How Do I Learn to Love Myself?

Did you know that if you type, how do I learn to… into Google, the #1 searched skill is—you guessed it—love myself.

Why is it that so many of us never learned this essential and vital ingredient to living a life of wholehearted happiness? Oftentimes, it’s the negative messaging that we received as kids that has become our conditioned and programmed response to life. Like an operating system that’s been running in the background, it affects our self-image and the way we see ourselves in relation to the world.

My negative programming was installed and had been operating beneath the surface since childhood. My dad died when I was ten years old and my mother died when I was sixteen. The six years between their deaths were not happy times as my mother, a widow with five kids, suffered from a debilitating heart condition and a broken heart. She spiraled into a deep depression and we parented her most of the time. She was angry and critical and nothing I did ever seemed good enough. So I doubled down, striving all the more to make her happy and earn her love. I became the proverbial people pleaser and mistakenly believed that love was conditional and I was only worthy of it if I performed well.

At sixteen years old, I was parentless and rudderless, set adrift in a sea of sex and drugs and rock and roll and looking for love in all the wrong places. Such a cliché, I know. But looking back, I can see how all of it became the driving force in my life to figure out this thing called love.

Other people would constantly tell me that I was way too hard on myself, never satisfied and always striving to better myself. That’s a bad thing? I thought. I had to be hard on myself because, heaven forbid, I rest on my laurels and stop achieving. Then who would love me?

I remember the time, over thirty years ago, a friend and colleague in the National Speakers Association, held my face in her hands, looked right into my eyes and proclaimed, “Kathleen, it’s time to have a love affair.”

I recoiled and broke free of her gaze and sputtered, “I’m already married.”

“No silly,” she responded, “I mean, it’s time to fall in love with yourself.”

I felt naked and vulnerable, like she could see right into my soul. But she said it with so much love and compassion that it made me pay attention and I became curious about this foreign concept of self-love. I read every self-help book I could get my hands on, but I was reading them from the perspective of trying to fix myself so I would be loveable.

One of those books was “One Day My Soul Just Opened Up” by Iyanla Vanzant. While reading it, immersed neck-deep in an old cast-iron, clawfoot bathtub, sobbing as my own salty tears dripped into the scalding hot water, I cried out to God, “When is my soul gonna open up?” That vivid memory was over twenty years ago. I didn’t know it then, but now I see that what I was really asking was, “When am I ever going to love myself?”

What I didn’t yet understand was that I was already on the path by all my asking, and that a soul-opening moment and self-love were one in the same. Many self-help books, like Vanzant’s, give the impression that it comes in a miraculous, parting-of-the-Red-Sea moment. But for me, it’s been more gradual, or so I thought, until one day recently, my soul just opened up. I call it my great awakening.

The terms “awakened” and “woke” are common buzzwords these days, signifying a social awareness of conditioned biases of injustice. But the kind of awakening I’m talking about is the sacred, spiritual, inner journey to your own soul. It’s a stirring within and a beckoning to listen. It’s a process of unlearning and reprogramming all the self-imposed restrictions, limiting beliefs and bullshit stories you’ve been habitually and incessantly telling yourself, so much so that you actually believe them to be true.

Recently I made a major decision to close my coaching practice after twenty years of working with teen girls and mothers and daughters, (women & guys too!!) and pouring my heart and soul into my clients. One of my former clients, a thirty-year-old young woman, passed away suddenly and it knocked me to my knees and it was like a nudge from the universe that at sixty-five, it’s time for me to pay attention to my own life now and use the time I have left to pour into my writing and painting, along with whatever else God has in store for me.

I’d been struggling with this decision for well over a year, but I hung on out of fear, financial insecurity and not wanting to disappoint others who might need my help. My soul had been crying out to me, first as a whisper that grew into a roar that I could no longer ignore. So I walked the beach, spending time with God and praying for guidance.

Then I sat down in the sand and started writing in my journal and got the divine nudge to write myself a love letter. Page after page, the words flowed out of me and I finally gave to myself everything I had been looking for from my mother, my family, my clients, my audiences and basically the whole world. Suddenly I realized that everything I’d ever achieved had been accomplished through the unmistakable and unmerited grace of God. I didn’t have to earn it, I just had to receive it.

And just like that, my soul opened up. The next day I felt like an entirely different person. My channels were wide open and I received a download for a poem and painting as an homage to all the girls I’ve coached before. On the blank canvas, I wrote these words… and then layer by layer this bold abstract came to life.

I entitled it, “To All the Girls,” but I know in my heart that it was as much for me as it was for them. I can see now that my awakening had been happening all along, in tiny ways along the path. Every time I practiced some small (and huge) act of self-care; prayer, meditation, forgiveness, gratitude, journaling, yoga, getting sober and surrendering my life and will to the care of God, my soul was opening up as I gradually kept letting go of what no longer served me.

Stepping into the unknown can be scary and it takes great courage to finally love ourselves after a lifetime of self-loathing. But strength lies on the other side of risk. Five minutes after posting my painting on Facebook, it sold for $1500, the most I’ve ever received for my artwork! Our faith is strengthened each time we refute the ingrained and habitual thought patterns of shame, unworthiness and limiting beliefs and fix our minds on God instead. Because after all, God is love, and you were created in His image, which makes you pure love too. So what’s not to love?

Go ahead… Try loving yourself and see what happens!