3.4 Loving yourself before you feel self-love
I remember hearing self–help gurus say…
It’s only once you feel love for yourself that you can truly love someone else.
Or….
It’s only when you’re able to feel love for yourself that you can truly treat yourself with care.
But this begs the question…
What do you do until then?
What do you do until that special feeling shows up?
What if the feeling of self–love does not come easily for you? What if it doesn’t come until later in life? Like was true for me.
The good news is that…
Self-love can be an action before it becomes a feeling.
Even long before.
The good news is that…
You get to take nurturing action on you own behalf without waiting to feel the emotion of self-love first.
And you’re able to do this because…
You believe in nurturance.
You want every child to grow up loving themselves deeply from early on. For you, this is not just a wish or a hope. It’s a passion. And this passion is…
A stand you take in your life and with your life.
And it’s a…
A moral stand.
It comes from that deepest place in your heart where you make your moral decisions.
Self–hate is a personal problem, as it is for children who get a bad start in life. Like if they grow up in a dysfunctional family where they get treated badly.
And self–hate is a social problem, forced on people taught by society to disregard themselves, and worse, to actively turn against themselves. For example…
Girls are taught to hate their bodies. And they’re taught that women are not worth as much as men and they should force themselves to fit in to this unjust society as they grow up.
People of color are freely hated by tens of millions of their fellow citizens, and they’re taught that they should join in that hate. They’re taught they are nobodies, and not worth caring about, not even by themselves.
Gay and lesbian people are taught to despise themselves and their desires from the minute they realize as children or teenagers that they’re not straight.
On and on it goes. So many people get self–hate hammered into them. A breathtaking number.
But just because you’re the victim of hate messages and hate attacks, just because you’re victimized in this way…
Does not mean you have to identify as a victim.
And it…
Does not mean you have to collude with the haters.
And you do not have to wait until somehow, magically, someday the feeling of self–love arrives in your life. Instead you get to take action right now. You get to take a moral stand for self–defense and self–nurturance both at the same time.
Which means…
You get to fight for yourself no matter what.
You get to fight no matter how many hateful messages you absorbed as a child and no matter how many people are attacking you now as an adult. You get to fight even if your self–love is suppressed and buried.
And you fight, because you…
Believe in it.
