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Understanding Self-Love
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It is often said our biggest critic in life is our own opinion. We must remind ourselves that our own opinion isn’t the ‘be-all-end-all’ decision. We must look outside ourselves, for we were born into a world full of other beings just like us, and as we continue to grow and experience new things, we must learn to love ourselves. Is that love the same love I have for my mom, or my dad, or my brother, or my sister or my friend? Well, no. It’s unique, just like you. Since love is a topic that has been discussed an infinite number of times over and will continue to be discussed time and time again, we won’t focus too much on its definition and examples, rather we’ll focus on the self and ways to identify what exactly makes up the self.
The self doesn’t have to be analyzed in a densely philosophical light of complex thought and impossible logic. Just as life often appears, the self is only as complicated as one makes it out to be. We’re often told the self is made up of a continuous stream of memories we’ve lived in life and how exactly we remember these events. These memories are never remembered as they truly occurred in our life, rather it’s our interpretation of these events that happened. How does one come to that conclusion you might ask? If this memory was shared with someone else, it’s likely they’ll include a detail you didn’t remember. That’s because we each observed the event in a light unique to our own personality and perception. “Now I thought this wasn’t going to be complicated?” Now you didn’t expect it to be that easy to understand how the self works. Let’s move forward. The self is, then, a complex world of memories we’ve created, and this web of memories often makes up our personalities. Now if someone were to tell you “You seem like a confident person”, it is something you either agree with or disagree with. But this statement and our opinion of it is something we may believe in in this moment, but perhaps five years down the line, we come to change our opinion of this statement. This goes to show that our opinion of ourselves is constantly changing. The lesson here is to ease the hold we have on our opinions, ideas, beliefs on life, because chances are, they’ll change in five, ten, twenty years from now.
I don’t mean to say that we should constantly be changing camps in belief, but this goes to say that we must make sure whatever belief we do have, it’s the one we want to carry forward in life. Although others may not be of the same opinion as you, we must remind ourselves to respect the decision they’ve made. We can begin to understand ourselves only by allowing change to occur, by embracing chaos if it comes, by learning to let go when we need to, and by holding on to those things we value as fundamental. Whatever we hold onto is made up of our memories, which is why reflection is so important.
One thing we can practice everyday is reflection on how our day went:
- Was it full of stress?
- Was it made up of moments of anxiety?
- What was my mood throughout the day? From here, we can gather ideas of how we see things.
Once we have a general idea, we can begin to mould a better conception of how we want to see things. The idea of the self here, our personality is made up of the things we remember. Treat your memory like an incredibly delicate and expensive glass. If we’re careful and mindful of the glass, we can make sure to take care of it and that it’s in the best condition possible. We wouldn’t want to break this glass, would we?
The philosophy we carry with us every day is often reflected by the nature of our memories, i.e., what memories we choose to hold on to. But in so far as the nature of our memories holds specific meaning to each of us, we must respect the memories of those that have come before us and will come after us. The self isn’t one thing or another thing. It is a constantly evolving definition each of us decides as we continue this life.
Today’s lesson: the self. Today’s answer: different from tomorrow. You can always reach us here at Pathway-Therapy if you'd like to further explore Your Self.
At Pathway-Therapy, we openly welcome and work with many life challenges.
Understanding why and how you react or feel the way you do in relationships with others helps you take a step towards a healthy, grounded, and fulfilled place in the world. Working with a trained psychotherapist will help you explore your life with different lenses and introduce alternative choices and pathways.