The Importance of Loving Yourself
With Valentine’s Day in the month of February, we often think about love and relationships this time of year. As a result, my blogs in the month of February will focus on the different aspects of love.
It’s often said that before you can love someone else, it helps to have a healthy, loving relationship with yourself. Week after week, I see clients that do not have a healthy, loving relationship with themselves…and the toll this takes on their minds and bodies is quite obvious.
This past year, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (hypothyroidism), so I’ve been working on developing a healthy, loving relationship with myself and my body. I’m not going to lie, it’s hard AF to to tell yourself that you love yourself when you are experiencing chronic joint pain, and you just don’t look the way you want. What I had to learn and what I now stress to my clients, is that your body may be experiencing chronic pain and illness because you don’t have a healthy, loving relationship with yourself and your body. Years of negative self talk, whether it be conscious and unconscious goes somewhere. Even if you never say a thing out loud, your body experiences those thoughts. If those thoughts are not properly processed and worked through, the energy from those thoughts finds a home in your body and starts creating health problems. Those health problems we call depression, anxiety, insomnia, fibromyalgia, cancer, hypo/hyperthyroidism, and so on. This happens so slowly that no one connects the quality of their thoughts with the quality of their health.
Say Nice Things To Yourself
The best way to begin developing a healthy and loving relationship with yourself, is to create some affirmations and say them to yourself each day while looking in a mirror.
“I love myself.”
“I’m worthy of love.”
“I take care of my body, because it houses my soul.”
“My health is my priority.”
“I take responsibility for how I look and feel.”
When you’ve been feeling like sh*t for decades, this is hard to do. If you are struggling with writing these down, start with a different approach. Ask yourself, “What are some positive things I’ve always needed to hear but was never told?”
Your answers may be something like this:
“You are loved.”
“I love you unconditionally.”
“You are not a mistake.”
“You were wanted.”
“You can do anything you set your mind to.”
This is a huge step in learning to love yourself unconditionally, and to begin building that healthy, loving relationship.
Do Nice Things For Yourself
Another thing I ask my clients to do, is imagine being in a healthy and loving relationship with themselves. If you were in positive relationship with yourself, what would you do differently? Would you make better food choices? Would you exercise? What nice things would you do for yourself?
Imagine Coming From a Loving Relationship
A lot of my clients come from absolutely horrific family lives. Unfortunately, they play these “home movies” over and over in their minds, and the cumulative effect are feelings of unworthiness because of how they were treated. The truth is, we only accurately remember 10% of what happened to us. Memories change over time and our unconscious mind fills in what we don’t remember. If you’re only going to accurately remember 10% of what actually happened to you and make up the other 90%, why not steer that 90% towards something positive and happy for yourself? Plants that are grown in good soil and given proper light do much better than plants grown in sand in the dark. People are no different than plants in this aspect. If you rewrite your memories and imagine coming from a loving family or experience loving relationships, the relationship you have with yourself, along with your health, will change for the better.
