The Primary Source of Love Is Not Another Person

Why do people want unconditional love but refuse to love themselves unconditionally? Simple. They believe something about themselves is unlovable.

This sounds kind of hypocritical, doesn’t it? Because if you don’t accept something about yourself can you blame others if they don’t accept it either?

Even if someone came along and loved you for the things you don’t like about yourself, you wouldn’t appreciate it. Why? Because the love you experience from others is limited to the love you give yourself.

If you dislike how you look or who you are or what you lack, you might hate that others agree with you, but ultimately, you do agree with them. And if someone comes along who likes those things about you, you will question their sincerity or their sanity.

Unconditional love from others isn’t guaranteed. You can look at poor parenting and broken relationships for proof of that. But if there was a context for unconditional love, it would be loving yourself unconditionally.

If you withdraw love from yourself because you fail or because you lack certain things or because you have traits you don’t prefer, you will be especially sensitive when others do the same to you.

And if you think about it, there are people who have worse problems than you who are being loved, so the only reason you might lack love is because you don’t believe you deserve it.

It could be because someone withdrew love from you or you fell short of your own standards. Regardless of the origin, your self-rejection causes you to be sensitive to rejection from others.

So we hope that someone will come along and correct that mistake and love us beyond conditions, but it doesn’t work that way. Only you can correct it.

Love is comprised of appreciation, compassion and protection. Which of these three things are you failing to give to yourself? Don’t look outside of yourself to boost these things because the external world is just a reflection of your inner world.

If you fail to protect yourself, you will inexplicably find yourself with dangerous people in dangerous situations. If you fail to appreciate yourself, when people say nice things about you, you will not be able to digest it and you will feel like a fraud.

Now, you might say, “I know I don’t love myself enough, but I don’t know exactly what I don’t love about myself.” How is that even possible? Actually, it’s fairly common.

When we feel the pain of love being withdrawn from us, we have two choices. We can either fight to regain the love, which some might call being needy, or we can shove the pain down, dissociate, or distract ourselves with something else.

When we fight to regain love, love becomes associated with anxiety. Therefore, anyone we desire must trigger this anxiety, and if you get with them, they will maintain your anxiety.

When we deny, disown or dissociate because love was withdrawn, love cannot be accessed and love cannot be given. Love cannot even be recognised. So as far as you’re concerned, love doesn’t even exist.

So to go back to the previous question of knowing that you don’t love yourself but not knowing exactly what you don’t love about yourself, you wouldn’t know because you are unconscious of it.

By shoving the pain down, dissociating or distracting yourself, you blocked yourself from conscious awareness of why love was withdrawn from you. You likely didn’t do it on purpose. It was done reflexively, to protect yourself.

It’s an issue that affects men mostly, but women do it sometimes. All humans will reflexively repress things at some point in time because the withdrawal of love is so painful. It’s traumatic, and the body will do what it must to survive.

But again, here’s the key, if you pay attention to what triggers you, this is the very thing that someone once judged you for. It is the point of trauma.

So what are the solutions? First let’s address some misconceptions.

Self-love is not arrogance or self-indulgence. In fact, people who love themselves know that to be arrogant and hedonistic would hurt them rather than help them.

Self-love is not a hindrance to self-improvement either. It may seem that criticism will lead to self-correction, but criticism without love is abuse. We all know those teachers who correct harshly and we know the teachers who correct with compassion.

Self-love is having appreciation, compassion and protection for yourself. These three acts elicit love, and when you have these for yourself, you see just how important it is for others to have them as well.

When it comes to uncovering what you don’t like about yourself, compassion is the tool that helps with this. Compassion is not feeling sorry for yourself or others. Compassion is caring about yourself and others.

The next time we feel triggered, instead of unconsciously reacting, instead of trying to escape the feeling, we face it, we honour what we’re feeling. This is the beginning of inner strength and not the boisterous cowardice that people trick you into thinking is strength.

The loudest person is often the most insecure, but because self-compassion, self-love and self-respect are so low in so many people, they think the higher the volume, the higher the value.

So while it is true that insecurity can show up as a mousy person who is scared to speak up, that is only one manifestation. The other is the loudmouth who can’t regulate himself and lacks self-control.

We can search for love in another person or through material things, but the primary source of love is not another person. If it were, then love will always be conditional. It is conditional on their approval of us.

That is a hellish way to live because you will have to constantly perform, sacrifice yourself or beg for the approval of others. And the worst part of it all is that you will never feel like you have enough because you rely on secondary sources of love.

You are your primary source of love, because when your family has failed to love you or your partner has failed to love you, it may hurt, but you are not without love because you love yourself.

Do not discard the love you have for yourself just because others do not see your value. Instead, love yourself, and watch how you consciously and unconsciously bring yourself more love and more things to love.

You can watch the video of this post here.