourself to make other people happy.
One twist that I find particularly useful is to think of the relationship with your Self as if your Self were someone else (and yes, Self with a capital S....it does help to differentiate the Self as a being worthy of love!). This also helps force you out of taking your Self for granted.
Because if you really think about it, if you treated your other loved ones the way you treat your Self, would your relationships suffer? We are often ready to help others we care about at the drop of a hat. They need something, we go running. We see something we think they would like, we buy it for them, even if there isn't a gift-giving holiday coming up...we just do it because we love them. We tell them we love them, we show them how much we care, we demonstrate how we appreciate what they do for us.
How many of those things do we do for ourselves? How often do we really treat our Self as if we were someone important, someone who deserved nice things, someone who needed to be told how amazing we were, someone who should be thanked for all that we do in this world.
We are taught to put the needs of others over our own. And I find this such a bad way of thinking. I much prefer to think about putting the needs of others over the wants of my Self (but even there, you have to be very mindful of boundaries!) But if you were to think about your life and all that you do, as if you were someone else, someone who cared very deeply about your Self...would you feel like your Self was over worked? Would you try to suggest that your Self take a break, or ask for help?
It can be really hard to ask other people when we need help. We may not want to inconvenience them, or we may be afraid of being thought of as weak or needy. But we need to learn to look at the things we are doing with a mindful eye for how much we are taking on. If we see our Self becoming overwhelmed, we need to look for ways to adjust so that we can have some breathing room.
One place I have struggled with for a long time is in regards to buying my Self stuff. Whether I have had virtually no spending money or a decent amount, when I buy things for myself, I feel guilty. I used to hide things that I had bought, little stuff, things that I literally bought with pocket change (like if I went to the thrift store and found a little candle holder for fifty cents....then I'd feel guilty and hide it, like I shouldn't have bought it). I have found that the more transparent I am about the things I buy, the more I learn to let go of that guilt. I make it a point now, to share the things I buy for myself with my hubby, and with my friends, not only to help me come to peace with the buying of the thing...but because the things I buy bring me joy and I want to share that with the people in my life. By being trapped by guilt over the purchases, I was literally robbing myself of the joy that I was trying to achieve!
There are a million ways to show that you love someone. We practice acts of love throughout the day, doing small things for the people in our lives, just because. We are kind to strangers because we have love in our hearts for all people. And it is time to reclaim some of that love for our Self. It is time to treat our Self as if we were important, and worthy of love, because we are. It is time to enter into a relationship with our Self, so that we can build up the love that we have, and so that we know how loved we truly are.
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