Why learning to love yourself can be harder than you think

We talk a lot these days about developing self-love, but what does it actually mean to love yourself? Well, to answer that, maybe we should first consider this: What actually is love?

The word covers a whole range of different elements - perhaps explaining why ancient Greek had so many different words for it. I like the definition shared in Brené Brown’s book ‘Atlas of the Heart’, which is this:

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

So in order to love ourselves, we have to allow ourselves to really feel into, and get to know, all the different parts of ourselves. That includes the scared parts of us that don’t feel good enough, the awkward parts, the judgmental parts, the controlling parts - all of them. That’s a vulnerable place to go.

Then, we need to offer trust, respect, kindness, and affection to all these parts of ourselves. Easier said than done when so often we cringe away from the parts of ourselves that don’t feel ‘acceptable’.

How do we learn to love ourselves?

If we think of love as a feeling, we can see compassion as a practice, which can both generate love and be generated by love. Also in ‘Atlas of the Heart’, Brené Brown defines compassion as: 

‘The daily practice of recognising and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.’

So if we can attend to our experiences kindly, and recognise that we are not alone and there is nothing wrong with us for feeling however we feel (in other words, show compassion to ourselves), we develop self-love.

So what gets in the way of loving ourselves?

Obstacle 1: Labelling certain parts of ourselves as ‘bad’

A friend of mine recently told me she had been on an online personal development course where the teacher listed out a series of internal parts of ourselves - the critic, the controller, the fear and so on - and labelled them as ‘the shitty committee’.

If we overlay the above definition of love onto that - offering trust, respect, kindness and affection to our most vulnerable and powerful parts - it becomes clear that these parts were not being offered love.

And it’s a common and easy pitfall to trip into - it’s human - but something worth addressing. How often have we (myself included) talked about ‘tackling your inner critic’ Or described the unwanted parts of ourselves as ‘the gremlins’?

It’s tricky, because it’s fair enough, and really important, that we explore how to prevent these parts from being in control of everything we do. They do very often hold us back, so learning how to get them to relinquish some control is important. But if we do so in a way that labels them ‘bad’, it rarely works.

Here’s where my training in internal family systems (IFS) and mindful self-compassion has been game-changing. The basis of all of this work needs to be compassion and curiosity. If we can approach all the parts of ourselves with kindness, without judgement, and with an interest in understanding what they have to tell us, we’re onto a winner.

What IFS teaches us is that all these parts of ourselves, however destructive they may appear to be (and may actually be), are valuable parts of us, whose intentions - while sometimes severely misguided - are good. Inner critics are examples of parts that are working hard to protect us and are driven by fears that if they don’t criticise us so that we perform better, or make ourselves smaller, then we’ll face overwhelming rejection.

Like many of our protectors, they likely acquired their fears years ago, when we were small children, and have been stuck in that mindset ever since. They may not always be active, but when something sets them off - a familiar-looking threat, perhaps - they click into action and take up their role because they fear for our safety.

If we follow the ‘shitty committee’ approach, and sideline these protective parts of ourselves by labelling them ‘bad’, what happens? While they might quieten for a while, their anxieties are likely to grow as they feel no one is listening to them, which means that they become more active. And if we do label them ‘bad’ and ignore their needs, we send a message that only certain parts of ourselves are worthy of love. In other words, some parts are shameful and unworthy.

Shame is a very powerful and difficult emotion to carry. Since we are social animals, we depend on the acceptance of others for survival. So to feel shame is to feel under threat. Shame leads us into a spiral of hiding what we perceive as shameful, burying those feelings and preventing us from talking openly - the very thing that can release us from shame.

A shame spiral is a painful place to be. We’ve all been there, and it takes some time even to realise that you’re in it. And it’s a difficult place from which to cultivate love. (It’s making me think of that Morcheeba song ‘fear can stop you loving, love can stop your fear.’) Anyway, all that to say - if we want to develop self-love, we need to cultivate openness and acceptance of all the different parts of ourselves.

Obstacle 2: Striving to ‘be better’

Now this can be a tricky one - we’ll have to get into the detail here, and it’s the detail that makes all the difference. Most of us are probably here engaging with this material for the very reason that we’re interested in personal development. A desire to understand ourselves better, and to overcome the difficulties that hold us back, can be really positive. There’s a subtle difference between this and striving to ‘be better’, which makes all the difference.

When I talk about striving to be better, I’m talking about being driven by a sense of ‘there’s something wrong with me’ or ‘I must be able to control this situation if only I try harder’. Perhaps I can talk about this as healthy vs unhealthy striving.

The starting points for each of these are different.

In healthy striving, we start from ‘I know that I am lovable and enough, flaws and all. I know that I can’t control everything about my situation.’

Whereas, unhealthy striving starts with ‘I will only be OK, lovable, acceptable, once I achieve these goals. If I just keep striving, I can correct what’s wrong here.’

In healthy striving, we know that our frustrations, challenges, foibles and flaws, are a normal part of the human experience. We recognise that we are in good company, that experiencing emotional ups and downs is part of being human and that millions of others have felt exactly as we feel.

Whereas in unhealthy striving, we start seeing these setbacks as reflections of our own unworthiness. Shame isolates us - ‘there must be something wrong with me’.

So if we can first allow ourselves to be - exactly as we are - without judgement or shame, then we can free ourselves up to develop and grow in a healthy way. It’s exactly as Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychotherapy, described it:

‘The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.’ - Carl Rogers.

Obstacle 3: Rushing & stress

Now, this obstacle relates very closely to the previous two. Stress and rushing tend to tip us into a more reactive state of mind. This makes it harder to be accepting of ourselves and can lead to unhealthy striving and self-judgement.

In other words, as stress agitates those protective parts of us, fear-driven behaviours seep in and rushing prevents us from stopping to notice this. Before we know it, we’re not sure how we got here, but we’re in a state of overwhelm and disarray. And we can very easily have lost touch with those key elements of self-love - of allowing ourselves to be deeply seen and known and responding with trust, respect, kindness and affection (paraphrased from Brené Brown, as quoted above).

So what can we do about all this?

Well, it is worth first acknowledging that the three obstacles listed above are things that most if not all of us, struggle with from time to time. So perhaps when we notice ourselves doing these things, we can offer some kindness rather than reprimanding ourselves. We are simply human, struggling with things just like everybody else. And it’s worth acknowledging what was in the title of this post - that these obstacles are well-intentioned - they come from parts of us that are trying to protect and care for us.

So it’s important that we recognise that they are trying their best and that learning to do things differently takes time. The next article in this series will explore three steps you can take to start dissolving these three obstacles, but even before that, the awareness you’re tapping into can start making a difference. Beginning to notice that you’re doing these things is a hugely powerful insight that can start you on a track towards a different way of being.

Because it can be difficult to see your own patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, engaging in coaching can work magic by shining a light on things about yourself that were invisible to you before. Sometimes the compassionate listening space of coaching can be so powerful that even by speaking your challenges aloud, you feel the tension lifting and the stuckness shifting - you release emotions and allow yourself to approach things differently, stepping into a position of power and agency within your own life. It is witnessing these joyful moments of release and transformation that make me love doing this work, and that inspire me to share the work of coaching with a wider audience.

Footnotes:

IFS (Internal family systems) is a model of therapeutic practice that was developed by a therapist (Dick Schwartz) who, having originally trained as a family therapist, started to notice that using the same principles he’d learnt in family therapy was incredibly effective when working with individuals. His basis was a compassionate, curious, exploratory approach - setting out to understand each individual’s experience. What he learnt from his patients was that we are all made up of all these different parts of ourselves - like subsections of our personality (or like the characters in the film Inside Out, if you’ve seen that).

All of us are made up of parts like this. This is why we often feel conflicted - we have two or more parts feeling different ways about things. And as Dick Schwartz had learnt as a family therapist, we need to listen to all our parts, understand what’s driving their behaviour, and respond with compassion, if we’re to have any chance of creating harmony and resolving issues.

‘Protector’ is the IFS term used to describe parts of our personality that are focused on protecting us from harm - either through managing things tightly or by firefighting to avert the impact of difficult experiences. An inner critic is an example of a protector.

Reactive states of mind refer to the states our minds go into under pressure and stress, which are more automatic and focused on survival, rather than considered. In reactive states of mind, we tend to see things in extremes - all-or-nothing thinking and can be particularly judgemental and critical. This is because these states of mind exist to serve the purpose of protecting us from immediate threats to our lives, and are fear-driven.

Bibliography

1. Brené Brown. Atlas of the Heart. New York Random House; 2021.