Eleven ways to know you don't love yourself.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

If you had asked me ten years ago whether I loved myself, I would’ve said yes.

Not only would I have told you that I definitely loved myself, I would have also believed it.

Even though I definitely know now that it wasn’t true.

How do I know?

Not because I said nasty things to myself (I couldn’t hear those things until much later).

Not because I was overtly sabotaging my life (in fact, I was the highest over-achiever I knew!).

I know because of the choices I made. I didn’t even know the choices I was making weren’t self-honoring and self-loving until years later, but my life was full of them.

For example:

✅ I used to, on average, have sex with men on the second date (or, given enough alcohol, in the first two hours of meeting them in a bar).

✅ I had a closet eating disorder that I labeled as “good self-control” and “being healthy.”

✅ I was in control of EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME.

✅ I was incredibly judgmental of my family members and gossiped about them behind their back with other family members and my friends.

✅ I was attracted to and grew obsessed with emotionally (and relationally and geographically and sexual orientationally) unavailable men.

✅ I expected people to lie to me and betray me.

✅ I prided myself on being able to do the most advanced yoga posture expressions at the sacrifice of my body, joints, and alignment.

✅ I thought intimacy was sex.

✅ I struggled to ask questions I didn’t want honest answers to and allowed myself to guess and speculate and analyze and deny reality instead.

✅ I asked everyone else for their opinion on my life circumstances and never made decisions without consulting at least five people about what they would do if they were me.

✅ I was a perfectionist.

Along with all of these things I was a loving and brilliant woman with an excellent and caring circle of friends, ambitious and successful, a world traveler in the making, more self-aware than most people I knew, ahead of my time, perceptive and astute, and versatile.

None of these things are mutually exclusive, and in fact, lack of self-love often shows up in this tricky and sophisticated way.

You can’t just think your way into self-love. Learning to love yourself starts with taking different actions, but more importantly, understanding what healthy, self-honoring, self-loving actions actually look like.

Can you think of some healthy expressions of the above forms of lack of self-love?