People Who Say "You Just Need to Love Yourself" Don't Understand Trauma

“Self-love isn’t the fix that’s needed. It’s the BYPRODUCT of the fix that’s needed.” Amen, sister.

If you’ve been abused as a child, you don’t know how to love yourself and don’t even know what that means. That’s why you need to PRETEND that you’re someone who loves themselves. You ask yourself, “What would a confident woman who loves herself do in this situation?” Then act like the confident woman and NOT yourself. You have to act in ways that are contrary to your traumatic training. Eventually if you keep standing up for yourself and act like you’re confident, you will be confident. Don’t act like you would act. Act like someone who’s never been hurt; act like someone who’d walk away at a moments notice if they were abused. It took me years of doing this before I realized that I did love myself by not destroying myself.

My father who was verbally and physically abusive as I was growing up later proclaimed my adult life was so troublesome because I hated myself. He was right. He just failed to mention why that was so.

It's hard to love yourself when the people who are meant to love you don't. ie close relatives

I think one hard part of self love for people like us is that it’s often TOUGH love that’s needed. We have to do the hard stuff, like recognizing our own self-defeating behaviors and making the changes. Ending relationships that make us miserable. Realizing that we’re not a very good person and starting to become better. Cutting out sugar because it makes us anxious. When people say “love yourself,” they often mean “do frivolous things like eat chocolate, go to a spa, or take a day off.” It’s like yeah, that stuff’s not gonna cut it. We have to make real changes… and it’s really hard work…

I am an attachment based therapist, this episode shows just how deep Anna understands attachment. Love her work. Keep it up Anna ❤

“If you can’t love yourself, start by taking positive actions.” It just needs to be said that taking positive action when you don’t feel like it IS loving yourself in a concrete way, just not the fluffy half-spiritual way people talk about in song lyrics. Love is not a feeling. Love is about stepping up.

I was watching a Jennifer Myers video where she responded to a coworkers question about why she has such good self-esteem, and she thought about it a moment and said "in order to have self esteem, i perform esteemable acts." Like she respects herself because she has built up years of evidence that she is respectable by spending those years behaving in accordance with her own values. This echoes that sentiment nicely. It was a huge eye opener for me!

One of the most awful feelings I’ve ever had was when someone told me “You can’t really love someone else until you love yourself.” First of all, that’s a LIE. But the reason it felt so bad was because I already had the lack of love from my parents, siblings and clearly fair-weather friends… so they were not only DENYING my obvious actions of love but also saying that the lack of love in my life was my own fault.

It amazes me how clueless "normal" people are. The things they say. The platitudes, the quotes from "masters", the punishing tone of their voice, "Loving yourself is the fruit of recovery" (my paraphrase). No wiser words have been said. Thanks so much.

I DO love myself... That's what folks really seem to miss... How much of our parents' work we had to do for ourselves! Did you have to go to bat for yourself against an entire school district to get the teachers and education you knew you needed at an early age because your parents were too fucked up to do their job? Did you have to change your own diapers? Did you have to find your own food? Did you have to try to get the love and parenting you needed from adults from somewhere outside your home? All we've ever done is LOVE OURSELVES, fight for ourselves, advocate for ourselves and deep down inside we know that is SO WRONG & it makes us angry. I've spent my entire life loving myself. And so have you. Remember that.

When people say "you should learn to love yourself" to me I look at them like they are speaking a foreign language.

I think being able to forgive ourselves and others is a critical part of learning to love. Gotta let go of some baggage too.... I'm still working on it, believe me!

Definitely hated myself when I was younger and loved someone deeply but because I hated myself I self sabotaged that relationship. To bad we can't go back in time with a healed mind.

My instinctual answer to that was always:"But how??!!" And even now, I feel it takes a lot of time to figure out how to properly take care of myself. Loving oneself is hard work and requires discipline. Moving, eating healthy, sleeping enough, seeing friends, practicing stuff that is important to me, going to therapy, learning about communication, saying no to the wrong situations, somehow getting it into my thick skull that maybe I deserve to be loved... "You gotta love yourself" turns out to be quiet a complex operation.

There is another influence on whether we can love ourselves, it is whether anyone in our childhood showed us that we were lovable. When your family went to your school plays it shows that you were worth someone’s effort. When they went to your games or graduations they reinforce that worth. When they didn’t go to ANYTHING you did it tells me that I am not worthy of love. I spent decades with that feeling infesting my background thoughts and it wasn’t until I realized that it was buried in me that I could expose it to God’s love and receive that healing.

I can honestly say, it's my friends who showed me that I was lovable. When i was a student in my early twenties, I was living by myself far from my family. I gradually made a group of friends and I was just AMAZED that they wanted to spend time with me, invited me to their homes etc. I thought "wait a minute, does this mean I'm not the ugly annoying piece of worthless shit my family has made me feel like I am my whole life? Either they're lying, or my friends are crazy for being so nice to me." That got me thinking and re-assessing reality. It took time to build some self confidence, but that was definitely the starting point. Their love was the first building block towards being at peace with myself. I'm 35 now, those friends are still near and dear to me. :)

A new age type told me that "you should never even get out of bed in the morning unless you first feel unconditional love for yourself, humanity, and the Universe. It's a choice!!" Talk about magical thinking! What utter BS! And yes, I've been told a gazillion times that I'd never truly love anyone or be loved unless I were in love with myself first. Both my parents hated themselves, and I loathed myself, but I loved so many people and animals deeply. I felt unworthy of them, but I had loads of love for them!

Commit to honesty. Honesty in all areas of your life. I can thank a 12-Step program for starting me on this path. Once you taste a life lived in honesty, it becomes difficult to be anything else. Beginning of self love for me.

I've always HAYED the saying, "Take care of yourself." Whenever I jabe heard this saying from one person to another, I found it to be so passive aggressive. To me, it's like, "I don't have the capacity to worry, think, or care about you - So you take care of you." Now I know it's because no one ever taught many people how to love themselves.