Loving yourself first

One thing my T always says is that I have to love myself before others can love me. I need to show to myself what I deserve from others. I do NOT agree with this. I do NOT love myself, but I know there are people out there who love me. And, I find it easier to learn to love myself if I feel loved by others first. I actually read in a book recently where the guy says the opposite of what my T says. We need to feel loved by others in order to love ourselves.

My mother always used to say that to me. I do not wish a conflict between you and your T, but that statement makes me feel nauseated. It is untrue. Children cannot develop secure attachment or a comfortable self-image without the consistant love and care of a parental figure first. That is how one learns what love is.

When I told my Ts what my mother used to tell me, "you must love myself before others can love you," they both went suitably ballistic.

In my case it was my mother blaming me for her neglect of me. In your case it's misguided therapy, at best. You are right to trust your feelings on this.

Thank you. I really despise that statement, and is one thing I wish I could change my T's mind on. It's so old school.

Your t's belief is not a rule. My personal belief is that some people need to be shown the way to loving themselves and that includes finding worth in the love we give to and receive from others.

Did your T elaborate on this idea at all?

I only ask because I suspect that they were talking about an adult kind of love rather than about your first attachments in childhood. I would tend to agree that as an adult, it can be very hard to be loved in a healthy way by someone else if you do not love yourself. If "loving yourself" sounds too hackneyed for you, sub in "have good self esteem" or something.

People with bad self esteem or inadequate self-love will often gravitate toward unhealthy attachments, romantic and otherwise, because they are emotionally familiar and maybe because they feel unworthy of anything better.

Of course I totally agree that you initially develop healthy self-love by having been loved by your early attachment people (or you work on it later in therapy or some other place). It's not that some infants are just born loving themselves and therefore gain the love of their parents while lesser infants who haven't mastered self-love just don't earn parental love either. If your T truly doesn't grasp this, there is a big problem.

I personally think it is okay --- in fact, more than okay --- to let others love us until we can love ourselves.

Personally, it isn't that no one can love me if I don't love myself. It's that I have difficulty having a truly healthy relationship if I don't love myself. They may love me bunches, but my communication problems or my inability to trust or my self-doubt, etc. gets in the way of the relationship.

I hate that statement. I don't love myself, but I do love others and they love me.

This is a much better way of saying what I was trying to get at!

I agree with you. The premise of "you have to love yourself before others can love you" is basically saying that only people who love themselves deserve the love of others, IMO. Which is horrible, IMO.

To me, the ability to love ourselves comes when we believe we are worthy of love and believe we are lovable. To me, these beliefs come about when we are genuinely loved by at least one other being, pet or person

This sort of thing makes sense to me. Like don't base your self worth on what others think.

Seems like, maybe, some people with difficult parents reject their parents in order to keep themselves. Unfortunately, I now believe, I rejected myself in order to keep my parents. :-( Well, and extended family/tribe, too.

It would be nice, I think, if there were a balance between the two. And maybe (many/most) people are born with a neurobiology that would support that.

Unfortunately, I believe (and there is some theory to support his idea) that I(basically, my nervous system) responded to my early family/social environment so that I developed a neurological, conditioned pathway to loving and caring about others' opinions at the expense of my own. :-( A social survival mechanism, probably? Not something I "chose", except to the extent that babies do have some choice -- but it's "baby" choice.

I came across a somewhat non-mainstream theory about that several years ago which really seemed to apply to me, so I've been consciously trying to use some ideas to turn things around.

It's a tricky thing to try to do, but I had spent years following therapists' suggestions and practices with little success, sometimes harm, so had little left to lose. I spent years in a horribly funk of negativity, which is not good for being a person other adults want to have a relationship with, even if I didn't outright express to many people except my last T (who ended up not being able to tolerate it either).

But, at long last, it may be resolving. As I've posted before, after my last T shamed and rejected me (or my somewhat dissociated rage state, "inner child"), we terminated. Several months after. that back in December, I think, how I felt about her and that relationship connected with how I had felt so rejected when I was a little girl.

Horrible, but paydirt maybe? After several months, I now feel some better about risking and accepting rejection now, which may be allowing me to "live" and "be" and love, both myself and others, more fully finally? Time will tell.

But, for me, it definitely hasn't been so easy as an instruction to "love myself".

Here today, my experience was the same, rejecting my emotional and physical needs in order to make the neglectful relationship with my parents "work." If I had no needs to begin with, there was nothing for them to neglect, and therefor they were good.

The switch to identifying and honoring my own needs has been a slow and painful one.

Wow....both of your thoughts are spot on for me!