“You Have to Love Yourself First”, They Say.
One night, I was in a car with my friend, driving around town on a cold winter evening. The sky was dark, and the street was lined with wet, slushy, gray snow. I knew this friend before I moved to Colorado - We first met in California in a mindfulness and meditation community. He left California before me to pursue a romantic relationship. When I decided to come to the mountain state for a new career, he helped me get settled in Boulder. During the car ride, he told me about his latest ideas and experience participating in a relationship skill group. We bonded over the idea that we were both struggling with loneliness. At one point, he said: I think you will need to love yourself first before you can love.
Hearing him say that, my first reaction was anger and defensiveness. I frantically tried to rebuke him with my own reasoning; I told him his statement had to be wrong because “without being shown how to love, how can one learn how to love oneself?” and “I know that I am capable of love, and therefore I don’t need to love myself to love others”. What was really happening painted a different picture; Deep inside, I interpreted my friend’s words as “you don’t really deserve love; you have to learn how to love yourself in order to be worthy”, which was not the message he tried to convey. Furthermore, the idea of “loving self” was challenging because I genuinely did not know how to do that. “Loving myself” was like telling someone “just be happy” or “stop being depressed/anxious”. I felt that my life-long struggle around complex emotions was being trivialized. At the same time, I felt blamed for not being good enough.
Do You Have to Love Yourself First?
I frequently come across clients who either endured abuse as children and/or had emotionally distant parents. “Care” and “love” often elicit confusion, numbness, sadness or even anger. An example of this is a client of mine, we’ll call her Tamara. Tamara is a 40-year-old recent divorcee coming out of a five-year marriage. During the first few sessions, she tearfully retold how she never felt she was good enough even though she “tried everything to make it work”. In her narrative, she wished to earn his affection by "compromising" to his needs. However, it seemed that no matter how much she did, her husband never showed neither affection nor appreciation. On top of frequent verbal put-downs and stonewalling, she divorced him after deciding she no longer wanted to try to please a husband who would never be satisfied. When I asked her to tell me more about previous relationships, she expressed that she had always been “attracted to emotionally calm men”. When I asked her whether she felt seen in those previous relationships, she gave a small pause and hesitantly remarked about how she had always needed to “keep the relationship together” and felt exhausted for not feeling understood or seen.
In the following sessions, we would talk about what self-purpose meant to her, the various triumphs in her life, and childhood memories. What had occurred to me was that Tamara’s life was full of wonderful moments of excitement and satisfaction, yet she had never experienced a truly reciprocal relationship where she felt as seen as she wanted. At one point, Tamara expressed she “wanted to believe in love, because (she) felt like (she) had never had that within her grasp”. When I shared with her that I thought she had never consistently experienced emotional warmth and care in her life, she started to react with despair and hopelessness. “That’s okay. Just because we did not get the love we needed as children, it does not mean we are doomed to struggle with loneliness for the rest of our lives”, I said. “However, in order to do that, the first step will be to teach yourself the kind of love we did not have the opportunity to acquire from our childhood.” Upon hearing that, she became interested to know more. Our time together shifted to working on the idea of “loving oneself”, and within a few months, Tamara felt it was possible to have a loving and peaceful life.
If you’ve had similar experiences with a friend, a family member, or even a stranger telling you to “love yourself first,” which led you to feeling confused or angry, you are certainly not the first person who went through that. The problem is that “loving yourself” neither offers a complete instruction, nor does it address the lonely and deep emotional pain that comes from feeling unsupported and abandoned by others. When someone tells us we have to “love ourselves first”, we might feel rejected and dismissed. However, like many other nuanced predicaments, the idea of “loving ourselves before loving others” does offer a grain of wisdom and truth. The effective solution to addressing our loneliness is neither “just having to believe in loving ourselves” nor to completely ignore the advice.
In my last post, we covered how our relationships with our early caretakers shape how we relate to others as adults. This time, I will share with you one of my more effective and direct ways to address our feelings of loneliness.
Love Is What a Kangaroo Mother Gives To Its Young
If we grew up in an environment with little modeling on connection and care, “love ourselves” would likely feel like a completely foreign concept. However, we can use a tried and true approach, backed by decades of cross-discipline wisdom, to address the emotional pain caused by our loneliness.
At the time of publishing this post, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended “Kangaroo Care,” the practice of holding a baby skin-to-skin to the chest, resembling how kangaroos keep their babies inside of their marsupium pouch. Although I am not a biologist to explain the functions of kangaroo pouches, “Kangaroo care” as a neonatal care practice regulates the emotions of the baby, encourages body temperature regulation, and often leads to better success in breastfeeding. This practice was created by two doctors, Edgar Ray MD and Hector Martinez MD, in the 1970s, borrowed from village wet nurses in Bogota, Columbia, World Health Organization. (2021, May 26), in order to increase the chance of survival for newborns, Knüppel, L., Davanzo, R., & Lawn, J. E. (2021).
How would this practice relate to us adults who struggle with loneliness? Skin-to-skin contact bonding, such as kangaroo care, not only positively affects infants, but it also has similar psychological effects on us adults. Imagine if you are a new parent. When hugging the baby. What feelings do you feel? Is it a comfortable warmth? Is it the feeling of being attached? When we are connecting with a baby, we receive a soothing emotion that calms us down. At the same time, the baby also makes us aware of our own parental instincts.
When we were infants, we were at our most vulnerable. Without the care of an adult, we would likely die from starvation, exposure to the environment, or get eaten by predators. Bonding with an adult releases dopamine and oxytocin, calming us down and getting us to feel warm and cuddly. The mutual feeling between us and the adult elicits bonding. This ensures we are noticed, thus, we can trust our basic needs will be met. On the other hand, our body will create psychological distress with the absence of bonding and connection. This either motivates us to get the adult’s attention or get away if they are proven to be unreliable or even harmful.
There are numerous studies on the topic of early affection and development. I recommend Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments, as well as Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby’s studies on Attachment Theory. |
As adults, we interact with our world using the same emotional mechanism. When we are face to face with a baby or a cute animal, many of us might have an urge to connect and bond with it through becoming attuned to its face, touching, and even hugging. When we feel close to another person, in general, we behave the same way. When we bond with someone as an adult, we are rewarded with feelings of warmth, safety, and connection. On the other hand, the experience of loneliness is the very opposite of the bonding experience. Instead of warmth, we perceive cold. For example, we would describe a friendly and kind person as “warm”, whilst we describe a distant and aloof person as “cold”. Similarly, we perceive people whom we want to bond with as “safe” and more likely to perceive people who are unfamiliar strangers as “unsafe”. In fact, the experience of loneliness can be described as a lack of bonding and connection. When we feel unloved, unworthy of love, undesired, or burdening the world, we are experiencing a lack of the warmth of bonding and connection.
The solution is straightforward: If we allow the brain to experience the warmth of bonding, we can cast away the painful states of loneliness. The more we practice accessing warmth and bonding, the more our brain builds a connection to that state of mind.
Spilling Battery Acid Onto The Garage Floor
The point is not to push down or push away our lonely feelings; we are trying to bring care to them. The emotional pain of loneliness can be countered by the emotional catharsis of warmth, safety, and connection. I like to use the metaphor of cleaning spilled battery acid.
Imagine working on a car and accidentally spilling battery acid all over the garage floor. It smells bad, and at some spots of the spill, you started to see wisps of fumes. You need to do something about this predicament before it starts to create more damage. So you run to the kitchen to find a box of baking soda. As you pour it over the spill, the powder smothers the acid. You have stopped the corrosion. The baking soda neutralizes the acid and makes it no longer hazardous to handle. Although our loneliness is not going to eat through the concrete floor, we can neutralize it by accessing appropriate loving emotions.
Taming Our Pain - Three Steps to Defuse Loneliness
So, now that we have described all the concepts and theories, we can put together the steps to address our emotional pain. First, we have to identify our painful loneliness. Oftentimes, we have developed coping strategies to either distract or numb our pain—it might be through substances, fantasies, activities, or compulsions. As long as we are engaging in coping, we might be unaware of the suffering we are running from. Be curious about the pain that drives us to crave our coping. It might be very uncomfortable, but it is the first step of taming it.
Next, we need to bring up our innate loving feeling. To get to this loving feeling, I have devised a three-step visualization for that purpose inspired by the studies and findings of Ray and Martinez’s kangaroo care practice:
Visualize objects we associate with warmth. It can be something in front of us or an imagined object, with red, orange, yellow, or earth-toned colors, like a fireplace. When we lock in onto the imagery, focus on it and try to find the warm and comfortable feelings within your body. It should be a comfortable and welcoming experience.
Visualize objects around us that we associate with softness. Similar to step 1, but think of a nice pillow, fresh linen, a comfy couch or bed, or a fluffy stuffed animal. Try to find the positive and soothing feelings associated with your imagery.
Think of a time when we have deeply cared for someone or something, or when someone else showed deep care for us. While it may be challenging, this step is perhaps the most important. Like the first two steps, we are going to lock in onto the calm and soothing feelings. However, we can also imagine extending that positive “warm and fuzzy feeling” to the part of us in pain. Be curious about the impact of bringing this loving feeling to our pains and ask ourselves what it is like.
Like the experience of a child bonding with their mother, when we bring up the loving feelings of care, we might notice that our loneliness and emotional pain shift into feelings less painful or even dissolve entirely. Like our primal fear of spiders and heights, we are primed to experience a state of connection through certain archetypal cues, such as human connection, warmth, and softness. Therefore, when we engage this visualization, our brain accesses the part of us that soothes our loneliness.
Issues and Barriers
If you engage in this exercise and experience exactly what I have described so far, I encourage you to try to bring it to your everyday life as a regular practice. The more we engage the part of our brain that brings warmth and care, the sooner we will earn a fundamental security both within ourselves and when we relate to others. However, it is also possible to experience issues and barriers when practicing the three steps.
Inability to access positive feelings: This can happen if we are really unfamiliar with the experience of self-soothing. If this happens repeatedly regardless of your moods, levels of fatigue, and different environments, I recommend setting a goal to explore what brings you positive emotions, not excluding consulting a mental health professional to rule out underlying conditions.
Grief and mournfulness come up along with warmth and love: This barrier can show up in two major ways - Overwhelming sadness and grief from the lack of support in our lives, or resentment and anger with feeling “ unfair for having to love ourselves”. For either of these experiences, it is important to remember to focus on accessing the positive experience as much as possible. If this is truly challenging after a number of recurring attempts, I would recommend examining your beliefs about love, grief, and anger along with addressing your loneliness.
Distractions make visualizing and feeling difficult: There are reasons for this. It might be that visualizing is not effective and engaging for you, which can be normal. You might want to explore other ways to access the same loving care described in this post. If you are neurodivergent, it may benefit you to alter this exercise to fit your needs. If neither applies to you, I would recommend strengthening your ability to stay concentrated by building mindfulness. In future posts, we will explore the topic of mindfulness in greater depth.
Exercise: Applying the Three-Step Method to Your Everyday Life
Practicing the three steps is about building a new habit. It is about small steps, consistency, patience, and making it easy to stick.
The three steps:
Think of something warm and feel its comfort.
Think of something soft and feel its comfort.
Think of when you felt warm and fuzzy caring for others or others for you. Bring that feeling to your pain when it is appropriate.
Some important tips:
Learn to regard our pain as something we care for instead of an enemy - The three-step exercise is about using care to resolve our pain, like how feeding a hungry dog will turn it into a friendly companion. Think care, not replacement.
Start Small - Use the three-step exercise daily, but try to engage in small chunks. For example, we can start by engaging one part of it, like looking at the nice painting on the wall that reminds us of warmth, instead of making it a full five or even 20-minute exercise.
Pair it with something else - Do you have a self-care routine? Do you have moments in your day that belong only to you? Try weaving this visualization into those moments. For example, when I brush my teeth in the evening, I am always alone. I can use that time to practice.
Make it about feeling good - Remember, this exercise is meant to create positive experiences. If you encounter procrastination and resistance, see if you can find ways to do it with less resistance. For example, I always feel challenged when I think of my supposedly loving grandparents in step 3, but I feel a lot more at ease and positive thinking about my cat. Perhaps I shall think about my cat instead.
Consistency is gold - Practice reminding ourselves that we are running a marathon, not a sprint. Create a discipline of trying not to skip twice in a row, but we are not “bad” or “have failed” when we find it difficult to be consistent. The journey of walking away from loneliness is likely going to have ups and downs. True regression only happens when we never start.
Sources:
Knüppel, L., Davanzo, R., & Lawn, J. E. (2021). Immediate "kangaroo mother care" and survival of infants with low birth weight. The New England Journal of Medicine, 384(22), 2028-2038. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2026486
World Health Organization. (2021, May 26). Kangaroo mother care started immediately after birth critical for saving lives, new research shows. https://www.who.int/news/item/26-05-2021-kangaroo-mother-care-started-immediately-after-birth-critical-for-saving-lives-new-research-shows
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Disclaimer: Psychotherapy is a psychological service involving a client interacting with a mental health professional with the aim of assessing or improving the mental health of the client. Neither the contents of this blog, nor our podcast, is psychotherapy, or a substitute for psychotherapy. The contents of this blog may be triggering to some, so reader’s discretion is advised. If you think that any of my suggestions, ideas, or exercises mentioned in this blog are creating further distress, please discontinue reading, and seek a professional’s help.
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