Why Loving Yourself Isn't Enough
Do you get told when relationships are challenging, or you're not exactly receiving the love that you desire that you just need to love yourself more?
And that somehow, self-love is the magic ticket that will solve all your relationship (and life!) problems?
I've been hearing for a long time, and maybe you have too, that in order to have love you just need to love yourself... more.
While I DO believe that loving yourself is incredibly important and that it is quite difficult, perhaps impossible to receive love from others if you don't love yourself, I'm starting to find that bit of advice to be a bit cliché... and inadequate.
Just loving yourself actually isn't enough.
It isn't enough for a couple of reasons:
First, and perhaps most obviously, love and relationship aren't just about you, they are also about the other person, about giving as much as they are about receiving.
It's possible to love yourself, take good care of yourself, do what's right for you and completely miss the needs, feelings and well-being of others. Just loving yourself in this way can still make it very difficult to have a satisfying relationship. You must also love the other person, you must also give love.
As someone from the blog Humans of New York so eloquently put:
"Love is a fragile thing. It will dissolve, so you have to recreate it everyday. Everyday you have to give your woman [man, brother, sister, friend] a new reason to love you."
The other, less obvious reason why loving yourself just isn't enough has to do with our past conditioning, experiences, subconscious patterns and beliefs. We may deeply love ourselves, feel deeply self-connected, and yet have subconscious beliefs and messages that affect our choices and our ability to engage in certain ways. These messages my often even have been put in place as an act of self-love.
Just imagine, if something traumatic or painful has occurred in your life connected to others, you may,on a subconscious level, as an act of self-love decide that you are never going to put yourself in a situation like that again. So, if you just love yourself without addressing these other layers, it won't transform your experience of relationship and love.
In addition, if you're anything like me you are so incredibly sensitive to the underlying energetic patterns of others, that unless you are very careful, you can, without being aware of it, start to take on their “stuff”.
You also may have learned throughout your life
In my experience, though self-love is an important foundation, it takes more than just loving yourself to work with this and learn how to navigate it in a way that you don't completely loose yourself and become tangled up.
So YES! love yourself and know that there is no substitute for truly loving yourself. It is the foundation for all other love. If you feel like you DO really love yourself, but still struggle or get confused in relationships, know that it's probably not because you just don't love yourself enough.
Please share comments, thoughts, experiences and reflections below. If this provides inspiration, insight or food for thought, then share it with your friends so they can engage with these ideas too.
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