Loving Yourself Before You Can Love Others

Release the guilt you may feel when you hear that you can’t love others before you love yourself.

Hi, I’m Nicole C. Ayers. Let’s talk about a really popular belief that I think is a bunch of malarkey. It’s this: you can’t truly love anyone else until you learn to love yourself. That’s just not true.

My teacher, Elizabeth DiAlto, brought this up, and I remember her take on It really just rocked my world, and so I wanted to share it with you because I think it’s so important.

We have spent our whole lives loving other people. What we do struggle with very often is loving ourselves, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t offering love to other people. When I hear that phrase, Well, I can’t really love anyone else until I learn to love myself, I have all this, like, there’s all this guilt swarming around, like have I not been loving my husband?

Have I not been loving my children? Did I not love my family, my friends? No, I don’t need that guilt in my life.

Now what I do think is true is that when you begin to turn the love you’ve been giving outward inward, and you do begin to love yourself, that you can deepen your relationships. You learn how to be more comfortable receiving other people’s love, which then gives you more love to pour out and also makes other people more receptive to your love.

Yes, I think those things are true, but this idea that you can’t ever love someone else until you have learned to love yourself is just not a guilt that we need to carry around or a worry that we haven’t been loving enough because we have.

You are enough. You have enough, and you do enough. Okay?

I wanna think about this just a little bit deeper in that sometimes it’s our relationships with other people that are really helping us heal our relationships with our bodies, with ourselves.

It was because of my husband’s love that he had not only for me as my whole self, but for my body, that helped me begin to soften into the idea that I could love my body. He reflected to me that I had a lovable body, and because I trusted him, because I believed in him, I began to realize that maybe that was a true statement. Yeah. If he loves my body, I can do that too.

So our loving relationships with other people can be absolute fuel for us to learn to love our bodies and learn to love ourselves. The next time you hear someone say, “Oh, you can’t truly love anyone else until you love yourself,” take a deep breath and just let that one go.

Until next time, take care.