Three Flavors of Self-Love
We hear a lot about “Self-love”. But what does it actually mean? How do we cut through the platitudes and actually create the internal relationship we are longing for?
In my 5 year journey to reorganize my nervous system and heal old trauma, I’ve found each of the following “flavors” of Self-love to have a deep and lasting impact on my life. Plus, they can bring lots of joy and peace along the way.
Flavor 1: Grace
The first flavor is grace: giving yourself kindness, compassion, understanding, patience, and forgiveness. This is the main focus of my Self-Compassion group within Primal Trust Academy and Community (this is an affiliate link). In the 5-week group series explore everything from slowing down, to giving yourself permission, to forgiving yourself for past choices or actions you may still be holding against yourself. We create new patterns of embracing vulnerability as an essential part of being human.
This is especially important for people with chronic illness. Underlying the body’s dysfunction, there is often a deeply embedded sense of expectation and pressure: either to be perfect, or exceptional, or to take care of everyone else while pretending we have no needs of our own. Grace is the practice of loosening that grip and meeting ourselves with humanity instead of judgment. 🧡
Flavor 2: Self-Parenting
The second flavor of self-love is self-parenting, and this has been a revelation for me. It completely shifted my understanding of what it means to be an adult. It helped me make peace with my childhood, and it gave me a path forward when, for many decades, I didn’t know how to heal wounds that were still wide open and bleeding.
Let’s be honest: no parent is perfect and no childhood is perfect. Most humans reach adulthood with some aspects of emotional and psychological needs still unmet. I’m talking about the fundamental human experiences that are necessary for neurological development and healthy relationships in adulthood (feeling safe, loved, supported, accepted. feeling a deep sense of belonging, etc.).
I think I had subconsciously been waiting for someone to give me these experiences, even into my 40’s. But along my healing journey, I realized that NO ONE WAS GOING TO APPEAR AND GIVE THEM TO ME. What shocked me most was realizing that once we reach adulthood (however you define that) it is no longer our parents’ or anyone else’s responsibility to tend to our needs or make sure they’re met.
So what do we do??
As part of my nervous system healing practice, I began devoting time each day to actively asking and listening:
What are my most vulnerable needs right now?
What does the little, scared part of me, stuck in old trauma or simply never guided, need?
What is that part yearning for, begging for, screaming for?
When I slowed down enough to ask these questions—and really listen—I started getting remarkable answers. Stay tuned for another post on how I used these answers to actually give myself the experiences I needed! Basically, though: I say the words. I offer physical actions. I let myself have the experiences. Essentially, Self-parenting is role-playing: becoming your own caring adult caregiver, while also allowing yourself to be the little one (baby, child, toddler, young girl, adolescent, etc).
As hokey as role-playing may sound, there is plenty of scientific evidence that shows that our brains interpret imagined experiences almost exactly as they interpret real ones. And I personally found this to be true. It stunned me to realize that my nervous system responded in exactly the same way as if someone else were giving these things to me.
Timeline jumping!
It doesn’t matter how long the need has gone unmet. It could be months, years, or decades. We are genetically predisposed to receive this kind of care. Our systems have been waiting our entire lives, ready to receive it. Our job is simply to give it, and receive it, allowing those gaps to finally be filled in.
Developmentally and neurologically, we are programmed to expect loving, tending, nurturing experiences starting at birth. When we finally receive them, the neurological placeholders that have been waiting can be marked as complete. Then our mental, emotional, and physical systems are free to move on to the next stage of development.
Side note about chronic illness
(Incidentally, I now believe that many, if not most, chronic illness symptoms are extreme messages from the brain and body, trying desperately to draw attention and care to places where we have some unmet fundamental needs.)
Flavor 3: Loving Yourself as an Adult
The third flavor of self-love is loving yourself as an adult.
This looks like affording yourself the attention, respect, honor, time, unconditional presence, and love that you deserve (and that so many of us wish someone else would give us).
Adult self-care includes prioritizing your own needs, which is a powerful step toward exiting old codependent patterns. It means turning some of the energy that used to be fruitlessly poured into other people (through fawning, people-pleasing, and over-giving) and redirecting it toward yourself first.
Loving yourself as an adult can look like asking which obligations and commitments actually feel aligned. It can mean putting limits on work and caregiving, carving out time for creativity and self-expression, and devoting time to listen to yourself. To feel your feelings. To move your body. To rest. To reflect, journal, meditate- whatever nourishes you as an adult human being.
A Sundae Kind of Love
Any of these flavors of self-love can fill in gaps where our heart has been longing: for patience, understanding, guidance, and belonging.
When we give ourselves all three, we really start living a delicious kind of life. We get to be someone who is centered, nourished, and overflowing with love.
Plus, when we live from a place of already-flowing love, we attract other beings who are also radiating love.
Instead of a hungry yearning, reaching, grasping for something outside of us to meet our needs, now our seeking overflows from love and toward love.