Eight years ago, I was sitting on my therapist’s couch crying. He was handing me tissues listening to how broken I felt. He offered me a blanket because I’d come with two sweaters and a scarf and still felt cold. I was depleted and had lost weight from years of trying to keep my life intact.
Two years before that moment I’d spent my nights curled up on the floor of my one-bedroom apartment, nursing myself, heartsick. My husband at the time had decided he wanted a divorce. I remember hearing the words slip out of his mouth at a moment he didn’t mean them to; they were gentle, but clear. He knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t me.
I remember the feeling; like I was standing at the edge of a cliff over a canyon and the edges started crumbling under my feet. I tried to back my way out of it, but it was too fast. Disoriented I gripped onto whatever I could, my fingers feeling for holds on the collapsing wall, desperate.
Up to that point in my life I was operating from a survival strategy where my safety depended on controlling my environment; manipulating it, if needed. I unconsciously believed that if my partner made me feel loved and accepted, then I must be lovable and good enough, which, obviously, was never going to work. Seth Godin put it so well in his book The Practice, he said “requiring control over external events is a recipe for heartache”. Literally.
This strategy worked for most of my twenties and the span of my 9-year marriage, until it didn’t anymore. After my marriage ended I spent nearly a decade in and out of a relationship that was violent and toxic. Not because I was broken, but because my unconscious need for attachment outweighed my conscious ability to choose what was healthy for me. Our survival systems are powerful, and it was more important to mine that I was “safe” (*attached) than thriving or happy.
And I have so much compassion for that version of me.
One heartbreak after another, I was shown that nothing external could make an internal part of me feel good enough. No matter how tightly I gripped or tried to fix myself to fit. No matter how many times I was willing to stand loyal at the edge of a cliff, the result would always be the same; I would feel unanchored and unworthy.
These aren’t the lessons they teach in school. We don’t learn about wholeness; we learn about trigonometry. We aren’t taught about our survival patterns or the implications of being raised by imperfect parents. Or how childhood experiences might influence our sense of self-worth or identity. We fumble around in the bodies of adults feeling frozen in time as younger versions of ourselves, trying to make sense of the moments someone we depended on messed up.
About a year ago I started feeling like I was near the edge of my own threshold. I was depleted, anxious, depressed, burnt out, and showing signs of adrenal fatigue. For nearly a decade I poured my life-force into a volatile relationship, and I had nothing left. I’d romanticized our connection for so long because I believed if it got better, I’d feel better.
Eight months before I made the decision to leave, I’d enrolled in a course with Kylie Mcbeath, and the work I did with her sparked a flame in me. For the first time I started getting clear about what in my life was pulling me towards my Truth, and what was pushing me away from it. For the first time I started unpacking survival mechanisms, belief systems, and ways I was depending on external sources to make me feel safe or good enough.
From the work I did with her, I’d built just enough internal strength during that time that I was finally able to choose to leave a harmful relationship. Rather than acting from old beliefs, I started building the resilience I needed to stand a little bit more on my own foundation— having the capacity to choose for myself changed everything.
So, what is self-love? What does it really mean to love yourself?
Let me start by saying that embodying it is a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than taking baths in essential oils. Although I totally do that. But they didn’t actually change what I believed about myself. Those things have very little to do with the immense power that lives in someone who has anchored the force of their own love.
The moment I started learning about self-love was the moment I chose to figure out what love felt like without any external input or influence. But not only that. It was the moment I was willing to sit in the pain of the void that lived inside me. And what I found was the moments I felt most void of love, were the moments I had the most opportunity to find it.
Self-love started happening when I started doing the gritty work of taking those moments as opportunities to rewire old patterns. To literally change my neural pathways.
And it makes me cry just writing this.
Because wow—it was heavy. And sometimes dark. I had to learn how to turn toward the parts of myself I’d abandoned. I welcomed home the parts of me I thought were wretched. The parts that felt like, if anyone knew about them, they would have locked me away in a dark room, exiled forever.
These were my younger parts I’d ignored and rejected. We can think of these “parts” like our inner child. My inner child had been so discarded it took months for her to trust me enough to even acknowledge my attempts at repair.
In those months after I left my relationship I was in constant pain and sick to my stomach, which was exactly what told me my younger parts needed my attention, more than ever. So every day I showed up; I felt her pain and I sat with her while she cried to be rescued— for someone to love her.
I stayed with her, patiently. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I got to know her. I asked her questions. I listened. I fed her warm meals. I wrapped her in blankets. And eventually, she started to trust me again. She saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. That I was choosing her.
And here’s the thing—we all have these parts. It’s in those moments when the pain feels so unbearable that our temptation is to subtly seek love or comfort from anywhere other than ourselves. But that moment is the crux. Because those parts are a part of you, and if they don’t feel accepted by you, they stay in exile believing they aren’t worthy. Rejected and unconsciously seeking someone or something to resolve their neglect.
The beauty (and the gut-wrench) is that nobody can do that but ourselves. Anything less is giving away our power, and a recipe for heartache.
What I had to learn was that regardless of any relationship, I wouldn’t feel fully chosen until I was fully choosing myself.
And that’s when I started to feel more whole.
That’s when I started to feel my own power.
That’s when I started to liberate myself.
I’m under no false impression that the path back to loving myself is complete—I think it’s lifelong for all of us. But as I sit here and write this, I’m on the other side of a huge descent, and by default a beautiful expansion.
It required me to turn in. To cut out the noise. To stop looking for something to fix what was hurting, and instead learn to soothe it myself.
I can say now with my whole being that I wouldn’t change a moment of the depths I had to feel to experience this version of myself.
Because what I’ve found is nothing feels as empowering as loving your own parts.
*Attachment in and of itself is not problematic, in fact we need it for healthy relationships. Here I’m referring to attachment at the expense of self-autonomy or authenticity.
My Weekly Recommendations—
Book: I’m currently reading The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. This book is beautiful for the topic of self-love, because he writes about the importance of honouring our grief and giving ourselves the space to feel and experience the depths of our truth, which for me, was central to building my capacity for self-love. Tending my own grief was an act of devotional Love.
Podcast: This weeks podcast recommendation is more of a poetic “meditation” than a podcast, but it’s a powerful one, by Sarah Blondin. Check out it out here.
Person: I’ve mentioned her once but I’ll mention her again. Kylie McBeath and her work was a huge turning point for me. You can also find her on Instagram.
Music: I’ve been dancing so much lately. I LOVE dancing, always have. I’d stopped dancing for almost a decade (hey nervous system dysregulation), but recently I’ve been going to dance classes and doing a lot of ecstatic dance by myself at home. This ecstatic dance playlist I made feels good to my bones.
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J. xo