Why is Self-Love so Misunderstood?

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

~Plato

Honesty is one of my strongest virtues. It always has been since as long as I can remember. Even as a kid I'd see the little lies my dad would tell in certain situations and wonder why he would bother to think up a falsehood when the truth would have been easier in the long run.

Even as a kid I saw lying as cowardice.

I think as children we are taught that lying is the worst thing we can do, then when we see through the lies of our parents we either use that as permission to tell our own lies, or hunker down to a deeper commitment to truth.

I fall in the latter category, I’ve always been devoted to being truthful. However, I did lie. I lied a lot in my earlier years. I lied to myself that I needed to give love to be loved. I lied out of the fear that I wasn't worthy of love. I lied when I knew that my husband didn't mean it when he told me he loved me. I told myself to believe him because it was easier than admitting he married me for my status, my title, my income and my need to please. 

Once I woke up to all the lies, the ones he told and the ones I told myself, I began my self-love journey. 

It was a long, drawn out journey, though. It became a process of seeing the lies, then fighting the fact that those lies meant years of my life lost to them, then sucking it up to acknowledge the weight of how I had to change in order to live in truth, and then losing people in my life who couldn't live with my new, scrupulous reality.

It's been heartbreaking to find so many people in my life who would prefer to tell lies and live with more lies. I don't judge, and so when I realized how many friends and family fell into the category of liars, I thought I could just let it be. I thought I could still love them and have them in my life because I saw the love within them that they suppressed, but it became apparent that it wasn't working. Even though I said nothing, on some level they knew I saw through their lies. They couldn't stand for me to be a mirror to that which they didn't want to see, so they got mean.

In honor of my self-love journey, I've been having to let go of the lie that I deserved their insensitive behavior and cruel judgments while maintaining a strict resistance to judging them back and love them unconditionally, from afar.

Because so many are locked in this fearful, dishonest thinking, it’s been tricky to find those aligned with truth, but for the sake of love for myself, I won’t settle for less. For the sake of demonstrating what self-love looks like to my kids and to those whom I hope to teach self-love and self-respect, I've maintained strict boundaries while still seeing the power of love in others even when they can't see it in themselves.  

To step toward a committed self-love journey takes massive truth alignment that is not an undertaking for the weak. And most people are weak.

This is why self-love is so misunderstood. People would rather tell the lie that they love themselves—and many do quite loudly, if you've noticed—than admit that they have been lying to themselves because there is so much lost in lies. So much time lost, so much love displaced, and so much pain suffered that no one wants to talk about it. No one is willing to admit that it's all due to the lies we tell that we can't not tell for the fear of the truth that will change our lives. Because people fear change almost as much as death itself.     

To understand this and know that a self-love journey is not only the right thing to do, but the most important thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones, is the first step toward true joy and happiness.

This is the place from which you can fully align with your soul’s purpose and make a difference in your world and our world.

Anything worth having is worth doing right. This is why I created Loving Yourself Whole because a self-love journey is so much more than positive affirmations. You can't just declare yourself self-loving because you splurged on a massage and told social media about it. To truly be in love with who you are is to know who you are, and to know who you are takes honest reflection, insight and a great deal of awareness. 

I know that is you. You wouldn't be reading this blog if you weren't willing to do this inner work, and I wouldn't be here to teach you if I hadn't done this work, so let's come together and deepen our self-love game. I know that as we do, the world will be a better place one self-loving soul at a time. 

Much Love,

Carin