How To Love Yourself When ‘Self Love’ Makes Your Skin Crawl
We love to be loved, but we hate to love ourselves. Maybe there’s a different way to approach self love.
Read Time: 6 minA piece of my trauma unfolded on the campus of a Christian university, so while the initial trauma had nothing to do with God or my faith, my religious system slowly became part of the conversation. That’s the way trauma is.
Trauma never stands on its own. Like a magnet, it silently pulls everything around it closer and closer until they too become part of the untangling and healing of the wound itself.
I’ve yo-yo’d closer and farther from my white evangelical understanding of the divine throughout my healing journey, and now I’m finding myself in a season where the string has stretched out a little bit longer than I’ve ever let it stretch before.
As I let doubt linger and questions sit without tidy answers, I find myself missing certain things. That’s why my heart started pounding when my friend let me in on a longing we both seem to share. Through slow tired tears they spoke aloud, “I’ve been looking for some version of the prophetic.” And in that moment I knew I had been too. In fact, I would venture that most of us also crave some version of an ethereal connection, a personalized divine driveby, if you will.
A Cosmic Connection
As humans we seem to crave a glimpse into the realms we physically cannot see. Yes, we want to know what is out there, but more importantly we want what is out there to know us. Some find this celestial connection in astrology, others through energy work, palm reading and tarot cards. It’s expressed in some charismatic religious settings, meditative images, and meaningful words spoken over us. Whatever the expression, it all seems to let us in on a cosmic story being cooked up behind the scenes.
Maybe you’re like me, and you desperately want a mystical insight to bump into the malaise of your day to day, but you’re also very skeptical of it all. I was raised in a culture where you had to be careful of Yoga, and Harry Potter contained witchcraft so dangerous that reading those words could compromise your soul irrevocably. In light of these religious guardrails, my prophetic channels were slimmed down to divine messages delivered by the people around me and physical signs and wonders open to my own interpretations.
Over time this proposedly safer version of the prophetic became suspicious too. Anyone else end up NOT married to the person God told them they would marry? (woof being twenty is hard)
It’s all so unknown and mystical, yet we all seem to find ourselves drawn to some expression of it.
Why is that?
The Narratives We Craft
We spend our entire lives narrating ourselves to the people around us. We tell others who we are, where we come from, what we value. We translate our actions, explain our decisions, and prepare people for the changes on our horizon.
It’s very vulnerable for someone or something to see us when we can’t control the narrative- for something outside of us to speak to what’s inside of us. It’s exposing, and what’s said in those unarmored spaces seems to touch the truest parts of us. The parts free of any reframing or bullshitting (intentional or otherwise). No wonder it makes such a startling and intoxicating impact!
What’s interesting is that more often than not, these cosmic communications don’t tell us something new, but rather they simply confirm what we already know. But we are hesitant to claim it without confirmation. We want affirmation- it’s powerful. Being seen is powerful. Being known in the raw is powerful.
If love were a physical thing, I imagine at its core would be a set of eyes (super creepy, I know). But truly. At the core of being loved is being seen. And after being seen, being accepted and celebrated.
It’s February and I learned in elementary school that this means we’re supposed to wear pink and talk about love. Graciously Valentine’s Day has expanded into Galentine’s Day, and I think an all inclusive Palentine’s Day is inevitably around the corner. With all this talk about love, we eventually circle the drain and land on self love. We love to be loved, but we hate to love ourselves.
A different Approach to Self Love
And everyone who just read the words “self love” immediately checked out, am I right? Great - that means I’m not the only one.
So hear me out: what if we could access self love through a different route? What if instead of wrangling our aversions and forcing underdeveloped self-acceptance and self-celebration, we tried a subtler approach? What if we just attempted to see ourselves instead?
When the rug floor has been pulled out from under you and you’ve been exposed without your permission, being seen is almost more than you can bear. We’ve been too seen and completely overlooked all at once. It’s no wonder being seen is what we most crave, and what we most run from.
I’m still working out what this looks like in community. All I know is I almost always feel sweaty and teary when I leave a friend’s house. So instead I’m going to practice with one variable. What would it look like to allow ourselves to be seen by just us?
What if we closed our eyes and held hands with the little one just beginning to craft the narrative of her life. What if we let her walk us to her favorite part of the backyard and show off her make-believe world? What if we held on as she grew tall and clumsy? What if we took a minute to sit at the end of her bed and watch as loneliness clawed its way in, solidifying her silent fears? What if we stood witness and squeezed her hand as she told the therapist about the cutting and held her gaze as she rallied to show up for herself through afternoon walks and awkward boundaries?
Monuments of Grit
You see we don’t see ourselves, the monuments of grit we have been becoming since the very beginning. We see with too much clarity what was done to us, what unraveled as a result and the impossibility of what we’re trying to become, but we gloss over the rebounding and reviving that catalyzed long before we told it to.
My hope is that as we wake each day we would be brave enough to fall madly in love with the fortitude we currently possess and the glimpses of it that have been there all along. That we would bravely dawdle through our stories, collecting evidence of a valor that has been gravely overlooked, yet steadfast and present. That we would spotlight the internal resources we take for granted and stare a little longer at the parts of us that long to be seen and known. That as we yearn to be seen by the unseen realms, we would find ways to let what we can physically see speak for the divine.
And maybe with time, if we learn to see ourselves, we can begin to accept ourselves too. And with that acceptance, we just might find a love that has been waiting there all along.
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Navigating trauma & feeling stuck in the past? Yeah, me too. I find tethering to the present helps a lot. Here, I made you a lil’ somethin’ to help!
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