7: do you really have to love yourself?

should self love be the ultimate goal? can we just like ourselves, or accept ourselves? this is what i talk about in today's episode, as well as the ups and downs of the self-love (or self-like) journey! plus, i answer a couple mental health-related questions.

stay tuned for today's small step about making a promise to yourself. it's a powerful one!

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Transcript

Do you even have to love yourself? Do you have to look in the mirror and think that you're beautiful? Should our ultimate goal be to love ourselves? That's what I want to talk about today on the small steps to self-love podcast. This is episode 7. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening another episode, out every Thursday. 

My goal was starting this podcast was to take you with me on my own self-love journey, to be on this journey together, and I got to thinking why not do an episode on what self-love really is, what that phrase means to me, what it might mean to you. 

If you're in a place of hating yourself, it's a strong word but, if you're in a place of hating yourself of disliking yourself, of being unaccepting of yourself, then the word love could feel very very far off. I don't want anyone to hear the word self-love and feel turned away from that, to feel like you are so far away from that, you could never even fathom feeling that way. And i've gone through phases of not liking that word either, of thinking there's no way I would ever love myself. And I know that there are self love advocates out there who say “yes I very much love myself. I'm in love with myself, and even still whenever I actually think about that, about saying those words about me, it feels weird to me. And so maybe that isn't the word that you want to use right now and that's OK. 

Maybe your prefer self-acceptance. Maybe your goal is self like. Maybe you know love is a little too strong and you just want to move toward liking yourself, to respecting yourself or accepting yourself, or just enjoying your own company. All of those words and phrases are absolutely fine if that's where you are right now so as I wanted to start talking about self love and what that journey looks like, I wanted to first start by saying if that word doesn't resonate with you that's OK. Maybe it never will and that's OK. But maybe your goal is just acceptance right now or liking yourself right now. 

The other thing I wanted to talk about was the ups and downs of self acceptance or self like and reminding you and reminding me that ups and downs are normal. That there will be days where we feel like we are making a lot of progress and we are becoming more confident. We're doubting ourselves less. We are insulting ourselves less, accepting ourselves more and then the next day we're back to critiquing ourselves, to being down about who we are or what we look like or whatever it is. And even though the goal is to work towards that not happening we can't be hard on ourselves when it does happen, and we need to remember that there are many ups and downs and that that's OK. That's what life is about and i've mentioned similar things in past episodes that we tend to only see the good in people's lives, especially with the Internet and we don't really see a lot of people’s downs, people's critiques of themselves and days where they're not loving themselves or not liking themselves.

And so we have to remember that we aren't seeing the full experience of everyone. We have to remember that our journey is our own and that each day is different and not be hard in yourself and to give yourself grace on those days where you don't like yourself where you are judging yourself a lot or critiquing everything we do or making mistakes and you aren't forgiving yourself for that. Remember that it is OK, that tomorrow is a new day, that this is a long term experience this is a long term journey that we are on and that we can't change in a day. 

We can't wake up tomorrow and love ourselves but we can continue making progress. We can continue growing and we can forgive ourselves on those days where we're feeling down or like we cannot possibly accept who we are, accept ourselves, forgive ourselves, love ourselves. 

One of my favorite poems that i've written is in my book changing with the tides, you may have seen it before. It's one of my more popular ones that i've shared on social media before and one that tends to resonate, and it's a letter that I wrote to myself, a promise to myself as I decided to kind of embark on my own self like journey. It's on page 112 of the book changing with the tides and i am going to read it for you. And this ties into today's small step for you which if you are new to the podcast, i give you a small step each week for you to take with you that week and try to do, and it's just meant to be a little task that brings us closer to our goals of self love.

If you are in a safe area where you can close your eyes go ahead and close your eyes while I read this to you.

To the person I am today: I promise I will start loving you again. I just need to remember how it feels to be proud of you, to look in the mirror and be in awe of you. I just need to remember what it was like before I told you you weren't good enough. I buried you alive, piling doubt and loathing onto your body like soil, so only I can bring you back to life, and I will. I promise.

Small step

So that was my letter, my promise to myself and for this week’s small step, I want you to write a letter to yourself too. Starting with that phrase “to the person I am today” write a notes or a letter or promise to yourself as you are today. Write out the doubts that you're having and write a promise at the end to treat yourself better. It might feel a little weird to do but that's OK we're stepping out of our comfort zones. It's all part of the growth journey. If you don't like to write or you don't want to write, you can say it out loud. You can talk into your phone using the like voice to text feature or you could even stand in front of the mirror and say it which could be really powerful, watching yourself say this promise to you.

 And we've talked about this before on the podcast but writing is such a therapeutic way too happens tangible things to go back to this promise that you've made to yourself so I definitely recommend writing it down or recording yourself saying it so that you can go back to it and remember this promise that you made yourself. And if you're someone who kind of needs accountability for things like this you could write it down and share it with a close loved one. You can share it in the comments below if you're watching on youtube or send me a DM or post on Instagram and tag me or send it to me privately if you don't wanna share it publicly. 

I would love to read your promise to yourself and cheer you on as we're all in this journey together.

So that was today's topic I wanted to just quickly talk about self love / self like and for the rest of the podcast I wanted to answer a couple questions that i've gotten recently from readers on Instagram. So I have a couple questions that I'm gonna answer that are mental health related but not necessarily on this exact topic. 

So the first one is what do you do when your feelings are too big and you shut down making it hard to communicate your needs? So I feel like we could do a whole podcast episode on this on communicating your needs or kind of shutting down when you're feeling low about yourself so again I'm not like a licensed mental health professional this is just me talking about my own journey and this is my own experience with this and what I always turn to whenever I couldn't share my feelings out loud was writing I have talked about this before i've written about this many times before but I always turned to writing whenever I didn't want to share how I was feeling with anyone else.

Now I think that's a great short term strategy but I don't think that that's that that's long term strategy I do think it's really important to talk to someone whether that is family or friends or you are able to go to counseling or whatever it is you need to do or whatever you feel comfortable with but I do think that writing it out first can really help you get your feelings across, and get your feeling straightened out. I know whatever I'm upset or I'm going through something, my mind is very jumbled and it's hard for me to think straight it's hard for me to communicate and process how I'm feeling and so writing can be a great way to do that by just thinking through how you're feeling writing it out and then going from there to being able to talk to someone about it I think that that's really helpful so that's where I recommend starting in that situation again if you don't like to write you could try just talking it out with yourself instead of keeping it all in her head whenever we're thinking we think you know maybe we're talking it through that way but actually saying it out loud that way your mind is kind of forced to stay on the same train of thought and you can be clear about how you're feeling so that's what I would recommend doing and then once you've done that talking to someone in your life if you can.

Someone else asked me how to respond if someone tells me that I do not need help and that I just want attention? And this question makes me a little sad because I think that they probably don't have bad intentions but that perception that people who are depressed or anxious or sad or whatever are seeking attention and not actually in need of help or in need of someone to talk to because i've just always thought like what if you're wrong what if this person really does need help and then you just kind of told them that they're only doing it for attention when really they need he needs someone to care about that they need someone just support them so I never really understood that mentality.

I would say that if there is someone in your life who's telling you that that is a friend to have a serious talk with him about how that makes you feel and I don't think that that person would have malicious intentions but at the same time that's not really being helpful and so I hope that there is someone in your life you can talk to it does have good intentions for you that does care about your mental health and wants you to feel supported and loved and that you can talk to and open up about your feelings with so that's how I would respond I would say you don't need attention but you would like someone to talk to about it and there's nothing wrong with that that's a normal thing to want especially when we're feeling alone and we're feeling sad so if you are in a place where you feel comfortable talking to them about that that's what I would recommend.

The other option is ignoring them and knowing that it might not be the best person to talk with about mental health related stuff and to find someone who does and hopefully you have someone who you can talk to you about it and trying even though I know it's harder to do than it is to say but trying to just ignore that and know that they're wrong and know that you know how you really feel you know what you are looking for and you know that you are not just seeking attention and that's why you're sad. So that's what I would say for that question and I hope that you find someone to talk to about what you're going through. 

So that is today's episode of small steps to self love. Thank you so much for listening! And last week I mentioned that I hope I could say this week that we got to 1000 downloads and we did so thank you so much for listening to the first seven episodes many more to come. If you have any questions for me that I can answer in future episodes or you have any topic requests please leave a comment leave a rating or review or send me a DM on Instagram and I'd love to hear from you about that. Have a great rest of your week and thank you again for listening.