According to Dr Brown, people who live wholeheartedly love themselves, which means treating themselves with kindness, respect, affection, and trust. A key component of that self-lovingness is accepting themselves as they are, and believing they are worthy of love just because. There isn’t a reason these folks have for deserving love from others and from themselves; there doesn’t need to be. That’s the point, actually. When we really love ourselves, we don’t set preconditions, and we don’t wait. We don’t love ourselves if. We love ourselves anyway. Warts and all, we are worthy. This statement includes you!

I love you more than I even love myself

Loving ourselves is important, because Dr Brown’s research led her to conclude that we cannot love our partner, or our kids, or our friends more than we love ourselves. No wonder so many people are hurting those they love. When we don’t love ourselves, we act in ways that may seem to be hurting just us—but there’s no such thing as a victimless crime once we’re in relationships. When we don’t love ourselves enough to work on our problems or celebrate our strengths, those around us suffer too. And if you feel so bad about yourself that you can’t enjoy your own goodness, your partner can’t enjoy you nearly as much either.

Also, research indicates that you can’t take in another person’s love very well when you believe you don’t deserve it.

When Matthew was little, his dad beat his mom in front of him. And Karen’s mother committed suicide, leaving her at the mercy of a truly wicked stepmother. We now know that childhood trauma like that changes the brain’s structure. It changes emotions and behavior. Matt and Karen are both good people who don’t feel very good about themselves. They do good things in the world, but when others try to love them, they feel undeserving. It’s hard for them to believe they’re worthwhile. So when others treat them as worthy, they usually push them away and retreat to the safety of many friends—but no one person to depend on too much.

How to recognise whether you love yourself or not

Through interviews and subsequent analyses, Dr Brown found that another hallmark of being self-loving is acceptance of others—combined with boundaries. The self-loving understand that most of us, most of the time, are doing the very best we can. This understanding lets them feel compassion for others, rather than anger and hate.

But that doesn’t mean everyone’s behavior is up to their standards for choosing them as a partner. If you want to find and keep love, you have to be choosy, and the other person’s character has to count. Self-loving people don’t hate those who fail to meet basic standards of decency—but they also don’t allow others to treat them any old way. They aren’t doormats. They build fences, and nobody gets through the gate without behaviours amounting to the password. The self-loving are kind but firm, holding would-be partners accountable for their actions. Their motto could be “boundaries without blame.” For example, a natural consequence of someone who stands you up could be that you don’t go out with them again. There’s no need to call them names, or hate them—in fact, those actions are against your chances to find and keep love.

The self-loving understand that most of us, most of the time, are doing the very best we can

What if you don’t love yourself very much right now?

Our lives are a house under constant construction. Building self-lovingness is a lifetime project. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait to find love until you are perfect at this, and your partner doesn’t have to be the paragon of self-love either.

Nobody loves themselves completely, so the first thing is to acknowledge that. You’re on the path, and this path has no end. It’s not a competition; embrace yourself right here where you are, right now in this and every moment.

But how?

In her research, Dr. Brown found that it helped people to love themselves more if they could tell their stories of shame to at least one other trustworthy person. Of course, for a lot of folks, the person they can trust is their lifemate—someone you’re trying to find. Maybe you have a close friend, though, or a therapist, who can listen to your story in a supportive, non-judgmental way. If so, that is a major step towards healing your heart.

I don’t know a trustworthy person to pour my heart out to

If you don’t have a friend or therapist standing in this gap for you, follow these science-backed steps towards change: notice, redirect, and repeat.

Notice

When you catch yourself thinking something shameful or unloving about yourself, notice.  Don’t trash-talk yourself—just notice that you are feeling, thinking, or doing something that isn’t self-loving. Gently noticing is the gateway to change. Sometimes, you might feel bad about yourself even though you’ve followed your moral code. People raised to feel chronic shame might relate to a nagging feeling that there’s just something “off” about them. For instance, say you’re feeling like you’re a bad person, even though you merely decided to stop dating someone who yelled at you. What you did was right for you; but you feel wrong. Other times, you really will do something inappropriate. Everyone makes mistakes. Maybe you said you’d call someone—and then you never did. That’s hurtful, and human.

The difference between shame and guilt is that shame feels like something is wrong with us; guilt feels like something is wrong with what we did. Research shows that guilt can be good.  It motivates us to apologise, or change our behaviour. Shame, though, freezes us; if we think we are bad, how can we change? Shame is the opposite of self-loving. It keeps us stuck.

So a mindset to move towards is acknowledging when we feel bad even though we’ve done nothing wrong: “I’ve got that sick feeling in my stomach, although I haven’t done a thing to deserve it.”  Or, acknowledge our feelings around our failures: “I’m feeling like crap, because I told Becky I would call her and then I chickened out.” Notice whether it’s a guilt feeling or a shame feeling—a feeling that what you did was wrong, or that you are wrong. Just notice.

Redirect

Then, redirect your thoughts to something that’s aligned with reality.”I’m sticking by my boundaries. There is every reason to stop seeing people who yell at me, and it’s my right to date people who make me feel like my best self. I’m feeling shame, but that’s because I was taught to feel wrong for having boundaries. I’m doing the loving thing for me now.” Or, “What I did was rude; it might be too late to apologise to Becky, but at least I can resolve to send a note to her, and call other people when I make promises in the future.”

Repeat

Repeat the notice-redirect chain every time you catch yourself. Over time, you’ll love yourself more!

Ultimately, we are the landlords of our lives. When we love ourselves, we have standards, and we don’t key in squatters who can’t or won’t meet them. It’s not mean. It’s what works. And what works starts with taking that first step towards loving ourselves.

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Myth #1 – “Finding and keeping love is only for the lucky and the few”

Please take a moment to answer two questions:

Q1: If you could have a marriage or love partnership that would be happy and last your lifetime, would you want it?

Q2: Do you think you can have it?

Year after year, when I ask my students the first question, nearly every hand is raised.  But when I ask them to keep their arms up if they believe they can have a happy lifelong marriage, hands and faces fall.

I got a note from a man named Jean, who said, “Two years ago, there was all this hoopla about a friend’s wedding—now they’re fighting. You see why I’m a cynic? Can two people be together forever, and be happy?”

There are many reasons this cynicism has taken hold, some of them are news stories, movies, novels, and music about love gone wrong, plus your personal experiences with your own or other people’s relationship implosions. Even the legal system plays a part; the ease of divorce has ironically led to less happiness even for those who remain together as exposure to others’ divorces has made people forecast and fear their own.  Jean has a point.

But the belief in probable divorce is bad for you because it creates ambivalence: uncertainty of whether marriage is worth it.  And how likely are you to organise yourself to find and keep a life partner if you’re not even sure it would make you happy?

Today, fewer people are marrying at all, as faith in the possibility of a good marriage has plummeted and a belief that happy marriage is blind luck has risen.

Replace myth with fact

The antidote to the Luck lie is simple: You need exposure to accurate information.  Replace those untrue thoughts with the following fact-based realities.

1. Marriage does make most people happy—happier than any other living arrangement

It’s true that having a horrid marriage makes people very unhappy. In comparisons of various types of people, the miserably married are the most miserable of all. But it’s equally true that having a lasting, good marriage is one of the few things that really do make people happy. A single, solid marriage makes people happier than wealth, fame, career, or many of the other things we spend our lives striving for. It also makes us far happier than cohabitation, permanent singlehood, divorce, or widowhood. And that’s true in every country where comparisons have been made. We could do worse than following E. M. Forster’s epigram, “Only connect!”

2. Happy marriage is a common, renewable resource

Are you worried the world will run out of gold, copper, or oil? Or chocolate, which, heaven forbid, I hear is in short supply? Good news! Love doesn’t work like that. It’s common. And highly renewable.

Lots and lots of people do, in fact, have happy marriages. More than half of first marriages in the USA today last a lifetime, and about ⅔rd of divorced folks remarry. Roughly 25 – 40 per cent of them stay together for life too. These figures, I suspect, are much higher in India.

What does this mean? It means lifelong love is normal, not rare. The majority of the population forms a lifelong bond! And they’re usually happy.

Bonus! Happiness lost is frequently regained in the very same marriage. 

Those we have loved, we can usually fall back in love with. For instance, in one study, 86 per cent of people who had stayed married through a period of unhappiness were happy again within five years.

3. Happiness in marriage isn’t random—it’s learnable 

Although many people feel that finding and keeping love is a gamble, something random that might, but probably won’t, fall onto them from some benevolent-yet-unpredictable ‘Love God’, that’s not so.

The skills that create and sustain happy marriages are highly learnable. Finding and keeping love is a series of positive actions. It is something I learned. It’s something my clients and students and blog readers have learned. And it’s something you can learn, too. I’ve written about that elsewhere!

What’s common is love like Katrina’s for her husband. She says, “Recently we were apart for two weeks and he was picking me up at the airport. I suggested that there was no need to park and that I would walk out of the airport and meet him. About quarter way down the escalator I saw my husband standing, waiting for me. I realised seeing him made me grin from ear to ear. He makes me as happy today as he did when we met 10 years ago.”

Look around you. There are actually plenty of people who find and keep a wonderful mate. My husband and I share the kind of love Katrina feels for her spouse. A lot of folks do. Open your mind to it. Your heart will follow, charting a new, happier course.

Adapted by the author from her book Love Factually: 10 Proven Steps from I Wish to I Do.

This was first published in the April 2016 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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