Now that I've talked my journey to self love, it's important for me to discuss the steps it takes to get there.
Step 1: Self-Acceptance. Before I could love myself I had to first come to terms with who I was. I've spent a lot of time using denial as a coping mechanism, especially when it comes to my anxiety or depression. I often deny my feelings and negative emotions, I deny when I'm struggling and I often deny the existence of my depression and anxiety. It was very difficult because I was creating this false narrative in my head that in order to be worthy as a person I couldn't have anything "wrong" with me and so anything that could be considered off had to be swept under the rug and ignored. (I choose to put "wrong" in parentheses because having mental illness doesn't make anything wrong with you, it was just a limiting belief I held at the time.) After leaving school and being hospitalized for my anxiety and depression, ignoring the existence of my mental illnesses became an impossibility if I wanted to survive and take care of myself. So once I got to that point of needing to see myself for who I was without judgement, I could then move to self-compassion. It often doesn't take something as drastic as hospitalization to move to a state of self-acceptance in your own life, but it is something that is quite difficult to do. But once you do it, it's such a relief because you're no longer under the pressure to be a version of yourself that you're not. Step 2: Self-Compassion After self acceptance I had to learn how to like myself and the easiest way to do that was to learn self-compassion. It's often so much easier to show compassion to friends and loved ones than ourselves. When it comes to me, I'm always super hard on myself with my mistakes, flaws and shortcomings. I typically feel like the only way to motivate myself to do better is constant reprimand. Learning self-compassion was a process of looking at myself from the outside and learning to support myself in difficult situations.This one is really hard because it's often difficult to justify to yourself why you are deserving of love. But the more you practice it, the easier it becomes until you too start to see yourself as someone worthy of self-love. And that's when you're ready for the third part. Step 3: Self Love Now self-love is taking the first two things and combining them. Accepting the parts about yourself that you don't appreciate and choosing to learn to LOVE those parts instead of looking down on them. It's learning how to be sympathetic to yourself and how to provide yourself with love and care when you're struggling. Self-love isn't a destination, it's promise you make to yourself that you work every day to keep. Real self-love is difficult, it's choosing yourself even when it feels like it makes no sense. It's building a relationship with yourself, and just like any loving relationship it's constant work. Self-love is re-learning to love yourself as you continuously change, grow and develop. That's the difficult part. Self-love is learning new things about yourself or your identity or gaining weight or changing your hair and working to get to a place where you love yourself just as much. But ideally, with self-love you want to be at a place that you love yourself so much on the inside that no matter how you change on the outside, you still love you.
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Naija SunshineHi! My name is Efe and this is my mental health blog where I'll be talking about my experiences with mental illness, as well as my thoughts and tips. Archives
September 2021
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