Self-Love, Knowing Yourself, and the Control Patterns Holding You Back From You
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For the record, I never—EVER—thought I’d be a former Navy SEAL writing about self-love.
But here we are.
There was more pushback on the self-love article than any others I’ve written.
Some readers preferred the concept of self-worth over self-love, or even “a good amount of like” (my personal favorite).
Others thought self-awareness and acceptance were better tools for helping others than self-love.
My initial thought to these comments was, “What part of you is uncomfortable with love?”
Are self-love and self-worth mutually exclusive? Can you have a strong sense of self-worth without self-love?
What do you express to the people in your life you care about most? Do you tell them how worthy they are? How much they’re “liked?” Or, do you tell them you love them? I don’t know about you but telling your wife/husband/partner how much you “like” them is a one-way ticket out of the relationship with no return options.
Now, can you be self-aware and lack self-love? Yes, absolutely. Just because I know how I’m showing up for myself, for others, and the exchange therein doesn't mean I love who I am. It just means I’m aware.
So, this then begs the question, what is self-love?
What Self-Love Is
Self-love is:
“…being present with yourself in an undefended state.” – Heidi Priebe
Dr Gábór Maté, a global expert on trauma, addiction, stress, and childhood development, simplifies human needs into two types:
Attachment, which refers to our need to connect with our caregivers to feel seen.
Authenticity, referring to our ability to acknowledge how we feel (emotions) and what we prefer (interests) and behave in ways that align with both.
Here’s how attachment and authenticity relate. As infants, we are completely reliant on our parents/caregivers to support our basic physical needs (i.e., food, sleep, shelter). We depend on them to help pacify us when we’re stressed and to validate our behaviors and emotions so we can learn how to feel and be “right.”
However, some parents don't realize that when their child cries and they tell their child to “suck it up,” "stop being upset," “you’re too emotional,” or to “get over it,” the child learns to suppress their emotion as a sacrifice for being accepted by their parent. In other words, they sacrifice how they truly feel (authenticity) because sacrificing attachment would threaten their very survival. This decision to forego authenticity for attachment follows us into adulthood.
If you’ve ever tried to reason your way through your emotions…
If you’ve ever said “yes” to something that just didn’t feel right to you…
If you’ve ever chosen to stay in a relationship where you didn’t feel heard or seen…
It’s because you learned and normalized the pattern of choosing attachment over authenticity as a child. While doing so may have been required for survival as an infant, it is not required as an adult.
Self-Love Is A Virtue
It’s the acknowledgement of oneself as somebody who’s worthy of all the things that love entails—acceptance, compassion, kindness, imperfection, failure, generosity, gratitude…
After all, how can you help or heal others if you aren’t open to helping/healing yourself?
Your ability and strength to help others is largely dependent on your ability and willingness to be yourself, and to be you means to stop being who you are not:
A doormat for others
Avoiding emotion
Finding excuses to avoid harsh realities
Telling yourself a false narrative such as, “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not worthy of love”
To be yourself you must know yourself, and this takes deep inner work.
“The inward movement can be summarized as follows: we observe ourselves, we accept what we find without judgment, we let it go, and the actual release causes our transformation.” – Yung Pueblo
Knowing yourself means (not an all-inclusive list):
understanding your nervous system and what causes it to dysregulate (ie., fight, flight, or freeze)
identifying the sensations in your body, what triggers them, and what they mean
being aware of the intention behind your comments and questions, judgments and opinions—and the parts of you where they reside
identifying your reactional patterns designed to keep you safe from discomfort (known as psychological control patterns)
knowing your triggers and the best way to manage them
I’ll touch briefly on each and how they tie into self-love, but first let’s talk about knowing yourself.
Knowing Yourself
You get to know yourself on a deeper level when you stay present with yourself on a moment-to-moment basis, and develop a constant, non-judgmental awareness of what it’s like to be you in every moment.
This is precisely why meditation, breathwork, or any other practices of solitude are so difficult: there’s nobody there to save you from you.
You’re alone with your thoughts, feelings, inhales and exhales, and it conjures up feelings of frustration, impatience, non-achievement—all the “things” that conflict with how we want to feel and be. Thus, we avoid such authentic experiences of the moment because it’s uncomfortable and contrary to “who we are.”
Here are a few others things to pay attention to when getting to know yourself:
Nervous system regulation. When the nervous system is regulated, we’re in a state of connection. We feel grounded, centered, in the present moment because we have the resources to cope and respond. When we’re dysregulated we feel overwhelmed, stressed, unable to cope or act in our best interest. Our behavior can be impulsive, reactive, or we just shut down. A dysregulated nervous system doesn’t always feel bad, it might just be numb. But what happens is our feelings and words don’t align with our truth and that’s innervating.
Bodily sensations. A lack of bodily sensations is a type of trauma response. At some point, the mind learned to disconnect from the body to keep it safe and never learned how to tune back into it. This is problematic because trauma is trapped in the body not the brain, and in order release it, you must connect with the body. This is a challenge for people who are constantly “in their heads” because they can’t connect with themselves. So what happens? Their nervous systems stay dysregulated and they keep repeating the same self-sabotaging patterns.
Intentions. This takes a great deal of mindfulness, which is something I’ll dive deeper into in future articles. The next time you’re in a conversation, before responding I encourage you to take a reflective pause and look inward at the intention behind what you’re about to say. Our intentions can be traced back to one of two emotions: fear or love. Fear-based intentions are:
Demonstrating how much you know
Proving the other person wrong so you can be “right”
Changing the course of the conversation because it’s uncomfortable
Intentions stemming from a place of love include:
Genuine curiosity about the other person
Listening without judgment or without thinking of what to say next
Patience to let the person finish
Psychological control patterns. A control pattern is a behavior or thought used to aid in avoiding negative feelings subconsciously or compulsively. Typical feelings to avoid are:
a lack of control
not knowing
shame
foolishness
criticism
authority
judgment by others
abandonment
rejection
feeling ignored
Any other outcome you might perceive as fear-based
Common behaviors and thoughts include:
Laughing when a joke hasn’t been made
Emotional volatility
Mismatched bursts of anger or temper tantrums
Feigning joy or contentment
Finishing people’s sentences for them
Asking a question and immediately answering it yourself
Entertain others by acting “cute”
Trying to talk someone out of being upset
Saying “I’m sorry” all the time
Not admitting fault or wrongdoing even when its apparent
Criticizing others
Judging and criticizing yourself
Being theatrical in your facial expressions
Unsolicited justification for one’s actions
Self-comparison
Telling jokes or making cynical or sarcastic comments
Telling yourself “I don’t care” or “XYZ doesn’t affect me”
Constantly focus on the needs and desires of other while ignoring your own
Transaction-based relationships (“I’ll do this for you if you do that for me”)
Telling yourself “I’ll just deal with it”
Triggers. Know the people, circumstances, topics, words, or issues that trigger you and create boundaries around them. This is not the same as dissociating or avoiding difficult emotions. If you know something will trigger you and you’ll feel dysregulated as a result, then then it’s your responsibility to self-manage until you can get to an emotional place where it won’t. How you do this is by setting boundaries. Boundaries aren’t just physical, they can also be emotional and mental, too. Basically, they’re whatever you want them to be to keep yourself regulated.
To practice self-love is to practice that which brings you closer toward yourself by employing principles of acceptance, non-judgment, non-striving (you don’t always have to try to “get there”), trust, gratitude, and all the other “touchy-feel-good-hippy-crap” that you were probably raised to avoid or to think of as “unmanly” (if you’re a dude) or “weak.”
Well, I got news for you. Avoiding “feel good” emotions like those above is weakness itself.
By embracing self-love, you intentionally create direction for yourself and reclaim your power along the way. Every moment dedicated to knowing yourself is a moment dedicated toward loving yourself, while churning out a new you in each and every moment along the way.
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