You Can’t Feel for Anyone Else What You Don’t Feel for Yourself

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I’m realizing the best way to increase my capacity to love and accept others, is to learn to love and accept myself. But this is something I’ve never found easy. In fact, with hindsight, I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling quite disdainful and disappointed with myself – a set of attitudes which I now realize were programmed into me in early childhood by parents who had high expectations of me, but were not so good at tuning into who I was r what kind of support I needed from them.

For my love for anyone else to be real and growing, it’s essential that the appreciation I have for my partner and for myself go together! Accepting and ‘loving’ another person for who they really are. And the win-win reality of this is that if I sense the same coming back from them in return, it helps me to have those feelings about myself too.

Because if I love someone, and they say they love me in return – I presumably believe they’re not completely deluded (otherwise how could I love them in the first place) so hopefully that ‘proves’ that despite any habitual misgivings I might have about myself, I must be pretty OK too. And it will make everyone happier if I can really accept and believe that.

It only makes common sense. If I was to think they are wonderful and I’m only second rate, I’d always feel secretly envious and insecure with them – exactly the kind of feelings which can end up destroying ‘love’. On top of that, my feelings about them will be mixed up with looking for validation from them that I am worthy of their affections – and that always ends in tears.

No-one outside of ourselves can ever convince us that we are ‘good enough’, and if we are looking outside for that we will always feel insecure and disappointed. This imbalance will surely lead to possessiveness, jealousy, and insecurity – all the demons of doubt that can ruin a relationship if they are allowed out of their cage. And the thing above all others which provides the key for them to be set free is low self-esteem and a lack of self-love.

Any shortfall in self-esteem is probably rooted in buried childhood experiences, if, for whatever reason, at that very formative stage in our lives we were given a distorted message about our worth. If this sense of low value was engraved on our neurons, it can be very difficult but by no means impossible to reprogrammed.

The first step is to catch any habitual negative thoughts we may have about our selves, and try to neutralize them by interrogating them to find out if they are based on any kind of current evidence or reality. It’s almost certain that they’re not – but these habitual thoughts wear a kind of neural pathway in our minds which means that with time it becomes increasingly easy and likely that our thoughts will just follow that same path, making it deeper at the same time.

The task’ then is to consciously choose to try to create more positive mental pathways, by relearning and acquiring a more balanced and realistic perception of ourselves, and by training ourselves to have more positive thoughts and attitudes. A professional counselor can help greatly with this process. And just like a runner can get in shape for a race by practicing, we can train ourselves to any unnecessary self-image with a kind and loving mindset in relation, firstly to ourselves and then to others – all of which will result in a happier life for us and for those we love. Happy New Year!

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Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood