What is Self-Love?

For many people, self-love means occasionally treating yourself to an expensive piece of clothing or dedicating a night just to yourself. However, the true feeling of self-love is something that you should build and nurture throughout your life.

In fact, one of the first steps in accepting love from others is learning how to love and appreciate yourself. Only by understanding and embracing your inner self can you build strong, intimate relationships and be at peace with others.

Unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced society, people are often swept up in other people’s emotions, personal goals, and constant feelings of self-criticism. Consequently, this can lead to serious mental health issues, including depression and anxiety, as well as relationship problems. This is why individual coaching for relationship issues often includes working on self-acceptance, self-esteem, and other aspects of self-growth.

What It Means To Love Yourself

It’s not unusual for people to either completely neglect themselves or mistaken self-love for selfishness and egocentrism. Some even believe that self-love is a shallow concept often propagated in commercial purposes.

However, self-love is so much more than this. While this feeling and attitude toward oneself may have different meanings for various individuals, it’s typically described as self-compassion, self-appreciation, and self-respect.

Of course, loving yourself requires you to first gain a deeper insight into your own mind and feelings, understand your personal behaviours and decisions, and learn how to accept your mistakes. By truly embracing your inner self, you will learn how to be gentle to yourself and your emotions instead of striving for perfection or criticizing yourself for every mistake.

Have you ever experienced that “over the moon” sensation when you find out that “someone” loves you? Just to hear those words “I love you” mean the world. It causes your heart to race, your stomach to flutter, and you finally find comfort in knowing you matter.

That sense of “I matter to someone” or that someone loves you, admires you, and cares for you is deep and natural. It feels good to matter—to be important in someone’s world. Unconditional love is something all human beings crave, and unfortunately, many people do not get it or enough of it.

Because you might be lacking in love, and because heartache follows those beautiful words in many cases, it is important to learn how to love one’s self.

Loving one’s self does not mean developing a shell and blocking out the world. It doesn’t mean having an ego so big that no one else can fit into a room with you. It doesn’t mean forgoing relationships because you only enjoy being with yourself.

It does mean becoming comfortable with who you are. It means recognizing that someone else who didn’t learn unconditional love has a hard time giving it. It means recognizing that most human beings hurt, and they pass this hurt along to other people. Understanding this can help you turn your attention from waiting and wanting someone to make you whole, to realizing you have that very ability inside of you.