Self-Love: The Antidote to All Forms of Abuse

Is Self-Love Really Selfish?

Have you ever loved someone or many people who simply made you feel bad about yourself? No matter how hard you tried to stay and love them, make things better for them, seek their approval, understand them, or communicate openly and vulnerably with them, they simply triggered your insecurities over and over again because they could not love or appreciate you for you. They made you feel unworthy, misunderstood, unloved, and invalidated because they projected their feelings of unworthiness onto you. They may have ghosted or breadcrumbed you, used you, manipulated you, condescended to or demeaned you, lied to you, and called you horrible names. They might have hit you, held you down, or controlled you financially or emotionally. In sticking around these kinds of wounded people, you simply jumped into the ditch of self-loathing they were stuck in and you became stuck in your own self-loathing along with them. No one wins here, but misery does love company.

This is the plight of the empathic person. The empath sponges up others’ feelings and takes them on as their own. The empath who is wounded in this way begins to feel like they don’t matter very much, are not good enough, and can’t get anything right in life and especially with this person. There is no pleasing this person. Why is self-love so important when we want to escape abuse of all kinds? Well, self-love instills a sense of confidence and self-worth. You lose confidence and self-worth when you are being abused. Self-love allows you to set healthy boundaries and to say “no” unapologetically when something feels wrong for you. Having boundaries also allows you to stand back or walk away from someone who simply cannot appreciate or love you the way you deserve to be loved. Is it selfish to set healthy boundaries when someone you love is hurting you? NO! It is putting yourself first and protecting your being. You are the protector and caregiver of your own body, mind, and soul. If someone is not appreciating you, is hurting you physically, sexually, financially, emotionally, or verbally, I invite you to start the process of asking yourself why you are allowing it. I invite you to step back from this pain and abuse that you are continuing to experience. Would you tell your best friend or your child that they deserve to be mistreated? If you would not, I also invite you to turn that question back onto yourself and find a way to move out of the beliefs and patterns that keep you locked in abusive cycles with people who are in deep pain and self-hatred.

We treat each other the way we treat ourselves. If someone has the capacity to inflict abuse onto you, imagine how they feel about themselves and what they are doing to themselves on the inside continually.

Believe me when I say that I know how difficult it is to walk away from someone we love, even though they are abusing us. We have invested love, time, and energy into the relationship, and we can feel like a failure when we step away and allow them to be in pain on their own. We hoped that they would eventually change, but the problem is that, by sticking around, we enable them to abuse us more and more every minute we give them chance after chance to be better to us. Staying around, being strong, forgiving over and over again is REWARDING their bad behavior. It teaches them nothing about how they have hurt us. It encourages them to continue—not to stop, see the error of their ways, and change. I really and truly wish this was the way it works, but it is not. For some, perhaps it does happen this way, but not for most.

By continuing to put yourself back into the lion’s den, you are asking for more pain and abuse. When you forgive someone time after time and try with them again, you are showing yourself that you do not love yourself more than them. You must love yourself more than them. You must set the example of what someone who loves and respects themselves does. They walk away from pain. They stand in the truth that they are worthy of love, respect, and appreciation. It is not your job to fix them. They can seek out professional help. It is not a wife’s, a girlfriend’s, a mother’s, or a husband’s job to fix and heal sick people, even if it is your job during the daytime. You can be the best partner, mother, and friend to them and those are the roles you play for them. You do not need to play coach or therapist with people you are emotionally connected to. You can support them in their lives and in their growth. You can encourage them and have loving and respectful discussions with them. You can give them advice about their job and other personal parts of their lives. This is expected in relationships. But, to take on their issues as your own, to make their issues your issues while allowing them to dump (project or transfer) them off onto you and then call you the problem is traumatizing, abusive, unfair, and unwarranted in your role as their loved one.

In order to heal the empathic wounding, you must become free of the false beliefs you received from your childhood that you carry about yourself today that tell you a story about how unworthy and undeserving you are of true, healthy love. You must heal and protect your energetic and auric fields so that abusive people can no longer hook into you. You must heal and know that you are no one’s caretaker but your own and that people can find a way to get the help they need. Every soul on this planet is STRONG and capable of healing when they desire to. Think of it in this way and it might help you to stop and have respect for them as a soul who is brilliant and divine and can be happy and stop the abuse—if and when they want to, and no time before then. People only change when THEY feel moved to, not when you love them endlessly. Love can help in healing, no doubt, but a person has to want to change in order to seek that change for themselves. Love that heals someone is love that is received by that someone. When someone is abusive, they cannot receive love. They want it, but they cannot believe they are worthy of it. So, loving them in order to help them heal becomes a futile effort. Love them from a distance. Love yourself first.

Please let me help you learn how to love yourself so that you can be free of abuse and live the happiest life you have ever dreamed of!