Loving the Self

I have a 3 year old niece who recently learned about the mail. One day she wanted to make a card for her dad and put it in the mailbox for him to find when he got home from work. It said “I love you.” The next day she decided she wanted to make a card for herself, so she could receive the joy of getting a letter in the mailbox too. And guess what she wrote on her card? Simply, “I love myself.”

Why does this simple story bring tears to my eyes? For one, I see over and over adult humans who struggle to love themselves. For many, it is lifelong work to be able to shed the self-contempt and quiet the self-critic in order to find acceptance for the person they are and believe they are worthy of love. Thankfully, what keeps me going in this work of therapy with adult humans is that I do often get to witness people come around to this point sooner than later, and it is glorious.

So, for me to see my sweet niece write (well, her dad wrote it as she dictated) “I love myself” as the first ever note to herself, it made me feel so glad and proud of her. And it made me wonder if all children begin with this sense of self, and what happens for it to get distorted, taken away, or reversed. This is a sad thought. To imagine the point where a child grows to lose their sense of self love.

I am 39 weeks pregnant and one thing that I was struck by at a baby shower for me, was how many people wrote in their cards and notes to our baby how they are already so loved. How!? How can my baby be so loved and not even had his first breath yet? Are we inherently loved? I have to believe that we are born this way.

So what happens? If you think about your own life, where were the points that you stopped loving yourself and starting to believe you were no longer worthy? As I just wrote above, it seems we aren’t even deserving of love, and yet who doesn’t love a newborn baby? What makes it so hard to continue to love ourselves in this world?

Perhaps you feel that you have done bad things, messed up, failed, etc. and so you are no longer loveable. But sometimes we can be the hardest on ourselves, and even when others tell us they love us, we have a hard time still loving ourselves. The good news is, we can continue to pursue self love and learn to find pure acceptance for the person that we are. We can overcome self-contempt with grace, curiosity, understanding, and compassion. Eventually maybe we, too, can genuinely write on a piece of paper “I LOVE MYSELF.”