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Loving ourselves. Owning our past.
“In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.”
- Andrea Dykstra
Self-love can be tough, especially for people who grew up in unfavorable environments where love was misused, abused or ignored altogether. Learning to love ourselves is at the foundation of self-care, so we should all be practicing healthy self-love. Hopefully, we have learned (or are learning) how to love ourselves in a healthy way, regardless of our past. We cannot change how we mistreated ourselves and how others mistreated us, but we can control how we treat ourselves moving forward. Self-care also means having healthy expectations for how others should treat us too.
We all had different experiences growing up. Some people were dealt much tougher hands than others. While we may not be able to pick the cards we are dealt, it’s on us to play our best hand. Sometimes we may have nothing else to do but fold. We have to be willing to ante up again. We also have to be willing to learn and grow from our experiences. Our experiences can teach us how to love ourselves if we are willing to accept where we are in life and what we have been through. From there, we can work on improving our own quality of life by incorporating self-love and self-care practices.
