Loving Me better

There is something I used to grapple with and think I am finally begging to get a sense of what it means. When someone asked me if I loved myself, or suggest that I should love myself more I used to get upset because OBVIOUSLY I love myself, I mean who doesn’t! But the more I got to understand what love is the more I started wondering if I really do love myself as I should. So then the question became, what do I understand by self-love?

I believe self-love is a continuum with two unhealthy extremes and a healthy middle. Bishop TD Jakes refers to these extremes as martyrdom and narcissism, l would like to refer to them as self-disregard and self-worship. These extremes are not fixed, meaning you are not either self -worshiping or self- disregarding. We tend to move along the continuum and will settle somewhere based on the health of our self-esteem at the time. Unfortunately self-love seems to be a difficult balance for many people , many of us tend to have a chosen extreme where we park.

Now I will be the first one to admit that we seem to live in times where self-worship is at its highest. You hear it everywhere, ‘as long as it makes you happy’, ‘you’ve got to put yourself first’ etc. At the extreme, self-worshipping people seem to believe that life is about pleasing themselves exclusively. You see this in the way people love and consume things obsessively. Now before you think this does not apply to you just take a look at your wardrobe. How many of those clothes/shoes/watches/bags etc. do you REALLY need? I know you work hard and I know it’s your money and that’s exactly my point. It can be exclusively and obsessively about YOU. Before you think this is just about money, some people actually collect people. People live for ‘likes’ and ‘internet friends’. They obsess over how many people view their pages, like their pictures and retweet their comments. How many relationships have you been in and out of? How many people do you need around you, for you? How many of your friendships are just about feeding your ego? Have you perhaps crossed the line from healthy self-love to self-worship? Do you perhaps need to always have the best, the most expansive, the latest, the hottest, the prettiest etc.? Do you justify it by telling yourself you ‘deserve’ only the best?

I hope I have made my point here. The truth is that an excessive accumulation of stuff usually indicates an empty hole inside that one is either desperately trying to fill or hide.

Then you get the extreme opposite where people, in the quest to not be ‘selfish’ have completely neglected loving themselves in return. We are made to believe that if you love people they will love you back. We are made to believe that putting yourself last is noble. So we bend ourselves backwards trying to make others happy, trying to please them. We sacrifice our own happiness and well being for the sake of others. We want to conform to those around us. We want to fit in and not cause upsets. Here is the challenge with this extreme, we tend to think it’s honourable. We even judge others on the other extreme because we are really convinced that we should all be self-sacrificing as people. What is your self-talk like? Are you super-critical of yourself and are always beating yourself up when you have made a mistake? Is it always your fault, even when it’s not? Do you tend to always think you should have done better / should have known better etc.?

So what do I understand to be self-love then? I think at its most basic self-love is actually self-acceptance. A lot of us have not really accepted ourselves as we are. We are always comparing ourselves with others or with some impossible standards that we struggle to attain or sustain. We only accept the parts of ourselves that we like or those that seem ‘likeable’. We beat ourselves up over those parts we don’t like and struggle accepting them. Which is why we are then super critical of ourselves (self-disregard) or try cover up those parts with people and things (self-worship).

I believe self-love means actually genuinely liking yourself. Do you find yourself interesting? Do you see yourself as a child of God and believe that He loves you just as you are? I believe that it means accepting that you have both a good side and a flawed side (both characters and physical flaws} and instead of judging yourself for them, to rather work on them or live with them.

I believe self-love means applying 1 Corinthians 13 to yourself also because you see … ‘Self-love is patient, self -love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs of self. Self -love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects self, always trusts self, always hopes, always perseveres.’

So wear that favourite dress, use the special occasion perfume, be kind to yourself and most importantly, allow yourself to be loved by others.