“It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit.” Eartha Kitt
Self-love is more than just a good thing. It is essential to building a healthy, loving relationship with another person.
Self-Love Is Not Narcissistic
But we shouldn’t be confused. Self-love is not narcissistic self-focus. Self-love is absolutely not about me, me, me. Far from it.
Self-love’s about holding ourselves in unconditional acceptance and positive regard. It’s about extending ourselves compassionate forgiveness. It’s about looking after ourselves in caring and balanced ways. It’s about respecting ourselves and standing for our worth in relationships. It’s about embracing our strengths and our weaknesses. It’s also about knowing our legitimate needs, honoring them and expressing those needs responsibly to others. No one can give us self-love. It’s something we have to grant ourselves.
Self-Love Is Noble
While Self-Love is basic, it’s also noble. In fact, it’s the noblest of acts. And yet, somehow, it’s the hardest.
You see, many of us don’t have a very high self-love quotient. We’ve accepted poor behavior on the part of others. We’ve not looked after ourselves properly at any level. We’ve thought about ourselves in unkind and critical ways. We believed our only value was in our accomplishments and others’ assessments of our worth or what we imagined them to be. We were also conflicted about what our obligations are to others and what our obligations are to ourselves.
Perhaps we weren’t conditioned to have positive self-regard. Perhaps we were taught that our only worth was to serve others and to sublimate our own needs. To do otherwise, we were told, is to be selfish. The result has been that focus has been so completely on others, that we’ve forgotten our most important relationship of all: the one we have with ourselves.
Making Self-Loving Choices
But now we are coming to understand that healthy self-love is the foundation for a good life and great relationships. And we certainly deserve both.
So from today we can each make a commitment and a choice to lift our Self-Love Quotient. We can do this each day in large and small ways by changing our thoughts, but even more importantly, by making self-respecting choices.
What’s your Self-Love Quotient? And what will you do today to enhance it?
