We Love Ourselves

It is Our Job to Love Ourselves

As children we may have assumed that it was our parents’ job to love us; now that we are adults, we learn that it is our job alone to love ourselves. It is not the responsibility of our spouse or partner; nor is it our children’s job either. We are each accountable for loving ourselves. The love others give us is a gift, not their responsibility. They are not required to fulfill our expectations. In other words, they were not put on the face of this earth just to love us!

Longing for Love

Since some of us did not feel loved as a child, as adults we still have the very strong longing to feel loved by another and think we need their love to be happy. However, it is good news for adults abused as children to find out that we can satisfy our longing to be loved by loving ourselves and allowing our Higher Power and others to love us. We see that the experience of feeling loved now is possible because it is in our hands, not someone else’s. We make a lifelong decision to love ourselves no matter what! We are aware that this decision opens up a whole new world of possibilities for us. We are no longer trying to get love from someone else to feel good.

Letting Go and Learning to Surrender

Many of us have developed attention-seeking skills to feel loved, but now we can surrender these old ways and just love ourselves as we are. We surrender being a “goody two shoes” so we’ll be appreciated and surrender telling others what they want to hear, whether we believe it or not. We let go of putting others’ wants before our own so that they won’t leave us. We release the need to maintain silence as we play small, so as not to take the focus off another. As we surrender one day at a time, we find we don’t need to be anything other than who or what we are today to feel loved. We learn to give it to ourselves and are open to receive it from a Higher Power.