Who Doesn’t Know How To Love Himself, Won’t Know How To Love You
It’s impossible to offer others what we don’t have. Just think that if we are not able to feel love for ourselves, it will be difficult for us to have a healthy relationship with others. Loving yourself is the first step in developing a foundation of trust and stability with another person.
Loving yourself means giving yourself the opportunity to discover the great potential and greatness we carry. It means being honest with yourself, committing to your own well-being. Furthermore, loving yourself also implies being aware of one’s vital needs and accepting, respecting and loving ourselves for who we are.
When we stop judging ourselves, criticizing ourselves, comparing ourselves to others, demanding to be different from who we are, we break with the preconceived idea we have about ourselves. This idea that conditions our lives and makes us live unaware of an important and valuable part of our being.
learn to love yourself
To be at peace with ourselves, we need to stop demanding beyond what we really are. Having aspirations to improve in life and as people is an indisputable project that we all need to do; but we cannot settle into a state of constant anxiety in which we despise our essence.
It is positive to learn to break with the false beliefs that condition our present. Only in the present can we act and live fully, and even if we don’t have everything we dreamed of having, we have the power to change things, acting according to who we are. Fantasizing about what the past was or what our future will be like only takes us away from reality. A reality that will never be the same as the one we dreamed of, but at least it’s real.
Learning to love yourself is an endless journey that will be presented in many ways. Valuing yourself in a healthy way is the first step towards self-knowledge. We need to learn to think more firmly, putting aside excessive criticism and unattainable perfection.
The attributions we perform about ourselves affect our self-esteem. Our self-esteem will suffer if we give credit to external factors, such as luck or coincidence, to the goals we have achieved in our life; and giving merit to internal characteristics to failures. Due to this kind of unfair assignments to ourselves we become more difficult people to be loved.
How to love others
True love is not physical or erotic love, but loving someone, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Sometimes feelings of intense desire, admiration, and emotional investment in another person make love difficult to understand. Most of us, at some point, have confused what it means to love another person with possessing or wanting to change another person.
To love others, we need to be based on altruistic ideas and behavior. Love for a person makes us want to contribute to the development of their abilities, not what we would like them to have.
Seeking our happiness and feeling good about ourselves is not being selfish, but it is the most necessary and important condition to be able to establish a positive relationship with others. Over time, we realize that we can’t blame others for not being what we’d like, and that’s where the journey to loving others begins.
