Here Is What My Father Taught Me About Self-love

I remember when I was trying to deal with anorexia nervosa, my father used to say, “if a person doesn’t love themself, they don’t love anyone.” I didn’t understand quite well what my father meant when he used to say that. However, as I got older, I came to realize that his idea was so brilliant and profound.

Self-love is the most basic step towards self-fulfillment and happiness. If you don’t love yourself, you are unable of giving your love to other people. In order to share an emotion or sentiment, you have to know what it is beforehand, and how people feel it. If not, you can be hurting people, and assume that it is love that you are sharing.

Besides, under this circumstance, you can’t even accept love and appreciation from other people because you think that you don’t deserve it. Therefore, you only attract more suffering and pain to your life.

What is self-love?

Even though self-love is such a crucial element, it is not normally internalized in our society. We generally teach children to be nice, brave, well-mannered, etc. and assume that somehow, they are naturally predisposed to love themselves and will do anything to protect their lives.

Yes! I think each one of us was born with the survival instinct, which is not entirely the same thing as self-love. However, to love yourself truly you need to be able to stand for your beliefs, your well-being, and what makes you happy and valuable. It’s not just trying to survive, it’s a continuous process that needs to be reinforced at each moment of your life.

That’s why the question of self-love needs to be considered from a social perspective and requires a much more nuanced approach than the terminology of survival instinct.

A child who had never experienced unconditional love during their first months of life would find it hard to love themself. Even when a person has found love throughout their life, they can get to a point of self-hatred due to different other factors.

Having a sense of existence is not simply a question of life and death, but a very complex paradigm. It is about the quality of attention that you give to yourself, and the boundaries that you settle so that you can maintain what you consider to be important for you.

That is, you need to have two things in your mind: on one hand, you have to nurture your body, your soul, and the people that are important to you, and on the other hand, you need to know how to keep part of this nutrient for yourself and to not let people abuse you or take advantage of you. If not, you are going to be hurt, and consequently, you might end up hurting people as well.

How to foster self-love

As simple as it seems, it’s not that easy for most people to love themselves. We need so much external attention that sometimes we are willing to lose everything that makes us happy, confident, and healthy so that we can have more friends, make more people happy, and have more people around…. Because our society values fame, connections, and popularity. If you have always been in a position of self-hatred, in order to get to a point where you love yourself, you will have to lose most of your connections.

Be aware that most people you have in your life are there because you’ve attracted them. If you don’t love yourself, that means most of your friends are either there to take advantage of you, or because they hate themselves as well. Both of those types of friendships can coincide in some cases.

That’s why there are at least 7 things that you need to be prepared for before fostering your self-love:

1. When you make the decision to love yourself, you’ll have to be lonely at some point. Maybe you’ll even give up and turn to your original self because of the pressure of being alone.

2. Nevertheless, be patient with yourself and get back as soon as you discover that you have left the right path.

3. Don’t try to change everything at the same time. You need to foster your self-love step by step, from the easiest point to the most difficult ones.

4. Be open to new relationships: As you are trying to love yourself, you’ll find new people that are going to talk to you. Some of them are even people that you wouldn’t even approach when you weren’t confident enough.

5. However, be aware that some people might actually come (intentionally or not) to destroy what you are barely building. That means you have to know how to differentiate right relationships from wrong ones.

6. Once you get to a point of confidence, continue to fight for your self-love, because it’s not something that you get and will never lose. Besides, what is self-love at some point in your life, will not be the same thing at some other point.

7. Help people love themselves, by respecting their boundaries and sharing your sincere love and appreciation with them.

That is, as valuable as a relationship or friendship can be if those people that are part of it don’t love themselves, it’s most likely a toxic relationship where love, hatred, and suffering are entangled.

When a whole society or community is constructed with people that hate themselves, it’s hard to foster any other kind of positive emotions and sentiments.

Self-love is a very important emotional state that you need to continuously foster in your life and then instill in your loved ones’ life.

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