When I say I love love, I mean the warm, happy kind of love. Not the toxic, distributing, intense kind of love.
Of course, there are many types of love and today I want to break down unhealthy and healthy kinds of love. There were people with whom the love felt comfortable and easy with, and people with whom the love felt overwhelming and volatile with.
How can we distinguish between healthy and unhealthy love?
Let’s unpack it!
The Five Key Concepts
A popular TedTalk by Katie Hood touches on this subject. She breaks it down into five key components:
- Unhealthy love is intense, while healthy love is comfortable
- Unhealthy love is isolating, while healthy love still makes you feel independent
- Unhealthy love is possessive, while healthy love is trusting
- Unhealthy love is belittling, while healthy love is kind
- Unhealthy love is volatile, while healthy love is respectful
The markers she mentions aren’t just good, they’re great and really touch on the toxicity that unhealthy love entails.
What it highlighted for me is really the one key difference between healthy love and unhealthy love:
Healthy love allows has practices that support your feelings of self-esteem and self-love.
Unhealthy love will make you feel anxious, overwhelmed, alone, angry, low in self-esteem, and confused.
Healthy love consists of you still being able to take care of yourself, and having self-love and self-respect in the process. You feel loved, cared for, and respected. You feel at ease and peaceful. Even with conflict (which is inevitable), you both work it out in a healthy way.
That kind of love allows for freedom and ease that makes the relationship healthy.
That kind of love allows room for self-love.
What’s the number one difference between healthy and unhealthy love?
The number one way I think you’ll be able to have healthy love…is if you always remember to love yourself…and yes, more than you love your partner (or others in general).
It might be hard to hear, but heck it was hard for me to hear the first time. All my codependency and enmeshment alarm bells went off, and I was like so concerned about being selfish or self-centered.
Here’s the thing, having self-love for yourself doesn’t mean you just focus on you. It just means you finally focus on you first. You can have an abundance of love for yourself, and an abundance of love for others. Actually, I recommend it…because a lot of love for yourself without regard for others is a breeding ground for narcissism and self-centeredness.
People stay in abusive relationships with someone because they love their partner and are focused on their partner’s needs more than their own. People people-please and feel overwhelmed because they focus on others’ needs without thinking about themselves. People with little self-love have lower self-esteem and they often question their partners and get jealous because they don’t understand how their partners would want them.
Y’all, healthy love feels freeing, not controlling. It feels safe, stable, calm, and consistent. It has trust and honesty. It’s supportive because your partner wants the best for you. It’s emotionally present and available.
Self-love motivates you to want to sustain, keep, and attract healthy love from other people. As many psychologists and psychology studies attest, “self-love and self-compassion are key for mental health and well-being.”
It might seem selfish at first, but the important thing to realize is when your cup is already full, you can better give to others. To truly be able to take care of others and nurture others, you have to know how to nurture yourself. Otherwise, you will be disconnected, have covert contract expectations of others, and be engaging in self-abandonment by not loving yourself and mainly focusing on others’ needs.
A healthy love starts with you having an abundance of self-love. Then you can continue to love, care, and respect others.
You have the power now to love yourself!
To attract healthy love, it starts with you. It starts with loving yourself enough to leave when things aren’t in your best interest and loving yourself enough to choose a life with people who do care about and love you.
You attract love that feels familiar to you…and usually, the most familiar kind of love is the kind of love your parents gave to you. But what if your parents were unhealthy? What if their relationship was toxic? What if you suffered emotional abuse or neglect?
Then it’s time to change the relationship you spend the most amount of time with…and that’s the relationship with yourself.
How can I create a healthy, loving relationship?
Your subconscious mind wants to keep you safe so it will choose to be around people that feel familiar. You are most familiar with how you treat yourself. How you treat yourself is most likely a reflection of how your parents treated you.
For example, if your parents were critical, you likely are critical of yourself. If your parents were supportive, you are likely more supportive of yourself. If your parents were emotionally absent, you likely are not present with your own emotions and feelings, being disconnected from how you feel.
But now you have the agency to change how you treat yourself. You can become more loving to yourself, changing your subconscious way of being, and changing who you are subconsciously attracted to. And that’s great because our subconscious decides 95–97% of our thoughts and actions.
So begin to cherish yourself more, love yourself more, and be the kind of person to yourself that acts in a healthy, and loving way.
Check out my free 21 days to self-love checklist here.
When you have a healthy, loving relationship with yourself…you will see that reflected in the people around you. You will be attracted to healthy, loving people. And you will be repelled by people who treat you poorly.
You’ll love yourself first so you won’t tolerate the BS someone else might have.
You got this!
Remember, the only human you spend your whole life with…is you. If there is anyone to create healthy love with, is you. Take time to practice self-care and focus on YOU. The more you maintain that, the more external healthy loving interactions will follow. The law of attraction! 🙂
Wishing you love! (…and I mean the healthy kind)
❤
N
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Want to buy me a coffee? https://ko-fi.com/purposeistolove (I’d be very, very thankful! ❤)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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