Writing this has been hard.
Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because self-love is one of those conversations we all arrive at differently. It looks different for all of us. It feels different for all of us. And it’s something I have struggled with a lot over the years.
Our concept of love is shaped so heavily by early childhood, by family dynamics, by the communities we grew up in. It’s a kind of “monkey see, monkey do” situation until we have the awareness to investigate our beliefs and really look at how we are or aren’t repeating patterns.
It takes a lot of self-investigation and honesty to arrive at a foundational understanding of what love even is. And it takes an even deeper level of reflection to see how we are or aren’t showing up for ourselves in those same ways.
For most of my life it was one of my biggest blind spots. I was great at loving other people. Trash at giving that same care to myself.
It’s something I’m actually enjoying digging into now, learning how to treat myself well, honor my needs, and be devoted to wanting what’s best for me even when it isn’t what I want in the moment.
It takes work.
It takes honesty.
It takes discipline.
And it is so much easier to stay conditioned. To act out of habit. To move through life unconsciously. To self-abandon, self-soothe, or self-neglect instead of choosing what actually affirms self-love.
When I first sat down to write this, everything I had to say came out sounding preachy. And that’s not what I want. I don’t want to sound like I have this all figured out and everyone else should gather around and listen.
That is not where I’m coming from.
There are just some things I’ve learned that took a lot of time, effort, and suffering to come to. And if you’ve struggled with self-love, I want you to know I hear you. This is not reflexive work. It’s a discipline. And the fact that you’re even working on it at all is a win.
My early life was full of abuse. The full complement: sexual, psychological, physical, emotional, financial. By the time I finally removed my entire bloodline from my life, I was completely disconnected from the truth of love. What it felt like. What is was.
It has taken me years of intense, intentional work to arrive where I am now, the healthiest, happiest, and most grounded version of me I’ve ever been.
And learning what self-love really meant for me was one of the hardest parts of all of it. Which makes total sense.
Self-love is the foundation upon which every other healthy relational and behavioral standard is built. If you don’t have it, you are easy to manipulate, easy to abuse, and effectively flying blind when it comes to what is actually healthy.
My version of self-love was self-abuse.
I had developed coping strategies, belief systems, behaviors, and addictions that confused self-soothing with self-care and self-abandonment with love.
It was a fractured existence.
I was worthy of love when I performed in a certain way.
When I looked a certain way.
When I had certain resources.
When I could be useful.
Love was conditional everywhere.
It exhausted me. It depleted me. And my beliefs about myself, about my worth, my place in the world, what I deserved, were painful to look at, let alone speak out loud.
Looking back now, I can see how desperate I was for loving acceptance. How much I twisted myself just to belong. How much I tolerated exploitation and mistreatment. How little I defended myself.
Shame, self-hatred, and judgment were part of my daily inner dialogue.
And every time the same patterns showed up again, betrayal, abuse, extraction, the shame compounded. I became certain that if this was my lived experience no matter what I changed, then it must be me.
I grew up believing I was born to be abused.
That belief was installed very early by the people who were supposed to love and protect me. And as I grew, I found and manufactured endless evidence to ways keep proving it true. Affirming it over and over, finding myself in one shitty situation after another.
Because that’s what we do with our beliefs—we build our lives around them. They become the lens through which we interpret every experience, the quiet script that tells us who we are and what we deserve. When something contradicts that script, our ego resists. It would rather be right and miserable than wrong and free. So even when the belief is painful, we cling to it, shaping our choices and relationships to confirm it again and again. It feels safer to live inside a familiar lie than to face the disorientation of rewriting who we think we are.
Getting myself out of that belief system meant leaving relationships, dismantling codependency, divorcing empathy from self-abandonment, and facing the brutal truth that I had played a role, unconsciously, in my own exploitation.
That grief was real.
That reckoning was real.
That work was brutal.
And it was necessary.
Self-love, for me, started showing up as discipline.
Not punishment.
Protection.
It showed up in what I stopped doing.
I stopped letting people use me.
I stopped numbing myself with substances.
I stopped pretending my future didn’t matter.
Right now it’s showing up in how I eat and how I live because Alzheimer’s runs in my family and I want to give myself the best shot I can at breaking that cycle.
That isn’t vanity. That’s love.
Self-love is not mud masks and massages. Those are nice. But that isn’t where this is built.
For me, self-love shows up in relentlessly investigating my psyche. In going back to the East Coast. Turning over every stone and ripping out all the skeletons in the closet with Charlie. In refusing to keep lugging around learned-pain I no longer deserve to carry. In bringing into focus everything I can about the future I want and building toward it on purpose.
It shows up in the trenches. In the choices I make every single day.
In whether those choices bring me closer to or farther away from my healthiest, most fulfilled, most self-actualized future.
And something strange happened when I started living this way.
Everything got quieter.
Not easier, but clearer.
I stopped rehearsing conversations.
I stopped twisting myself into shapes to be acceptable.
I stopped offering what I didn’t actually have.
I stopped staying where I was resentful.
Loving myself changed how I love other people too.
I’m more honest.
I don’t confuse endurance with loyalty or proximity with intimacy.
When I care about someone now, it comes from fullness instead of obligation.
From choice instead of fear.
I want what’s best for them in the same way I want what’s best for me, not because I’m trying to be good, but because I actually know what that feels like now.
And that brings me back to the Golden Rule.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
A lot of us probably are. And that’s the problem.
We’re loving our neighbors the same way we love ourselves, conditionally, critically, abusively, because we don’t know any better yet.
The crueler you are to yourself in your own mind, the crueler you expect the world to be. And then you start finding evidence to prove it.
We are loving each other the way we are loving ourselves.
And that explains a lot.
So I’ll ask you what I’ve had to ask myself.
Do you love yourself? How?
In how you treat your body.
In what you tolerate.
In how you talk to yourself.
In how you engage in relationships.
In what you believe you deserve.
And if you don’t love yourself in those ways yet, that doesn’t make you broken.
It means there is something to learn and work to do.
Self-love isn’t narcissism.
It isn’t indulgence.
It isn’t self-obsession.
To reach your highest potential, it is essential.
Criticizing yourself into becoming who you want to be has never worked.
Only love does that.
Every single time.
And if this is the work you’re ready to do in your own life, this is exactly the kind of re-patterning my clients experience in our work together.
You can book a session with me below.
-Sunny
