How long before you move on and can live your life again?
Some people never move on. Some people believe there is no more hope after their last breakup and vow their previous relationship will be their last relationship.
Once you start on that quest for love and a new relationship, you’ll realize that you can’t open your heart to others until you open it to yourself.
Yes, everything they say about self-love is true. You need to have a deep, committed and fulfilling relationship with yourself before you can love another person.
But how do you do this?
How do you love yourself when you have trouble loving another person?
After walking the journey back from heartbreak myself, I don’t have all the answers but I do have my answers.
I get a lot of similar questions from readers of my blog and I decided to write this book, Loving Yourself After Heartbreak for anyone who was having issues with self-worth and self-esteem after heartbreak.
Loving yourself shows up in so many ways in your life.
It’s not just what you think about yourself and how you treat yourself but it’s about boundaries, it’s about making peace with your past, it’s about grieving and forgiveness, letting go of resentments.
It’s how to live your life, how to surrender and how you find happiness.
I took a stab at answering 21 of the most common questions I receive about the topic of self-love. A few have to do with heart-break but most have to do with taking care of yourself, healing yourself and rebuilding your self-worth after heartbreak.
Here are the 21 questions I answer in the book, Love Yourself After Heartbreak:
Chapter 1: The benefits of loving yourself after heartbreak
Chapter 2: How do you make peace with your past?
Chapter 3: How do you cope with the sadness and pain of a breakup?
Chapter 4: How do you overcome feelings of being “not good enough” or worthlessness?
Chapter 5: How do you overcome self-doubt?
Chapter 6: How do you stop the need for love and validation to feel good about yourself?
Chapter 7: How do you stop pleasing others?
Chapter 8: How do you find forgiveness when swimming in resentment?
Chapter 9: How do you let go of self-pity and victimhood?
Chapter 10: How do you stop judging and comparing yourself to others?
Chapter 11: How do you stop blaming yourself for the breakup?
Chapter 12: How do you deal with abandonment and loneliness?
Chapter 13: How do you deal with rejection?
Chapter 14: How do you deal with fear and worry of the future?
Chapter 15: How do you stop over-thinking everything?
Chapter 16: How do you let go of over-commitments and simplify your life?
Chapter 17: How do you find happiness within?
Chapter 18: How do you love when you’re afraid of love?
Chapter 19: How do you love someone when you have trouble loving yourself?
Chapter 20: How do you surrender and live more lightly?
Chapter 21: How do you love the next time around? Are you ready for a self-love cleanse? Need specific strategies and tips to make big changes in your life?
The suggestions and tips in this book are practical and focused on helping you make real life changes so you show up in the world differently.
Ready? Pick up Love Yourself After Heartbreakhere. It’s on sale this week for $.99.
The relationship is over but your past contains so much wreckage and rubble.
If your relationship was difficult, challenging and full of conflict, you’re not alone.
Likely, in the final days or months of your relationship or marriage, you both spent a lot of time tearing each other down.
After a long and conflict-filled relationship, you will doubt your own self-worth.
If you grew up having your family take shots at your self-esteem, your ex likely didn’t make it any better.
If your partner ended the relationship first and the breakup wasn’t mutual, you’re likely feeling worse about yourself than ever before.
Feelings of “not good enough” and “worthlessness” can consume your life.
This section from my newest book, Love Yourself After Heartbreak, will help you repair your self-worth and self-confidence.
7 Ways to Overcome Feelings of Not Being Good Enough
1.Being Aware. The first step to heal feelings of not being good enough is self-awareness.
Your ex might have destroyed your self-worth but if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll find that others sabotaged your self-worth as you grew up.
Who did? What did they do and how did their actions affect your self-worth?
If you can acknowledge the things that damaged your self-worth in the past, you have a starting point for the work and healing that you need to do. You know you’ll have to deal with the people who emotionally hurt you before – forgive them and come to terms with the hits to your self-worth.
Also, become aware of your belief system.
When things go wrong, what hurtful things do you say to yourself? When you disappoint yourself or make a mistake, what internal dialogue do you have?
The idea is to notice these thoughts and beliefs as soon as they pop up.
2.Prove your internal chatter wrong.
Observe your internal self-talk and how you’re putting yourself down.
Pick up on these remarks and prove those statements wrong.
If you’re telling yourself you’re not intelligent, remind yourself about your achievements and academic laurels.
If you’re telling yourself you’re useless, remind yourself about all the people you’ve helped and how many people appreciate you.
This is an active process of continuously rebutting the negative self-talk and self-criticism in your mind.
This internal chatter is simply a continuation of the attacks from people who ruined your self-worth as you grew up.
You heard others attack you and now you mentally attack yourself.
3. Rebut with positive affirmations, visualization
Not only acknowledge and rebuild this self-talk; actively replace the thoughts with more positive ones.
Some suggest the use of mantras and affirmations to feel more worthy.
You’ll know whether you find this helpful.
You can also visualize yourself in a state of worthiness and imagine what that would feel like.
How would you stand? How would you interact with others? How would you show up in the world? Continue to picture yourself in that state until you end up living in that state.
Visualize worthiness until you arrive at worthiness.
Replace your negative self-talk and improve your self-worth with words, emotions, images and beliefs of high self-worth. Take every opportunity to confront the negative view of yourself and substitute it with a positive one. Turn this into a daily practice.
4. Declutter your friendships and negative influences in your life
Another action is to see who is around you in your everyday life.
You may need a friend-and-family purge. Yes, in the ideal world you’re mature and strong enough to not let negativity bother you. If you’re already there, forget this step.
If you’re still struggling, take note of every person in your life, especially the people who make you feel terrible about yourself. Do whatever you can to reduce the time you spend with these people.
Stay as far away from them as you can.
If they live in the same house you do (for example, your parents), minimize the time you spend with them.
Create a negativity-free zone around your life and minimize the number of people who make you feel bad about yourself. This is not a permanent solution but a temporary strategy while you are working on your self-worth.
5. Doing good makes you feel good.
You feel good about yourself when you are doing things that make you feel good.
You will feel good when you take part in activities you do well in.
If you’re an expert in a particular area or the go-to person in your family for something, do more of that.
If you’re the family party planner, plan the party.
If you’re the creative one at work, do more creative work there.
If you’re the leader, lead.
Doing those activities you’re good at will make you feel better about yourself.
Soak in all the positivity, compliments and good wishes you get when you do those things you’re good at doing.
The other activities that make you feel good about yourself are those you generally like doing.
All of us have different healthy feel-good activities.
Drinking martinis or relishing carne asadas may be your feel-good activity but other things you do awaken your heart and bring your soul alive.
Which activities bring you bliss and happiness? Which activities challenge you?
Doing more of these activities will help you feel good about yourself. Spending more of your time in nature, gardening, surfing, going to the movies, shopping or whatever else brings you to a place of bliss – do more of that.
6. The expansive view of yourself
One more way to boost your self-worth involves the spiritual dimension.
Beneath your personality and outward appearance is the real you.
This is a person you hardly know or spend time with.
You have experiences as the “external” you who shows up in the world. You’re a sister, aunt, lawyer, friend, neighbor, etc. Everyone, including you, has a perception of who you are but you really don’t know who you are.
Getting to this person is getting to your essence.
Once you realize who you are and live from that place, you have the potential to live a highly worthwhile life.
When you’re living from this essence or your spiritual center, you no longer depend on other people’s values or perception of you.
How do you get there?
You slowly unmask and remove all the layers of who you are.
You detach from the different roles you play in the world, from family member to professional to parent, etc.
You become quiet and get into nature to see yourself as someone deeper and more spiritual than who you currently show up as. You get to the fiber of your being.
What do you do that helps you feel more soulful?
The church may be the last place that does this for you.
It could be as simple as spending time with your children or gardening.
Keep tapping into this spiritual realm.
Work on seeing yourself as part of the bigger spiritual fabric of the world.
7. Trust yourself more.
When you feel unworthy, you have no sense of yourself. You’re lost. You feel invisible.
To overcome these feelings of worthlessness, like you don’t exist, you have to not only get to your spiritual center as described above, but you have to get in touch with the wise inner person who resides within you.
You have a guide. You have a voice of reason and wisdom.
You have yourself. Call it your intuition, self-knowledge or higher self.
Within you is this all-knowing, all-wise person in majestic robes who knows what’s best for you.
This inner-person is guiding you but if you’re like me, you avoid, ignore and hardly acknowledge this voice of wisdom.
To live more in harmony with this voice and to raise your worthiness, listen to this voice more often.
Check in with this voice regularly and ask it to guide you in your decision-making.
You can read more about how to repair your self-worth in my new book, Love Yourself After Heartbreakhere.
Everyone and their mother – and, for sure, all Indian mothers – would tell you this is a no-brainer.
Of course you’re going to stay in this relationship – no matter how suicidal you are.
The East would say, “Listen to your head and do what feels practical and takes everyone else’s happiness into account. Don’t kill your family by being so selfish and thinking only about yourself.”
Yet, in America and much of the Western world, which values individual happiness, this isn’t going to fly.
In these parts, we hold happiness to be paramount.
Relationships are dynamic here. If they don’t work, they end. People move on in search of other people who will make them happy.
The West would say, “Listen to your soul and do what feels right. Don’t kill yourself by hiding from the truth.”
Culturally, different parts of the world would answer this question differently.
I’m not going to refer to any cultural norm. Instead, I’m going to encourage you to consider these 7 questions instead.
If you’re in an unhappy relationship and feel stuck, here are 7 questions to consider.
1. Does hope exist for improvement?
Is there something that you haven’t tried?
Being realistic, can your relationship improve?
I’m not asking you to hold onto an impossible dream based on delusional thinking.
I’m asking you to inspect your relationship to see if you, your partner or any circumstance can change for the better?
Is there a chance for change, a new beginning, or either of you showing up differently?
2.Can either of you change?
Now, in part, this is a trick question because you might think the problem is your partner.
“If he only changed, things would be different,” you’re thinking to yourself. More than likely it is him but it’s also you.
The big difference between him and you is that you can’t control him or how he shows up in the relationship.
So really, the only question is, can you change?
Are you willing to change?
Are you willing to do what it takes to make the relationship work, even if you aren’t the problem?
3.Do you value other people’s happiness more or less than yourself?
This is not a trick question. Many people answer this question differently, and different cultures may have different answers.
I don’t think there’s a right answer. Your society and your culture might be telling you to do one thing but you might personally have a different value system.
If you value maintaining the status quo and keeping others in your life happy, you might have to stay in a dysfunctional relationship.
If you value yourself and your personal happiness, it might be time to call it quits.
4.What is the worst that can happen if this relationship ended?
Think about your situation and imagine the worst case scenario occurred.
Your marriage ended.
Think about all the people you would disappoint, sadden and anger.
Visualize your entire life falling apart, like the rug is being pulled out from under you.
Everything crumbles and your world, as you know it, no longer exists.
Now what?
Can you envision this space? Are you still breathing? Are you “okay” here?
Check in with your body and yourself to see if you can be in this space.
5.Could you tolerate unhappiness in this relationship and find happiness in other parts of your life?
If you are going to stay in an unhappy relationship, then what else can you focus your time and energy on?
I know this isn’t ideal but it is practical.
What else can keep you going? Your kids? Your dreams? Your career?
What else can bring you joy? Your spiritual practice, being in the moment, friendships or travel?
6.Are you willing to work on the relationship?
“Working on the relationship” doesn’t mean that suddenly either of you change and become different people.
“Working on the relationship” means not falling to your default behavior and doing what you would usually do.
It’s handling situations differently.
It’s communicating with each other.
It’s respecting each other.
It’s spending time with each other.
At the tail end of a relationship that is falling apart, these are all the things that you don’t really want to do. So, are you willing to do it?
Are you willing to work on the relationship when your partner is absent, uninterested or unwilling?
7.How much would you regret this relationship in 10, 20 or 30 years?
Think down the road and imagine having survived this relationship for a number of years into the future.
You could take it as far as your deathbed.
Can you see yourself having survived this relationship?
Can you stomach the idea of having to stay put in a dysfunctional relationship for years of your life?
Can you find peace today if you decide to stay?
Seeing yourself in the future and imagining how it will be can give you clear answers about what to do today.
Staying in a bad relationship is never easy. Your values, circumstances and priorities are different from anyone else in the same situation.
Ultimately, you know what’s best for you and you’ve got to make a choice that you will live with the rest of your life.
I help people overcome their devastating breakups and divorces and find love again. Instead of visiting the Himalayas, sign up below and join me. I am taking a writing break but will be back soon.
This guide is free. A ticket to the Himalayas is $2000. Your move.
