How Self Love Can Change Your Life – And How to Actually Love Yourself

At the beginning of my personal development journey, it would drive me crazy when people would say, “Just love yourself! You’ve just got to love yourself more. It’s going to make your relationships better, it’s going to help you connect to your purpose, and it’s going to help you make more money.”

It was touted as some miracle cure. But I was always left wondering, “HOW?!”

Theoretically, I could understand it and think it. I would say to myself, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” And I would write out things about myself that I thought I loved.

But I couldn’t think my way to actually loving myself. I didn’t feel I loved myself. I tried to “fake it til I make it.” And it wasn’t working.

So I asked myself, “How does self love actually work?”

The main distinction I saw was between THINKING about loving yourself and actually FEELING an embodied feeling of love towards oneself.

I sought to understand how to FEEL self-love and what was in the way of that.

This led me to studying the neurology of trauma. What I discovered was that when you go through any trauma as a child, big or small, parts of your neurology actually get frozen in time and stop developing. These neural networks, chains of neurons that are linked together by neural pathways are where the memories, people, situations, feelings, and thoughts that were happening at that moment are stored. And this neural network becomes devoted to making sure you don’t go through that trauma, challenge, or pain ever again.

This doesn’t have to be a big trauma, although it could be. It could be as simple as you crawling out of the room for the first time as a little baby, your mom on the couch and you bravely crawling farther from your mom than you ever have before. You start to feel a little nervous and anxious so you turn around and she’s GONE. And immediately in your little nervous system, it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s not safe for me to go past my boundaries or too far from my parents. They will leave if I do that!”

In reality, your mom probably went to shut off the dryer or pick up the phone or check on a strange sound outside. But, from something as small as that, a neural network could become devoted to making sure you never experience that fear again. And this could become a form of “fear of abandonment” or “anxious attachment” in relationships.

So what this means is that there’s essentially an inner child in your neurology, a neural network that is frozen at that age.

So you have a little three year old, a little five year old, a little seven year old, all these different younger versions of you in your neurology in the form of neural pathways that make up a particular neural networks that are devoted and committed to making sure you don’t go through that trauma again.

So, in the present day, whenever any person, circumstance, or opportunity poses a potential risk to going through that trauma again, electricity begins to fire from neuron to neuron across the neural pathways of that neural network, kicking off a protection pattern that you developed/learned back when you were a child.

And, if you’re not aware this is happening, it will happen automatically and unconsciously, often when there actually isn’t a threat. That is because this part of you, this part of your neurology identifies it as a threat and kicks off the automatic defense mechanism.

These very same patterns that you created to protect yourself and that DID protect yourself become the very sabotaging behaviors that you end up hating about yourself.

And this is where there’s a HUGE opportunity to shift to FEELING self-love.

In these moments, you can begin to bring your automatic unconscious protection patterns to conscious Awareness. And then, instead of hating them and thinking there’s something wrong with you, you can begin to deeply understand HOW they formed so you can begin to have compassion for yourself and these younger parts of your neurology.

Compassion is then the doorway to Love.

This moves Self-Love out of the theoretical and into the embodied.

The important Awareness to develop is that these patterns are NOT you. They are parts of you, defense mechanisms built by younger versions of you to help you navigate challenging times.

For me, some of the major patterns I developed were a fear of abandonment, anxious attachment, a feeling of not being good enough, and a fear of fully expressing. This was because my dad didn’t really want me. It was because there was a lot of fighting in my home as a young child. It’s because my parents separated when I was 6. It’s because I was bullied for loving to study and read. It’s because I was made fun of for being naturally romantic and not a womanizer.

During my childhood, it often wasn’t physically or emotionally safe to be me. And I learned and developed LOTS of protection patterns to help myself no longer feel lonely, depressed, or outcast. And they helped me… until they didn’t.

Then they began to sabotage my relationships, happiness, and purpose. I would push partners away through my anxiety, fear, and lack of self-worth. I would push my dreams aside in order to choose the safe options that would make me more acceptable and attractive according to societal norms. And I would move through the world trying to make people like me.

But even I didn’t like myself, never mind love myself. And I couldn’t even fathom how to truly love myself. Until I started understanding what was happening in my neurology and beginning to bring these patterns to my conscious awareness.

Perhaps you resonate with my story and have similar protection patterns. Or perhaps yours look very different. These protection patterns can look like avoidance, directing anger at others, or blaming others. They can look like hiding away and disconnecting from the world. They can look like freezing and not knowing what to say. They can look like panic attacks. They can look like avoidance through busyness. They can look like fears of abandonment, fears of commitment, and any number of fears or other defense mechanisms.

Whatever your protection patterns are, when you bring more awareness to them, they slowly become less automatic and you’re able to choose something different. The pathway to choosing something different is ACCEPTANCE.

Acceptance looks like taking some time to remember why you created the protection patterns in the first place and how they absolutely helped you get through a tough time in the past. Then, you can realize how they helped you then but are no longer helping you.

And finally, you can have the breakthrough that these patterns are NOT you. They are a part of you, a young child in your psyche, a younger version of you that is desperately trying to protect you from a perceived threat that actually isn’t there anymore.

Then, you’ll have somewhere to direct your Self-Love. And you can help this younger part of you relax and realize there isn’t a threat. You can put yourself back in their shoes and back in the moments when they created this pattern. And you can actually FEEL gratitude for them, their bravery, their resilience, and their perseverance to create this pattern at that young age.

Instead of beating yourself up or judging yourself with thoughts like, “I can’t believe I did it again, how can I be so stupid? How can I keep ruining my relationships?” … you can begin to pause in moments of trigger and fear and soften.

These younger versions of you are AMAZING. They did what they had to do to get you to where you are now. And they’re an integral part of your psyche and who you are. And when you realize that your self-judgement, self-deprecating self-talk, etc is directed at them, you can begin to soften and stop yelling at this young powerful one. You can thank them. You can bring your awareness to your heart and actually feel deep appreciation for them.

THAT is how to actually love yourself.

So, when you can catch yourself beating yourself up, pause for a moment and ask yourself these questions:

• When did I create this protection pattern?
• How did I need this exact protection pattern?
• In what ways was I powerful and perseverant and brave in creating this protection pattern because I needed it back then?
• How is it no longer serving me? 

That will help you separate from from the pattern and see it’s not you. Then you can actually love yourself. You can love this part of your neurology, this inner child that lives in a little neural network up inyour mind. And you can love that part of yourself and help that part of yourself relax and realize there actually isn’t a danger and they can stop trying to protect you.

Think about this: what do you do with a scared, freaking out child? You don’t tell them how horrible they are. You don’t ignore them or call them names. (Perhaps someone in your childhood did do those things to you.) Instead, you love them, console them, hug them.

Instead of trying to fix yourself on an endless hamster wheel of personal development, this will actually create the SPACE for a new behavior to emerge. For you to reconnect to the GIFTS of this inner child: the joy, the full expression, the love, the wonder. Out of your love for this part of you will naturally emerge back these gifts.

This requires patience and gentleness. The mind likely won’t like this path as the mind likes solving problems and fixing things. But there is no problem and there’s nothing to fix. Your mind isn’t the tool for this process. Your heart is.

These parts of you are amazing. And when you can really feel that, that’s the difference between THINKING self love and FEELING self love.

This is where the rubber meets the road: when you actually pause to slow down and go into your heart, to put yourself back in the position of that little child when this protection pattern was created and love them.

Self-love is about slowing down and being with this part of you. This helps this part of you relax so the next time there’s a triggering event, the electricity will fire across the neural pathways of that neural network a little bit slower. There won’t be as much of a reaction and this becomes the space for something new to emerge and for this neural network to re-integrate with the rest of your neurology in the present moment, no longer scanning for threats of the past.

And that is how self love can change your life. Instead of trying to fix yourself, you create the space for something new from a place of deep understanding, deep compassion, and deep self love that shifts your patterns and triggers. So you’re actually attracting new kinds of relationships, experiences, and opportunities.

I truly hope this blog post has shifted something for you.

Self-love actually IS a miracle cure when you actually know how to FEEL it instead of THINK it.

Leave any questions in the comments below and I’ll be sure to answer each one.

Also, I’d love for you to download your free Personalized Phoenix Method Guide below. It is personalized with your unique Human Design chart to support you in your Self-Love and Self-Remembrance journey!

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