I should always love myself first, and you should too

I should always love myself first, and you should too

From good communication to honesty, love, integrity and passion. There are tons of factors that go into building a conscious, balanced, sacred partnership. In my opinion, there is just one factor that is sort of overlooked: our relationship with ourselves. People who aren’t conscious of the connection between personal identity and relationship identity don’t understand that we bring emotional wounds from our childhood, teenage and adult years into our adult relationships wherer in business, in love or in friendships. Our childhood and adulthood are profoundly interlinked and impact how we show up in the world and how we feel about ourselves. This sets the basis of something called ‘unconscious attraction’, which is the type of love we accept, attract and tolerate. I find that when people start looking into things, they start to see a lot of reasons why they’ve ended up in the relationship that they have.

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In my view, establishing a connection with onseself, which involves truly  comprehending who you are and how you became that way, coupled with a strong foundation of self-love, self-respect (and even self-adoration), allows you to enter a relationship from the best possible position – not from a place of lack where you must depend on another person to fill the void within you. If you enter a relationship without a firm grounding in internal worth, trust, or belief in yourself (meaning you do not comprehend the truth of what makes you worthy, likable and lovable), you are likely to have a persistent need (either consciously or unconsciously) for external validation from someone else. If you are not filling up your own cup, you will continuosly seek your partner’s validation to ”fill the void” and make you feel better. This is not the foundation of a healthy relationship, as not only can this person take that validation away from you at any moment, but also because I believe that a healthy relationship should involve building something together, with both parties taking responsibility for the emotions they bring to the table, rather than putting pressure on one person in the relationship. This is a sure-fire way to lead to the end of a relationship over time if you are mothering or fathering your partner or guiding them through their trauma rather than them taking responsibility for it.

If you don’t have self-love or self-respect, you also won’t trust in yourself, your judgement, your decisions and your boundaries because you will have never been taught that your own internal compass, intuition, and decision making is worthy of being followed – and that your boundaries are worthy of being respected (EVEN if someone else doesn’t like them). This lack of internal self-love often shows up in terms of pleasing people. I always refer to this as the inner child wound because your inner child doesn’t want the other person to leave (just like we wanted our parents to stick around in childhood), so without a feeling of safety on our own, you will do everything and anything to ensure that the other person sticks around.

I used to ask my friend regularly – what sort of true validation is this if they only stay around because you are bending backward to tolerate their behaviour? When you are clear on who you are and what you stand for, you can start to find consistency, stability and happiness in yourself, meaning that you don’y have to look for someone to fill up your cup. This means you will avoid a codependent or conditional form of love because… honestly?… You will want them, but you won’t *need* them, and that is a critical pieve of information to distinguish.

Mostly the problem is in our childhood, that it often taught us that we need others to love us or that we need to act in a certain way to earn love from our parents or caregivers. Our caregivers often did yheir best with what they knew, but their emotional limitations impacted how they loved and cared for us. This, in turn, influences how we grow into adults and what we think and know love to be. But for some people? Particularly for those with narcissitic parents, things can be even more complicated.

Many people around me are deeply shaped (and ofted damaged) by their parents or narcissistic parents who have never made them feel like they were good enough or lovable enough. This leads to them often dating similar types of people in adulthood, which can lead to deeply toxic and distressing relationships (but that feel like ‘love’ and ‘passion’) or becoming toxic themselves.

I have seen many toxic situations around me, and I have been in some myself. I’m having to do a huge amount of work on my self-love, self-respect and internal boundaries – particularly when I found myself attracted to toxic men who were bad for me. Like with everything, self-awareness is so important here. Once you commit to doing the work, you can start to see what cycles you have been conditioned with, and then you can start to break them down and rebuild them.

For me, self-love is a huge party of my daily routine. These are some areas that I try to focus on in terms of building my self-love, self-respect and self-identity.

  • Engaging myself in self-mirror talk and affirmation work when I can – I love to know I am working deep into my subconscious as this is what truly holds power.
  • I connect with my body trough a holi (body) worship routine and thank it for all it has done to get me where I am today.
  • I try to accept the broken parts of me – this isn’t about thinking I am ‘perfect’ it is accepting that I am perfect despite all I have been through and have weathered. I forgive those in my past who hurt me – I know that I am stronger than anything they put me through and that everything has shaped me to be this resilient, proud and strong woman I am today. I’m grateful for them, no matter what they did.
  • Engaging myself in a health and fitness routine frequently and engage in therapy whenever necessary because if you do not respect and cherish your body and mind, then you will not be telling yourself subconsciously that it is worthy of being loved.
  • I always put my own energy first over anyone else’s. Some people might call this selfish, but I call it smart. I will never engage with anyone who has bad energy, and I will nto engage with anyone who steals from my energy in any way. I keep my circle around me incredibly small and full of amazing people. You are not getting acces to me if you aren’t a really good quality person.
  •  I am actively working on setting my boundaries now. I am a strong, intelligent smart woman, and I will leave a relationship (business or personal) at the first sign of red flags because I no longer am willing to sacrifice myself and end up in shitty relationships or situations. I have done this too many times when I was younger;
  • I try to love myself hard – I believe in myself more than anyone else because if I won’t, then who will? I tell myself constantly that I can achieve whatever I want to and reaffirm how many beautiful things there are about me.
  • I try to take time out for myself whenever I need it – maybe it’s that my period needs me to be extra gentle with myself that week, or maybe it is that I need a couple of hours where I will move work calls and prioritize me. I always come first because I know that my future partner will be grateful for how I cherish and care for myself.
  • Finally, I try to listen to my feminine energy and intuition. We are so often disconnected from our true self and intuition that it is hard to see what our body and soul truly feel. Slowing down allows us to look a little more clearly at what is happening, what part we are playing in it, and how we can act differently for a better and more healthy outcome.

This work is such a huge part of my journey and I hope it will be in yours too. Let me know what you’d add to the list.

To love and healing,

Jena X

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