“I love and approve of myself.” We have come to hear these affirmation sentences so much.
We added our expectations of miracles to them, and the weight of “I deserve this” on its back…
So what happened? Did we really love ourselves? Or were we able to approve of the aspects of ourselves that we found the most embarrassing, or the aspects of ourselves that we did not, we could not even admit that they belonged to us?
I don’t know anyone who changed their life through this sentence. Or at least someone who loves and approves themselves more just because they use this affirmation…
When does a person love and approve of themselves?
What is the criterion for this?
What happens that allows us to say someone loves themselves?
My answer to this question is very clear, it consists of two parts… 1. Who am I? 2. What does it mean to love? If we can answer these two questions, this could work…
Let’s start with loving, partly because it’s easier, yes you wouldn’t believe but, telling “what does to love mean?” is easier thanasking “who am I?”.
Loving is not just a feeling, it is a package with a behavioral dimension, including many elements such as reason, labor, intuition, protection, compassion, tolerance, commitment, belonging, service, honor, hearing your needs, noticing, respect, and cultivation. I guess no one will object to that. Although we all have different models of showing love, this is what love is like in essence.
So how to know who I am, to then find out if I like it or not?
Myself, I mean me, not just my emotions, my mind and my actions…
So what am I then???
Humans, who think about their own existence, can witness their own development, and being the only living thing that can adapt consciously to changing conditions, cannot be satisfied with a single definition of who they are. If you ask me, I am more than my body, my emotion, my mind, and my spirituality, and the sum of my actions that I create as a result of them.
Is it easy to know and recognize something so layered and fragmented that it is easy to approve and even love?
The physical needs that are common and socially understandable for everyone, such as getting hungry and going to the toilet, are very easy to approve of the action I take as a result of these needs. If I eat when I’m hungry, I don’t need approval! But if I eat unhealthy things without being hungry and thinking that I should lose weight, can I approve myself?
Things start to get complicated when a little emotion, a little moral values and a little socialization enter into physical needs. A few other voices appear in my mind besides me, some of them say “don’t do it” and others say “but do it, we only live once”… I regret it a lot both when I do some of them, and when I don’t do some. Which one should I listen to, which one should I serve? Whichever one I listen to, do I not love myself in the other?
It’s really messed up, isn’t it? We go through this a lot in daily life, we say “we are bored, we are overwhelmed, we are unhappy”, but we do not know the root cause. Unfortunately, we cannot love ourselves enough because we do not know ourselves well enough, and we do not even know what to love.
While the family we grew up with, its values and the socialization process tried to turn us into accepted prototypes by taking us away from us, and after we grew up with the knowledge of where to behave and which emotion should accompany this behavior, we cannot get up one day and say “no, this is not what I want, it is what society wants” or “what my parents found suitable for me”. But of course we love and approve of ourselves ☺
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. It takes a long time to decide what you like or dislike, what you want or don’t want, and more importantly, whether you want to pay the price for them. It takes a lot of emotional maturation to realize that our truths, which we believe in and know our own value, may one day have to change.
When we understand that negative reactions from the body such as illness, contraction, tension are a signal, we take a step closer to ourselves when we realize that this is how our body tells us “you are not cheery, you are feeling unwell” or “you are not comfortable”.
When we notice our repetitive emotions, whether they are ours or those taught by someone else, whether they are the legacy of today or yesterday, whether they are caused by anxiety, whether they are caused by the mind or when we can really distinguish them from our body, that is, from our subconscious…
One more step when we can organize what goes through our minds in a way that does not harm us, but serves us, when we solve our minds, mental processes, in which situation we think in similar patterns, when we can observe the limitations in our thought patterns…
And beyond all this, when we realize that we need to connect as much as be independent as a human being, that we also need to create a spirituality outside the world of matter, that meaning has a spiritual dimension as well as a mental dimension…
When we realize these and are sincere enough to meet our own needs with all this consciousness, taking care of the good of the whole and respecting others, one more step…
It is an endless journey for a person to approach being one’s self, to realize one’s self, to see the areas of development, to do these not because others say but because one wants, with the intention of establishing a better life, smoother, more tolerant relationships, to get one step closer to one’s self in every awareness. The person who tries to approach themselves until their last breath, that is, the self behind their identities, roles, attitudes and behaviors, is sometimes terrified, afraid, despondent when they see how alienated they are while doing this, rarely gets excited and impatient to give birth to closeness to one’s self from that strangeness.
In this challenging, laden, sometimes anxious, sometimes beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes heartwarming journey, one often forgets to love and approve of oneself. How many of us are able to put our need for resting ahead of the need to succeed at work! How many of us are able to show the courage, and more importantly, the sincerity to end an unhappy relationship!
How many of us care more about our self-esteem than being loved!
How many of us can choose between social acceptance and personal happiness!
But how many of us can put satisfaction instead of success, peace instead of more, loneliness instead of paid relationships, choices and what they bring instead of approval!
How many of us give ourselves a sincere feedback instead of making excuses that start with feedback!
How many of us are willing to pay the price of being ourselves by disrupting our current comfort that we are talking about loving and affirming ourselves?
Unfortunately, very few of us. Not because we don’t know how to love, but because we don’t know exactly what to love. So I said, I just didn’t see anyone whose life changed with this affirmation. When the “me” behind this affirmation emerges with a clear awareness, then the person both loves and approves of oneself and easily recreates the better, the more lovable of what one loves at every step. And I hope it will be so…
