How To Like Yourself Without Hating Yourself
I struggled on what to title this blog post because “how to love yourself” or “self-love is possible” feels thin. Anyone would argue that simply “believing” you’re going to like yourself more tomorrow doesn’t actually move the needle on how much (or how little) you like yourself. Particularly if your starting point is in the negatives, which if we’re honest is most of us.
Our society cultivates humans who thrive on self-mutilation as a means to building power or a “backbone” or thick skin. We grow up believing the only way we’re going to be better humans is if we punish ourselves for the times we’re not. It’s addition by subtraction. As someone who’s lived with disordered eating most of her life, I can attest to the connection between “doing something bad or being bad” and “deprivation as a punishment” can be slippery and traumatizing.
I’ve worked to believe in self-compassion as one of the best ways to like yourself without creating a hate-filled personal relationship with yourself. Addition by addition. Research out of Stanford University says it best, “when we fail, feel insecure or inadequate, many people fall into the trap of self-criticism, which is actually a self-defeating tendency.”
By their definition, “self-compassion involves facing failure, insecurity, or mistakes in a completely different way. Unlike self-criticism, self-compassion builds greater resilience, strength, and happiness.”
How you may ask?
By motivating you to figure out alternatives for how to encourage yourself instead of creating a pattern where your actions are motivated by not wanting to get punished.
As tangible steps, this is what it looks like for me:
Cultivating self-awareness — practicing listening to myself (especially when it’s uncomfortable) is how I spot my red flags
Committing to skipping Plan A — years of self-criticism means that self-criticism is my M.O., it is where I go first. That’s okay to acknowledge so long as I commit to skipping whatever Plan A suggests and moving to Plan B instead.
Learning through trial and error — learning to like, support, and love yourself is as complicated as learning to like, support, and love another human being. It requires space for trial and error. This can be the hardest step because we assume we should already know how to love ourselves and squeeze ourselves out of the possibility of trying different things because it feels like a failure that we have to in the first place.
The more that you can commit to self-compassion, you’ll find self-love (and like) along the way. I find the idea of practicing and strengthening my “self-compassion muscle” as more attainable than the toxic-positivity edict that I should love myself more instantly.