Your Relationship With Yourself

DICTATES YOUR
RELATIONSHIP
WITH OTHERS

BAYOUHEALTH
BY SHANNON DAHLUM 

We may be culturally obsessed with money and power, but humans are ultimately driven by our need for love.  We chase success through the best educations and most prolific careers, we build security with savings accounts, and create a sense of worth and acceptance by purchasing nice homes and cars.  At the end of the day, though, the one thing that money or education can’t secure for us is what provides the most value in our lives: true connection with others. 

I’m certainly not a love and relationship expert, but like most, I am a person who’s had significant relationships, lost significant relationships, and battled my relationship with myself.  The things I’ve learned so far through these experiences have enriched my life far more than my education, my income, my career, and my possessions, combined. 

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”  I’m not sure who can be originally credited with this quote, but it’s one I’ve come across in several places and it’s really struck a chord with me.  It’s the word “learn” that really hit me.  I think we’re conditioned to believe love is something that happens to us; a feeling that randomly hits us upside the head and sweeps us off our feet.  Love isn’t something that falls out of the sky, though; it’s generated from within us and then expressed outwardly.  We only have the capacity to love another to the extent with which we love ourselves.  It’s the relationships we have with ourselves that dictate how we relate with others, and there is definitely a learning (and unlearning) process to cultivating a true love for oneself. 

As babies and children, we have an innate need to fit into our family unit.  We depend on them for our survival, so it’s important that we’re accepted by them.  We instinctively learn how to behave in order to gain what feels to us like their love and approval.  We may learn not to express certain emotions because we can see that our caretakers pull away or get angry with us when we do. We may learn that we feel more approval when we participate in the activities they want us to, rather than in the things that bring us our own sense of joy.  We may find that expressing ourselves authentically leads to feelings of rejection, so to stay in the good graces of those near to us, we suppress parts of our true nature and perform for their approval. 

As we grow, this desire for approval carries over into our friendships, too.  Peer pressure can shape our choices about what to wear to school, what music to listen to, who we associate with, and the opinions we express, all because we just want to fit in.  Our sense of self worth depends on the acceptance we feel from others, rather than an innate sense of worthiness or unconditional self love.  To a certain degree, we learn to be who others want us to be and continue suppressing the parts of ourselves we feel wouldn’t be accepted. 

These desires to be accepted by our families and peers don’t suddenly disappear when we reach the stage of physical independence.  Up to this point in our lives, we’ve learned what we need to do to and believe to gain approval of others, and those behaviors and beliefs have subconsciously become woven into our personalities.  Some of us have learned that performing well earns approval, so we’re deeply driven to climb to the top of the corporate ladder.  Some of us have felt more love from others when our bodies look a certain way, so we become obsessed with diets and/or exercise programs.  Some of us have learned that confrontation feels like rejection, so we don’t always express our emotions or opinions when they aren’t in alignment with the emotions or opinions of others.  We’ve learned to choose the approval of others, rather that choosing ourselves.  Our desire to be in alignment with the expectations of others drives us to abandon our true nature.  It becomes easy, then, to mistake the high we feel from gaining the conditional acceptance from another for feelings of unconditional love between us.  When we fail to love ourselves and search for validation from others, we easily mistake attachment for love.  

While we may be physically independent, attachment forces us to remain dependent on others to provide our sense of self worth.  It motivates us to control how others react toward us.  Our desire to gain their approval is so strong, that we subconconnciously use manipulation tactics to illicit these reactions from them.  Manipulation doesn’t only involve big lies and guilt trips; any time we aren’t expressing ourselves authentically in order to gain approval, we’re being manipulative.  This may be hard to swallow, but consistently sacrificing our own needs for someone else’s isn’t necessarily an act of service, it’s often an act of manipulation.  We may feel like we love someone so much that we’ll deny our own emotions and desires over and over in order to honor theirs, but that behavior may be driven by a lack of love for ourselves and the desire to feel worthy in someone else’s eyes; not love toward them.  For example, suppressing anger or disagreement 

with someone is a manipulation tactic that can be used to avoid facing confrontation or criticism from them, which can feel like rejection.  We do it to maintain a sense of closeness.  It usually backfires, though, because the short term external peace it provides leaves a buildup of internal resentment in its wake that drives us apart. 

While attachment leads to controlling behaviors, there is complete freedom in love.  Loving another person means you allow them to be who they truly are.  You encourage them to express their desires and you respectfully honor their boundaries, even when it may not benefit you. Truly loving yourself provides the same freedom for authentic expression, with no dependence on how others perceive you. 

As a coach who helps people with fitness and body image, I see so many adults who have weight loss goals because they feel that maintaining a certain appearance will make them feel more accepted by others.  If the people around them will only accept them fully if they fit into a certain size jeans, though, that’s a pretty shallow level of acceptance.  I don’t think those are the types of relationships any of us really strive for.  True love certainly doesn’t only fit inside of size 4 jeans.  Accepting and loving yourself as you are, no matter what size you wear, is step number one when it comes to attracting others into your life who will also accept and love you regardless of your body size. 

Self love is a practice that requires a lot of unlearning when it comes to striving to be in alignment with the expectations of others, and a lot of learning how to live fully in alignment with our true natures.  It demands that we take a deeper look at ourselves and discover who we really are.  If we weren’t worried what anyone else might think, what would our likes and dislikes be?  What values would be important to us?  How would we choose to spend our time?  So many of us have spent our lives learning how to perform in order to gain approval and we’ve lost touch with who we really are inside.  Learning to honor who we are, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, requires a lot of honesty and vulnerability.  It means we have to be honest with ourselves, so we can then honestly express ourselves to those around us.  It can be scary, because we may risk receiving harsh judgement and criticism from others.  This is why it requires total acceptance and love toward ourselves, so our need to gain it from others diminishes.  When we really love ourselves, we know we’ll be okay if others don’t like parts of us.  We release our attachment to their approval but in turn, open ourselves up to giving and receiving unconditional love. 

Valentine’s Day is about showing the love we have toward others, but I challenge you to dig deeper into how you love yourself.  Notice all the little ways in which you aren’t true to yourself.  Pay attention to how you avoid facing uncomfortable emotions by numbing them with distraction, and how you avoid tough situations by staying quiet when you should be speaking up for yourself.  If you weren’t worried about the response from others, who would you be?  

Loving yourself means doing the hard work of staying true to the voice inside of you rather taking the easy route of conforming to all the voices outside of you.