Ep #103: Self Love 2.0 | Becoming You Again Podcast
Self love, self like, self acceptance, self esteem, self appreciation, self confidence. They are all basically meaning the same thing which is an an attitude toward yourself and how you think and feel about yourself.
When you've been socialized to believe that you are the supporting role in life to everyone around you, it can be difficult to turn to self love. All you've been taught is to see yourself from an outside perspective - am I worthy in their eyes and if so then I can accept myself. Have I given of myself and served others enough today to find myself valuable and useful? If so, then I can like myself today.
Listen in as I teach you how you've been socialized to believe this and what it takes to decondition yourself from this thinking in order to step into more self love and acceptance.
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If you're going through a divorce or are divorced, odds are you've gone through something traumatic. It may show up in how you're constantly second guessing yourself. It may show up in how you feel triggered by even the smallest things. It may show up in never feeling secure in your emotions, always feeling like they are out of control. It may show up in your ability to believe that you're worthy, lovable or capable of living a life on your own. If any of these are resonant with you, then I invite you to schedule your free consult with me and we'll talk about what may be helpful to you to get you through the trauma and begin to heal. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 103.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
Welcome back, hello my friends, how are you doing? I’m so good. Things are well. I’ve been working on myself and healing myself just as I many of you are as well. And I am starting to recognize that layers are being uncovered and are being healed from and I am opening up space inside myself for those layers to be seen and heard and recognized and sometimes it is scary and sometimes it hurts and sometimes it is sad and sometimes it feels hard and sometimes I feel angry about it but overall after a work through all of those things and allow for all of those things I am noticing a difference in myself. I am noticing a sturdiness in myself and to strengthen myself that was kind of missing before and it is kind of wild to watch this growth within me and it feels, like I said, really good. I am excited about that.
I am also excited to be doing this podcast specifically this one, because I haven’t done a podcast on the topic of self love since the very beginning of the podcast, and the podcast just reached it’s one year anniversary the other day! Like I think two or three days ago. So first of all Yay. That’s so cool, right? But my last podcast where I talk specifically about learning to love yourself was in episode number 6. That was so long ago. When I first laid out my podcast episodes I recorded like the first six all at once, like one right after the other, all on the same day or maybe the same two days and then I just released them consecutively each week for the first six weeks so this was one of the very first podcast that I even recorded and now we are on episode number 103!! What?! Like first of all that is awesome. Can we just take a minute and let me celebrate how cool that is. But also I decided that maybe it was a good time to revisit this topic and give you kind of an updated version of self love and that is why I’m calling it self love 2.0. I like the title 2.0 because it feels like a progression. It feels like there is more information. It feels like it is up levels and I really like that. So let us talk about it.
There are many things that make up our ability to love ourselves, and listen you can call it whatever is resonant with you. I know for some self love doesn’t feel safe. It does not feel good. It feels very far away. It feels very out of reach. So please feel free to insert whatever set of words feels inspiring or good to you. Self like, self acceptance, self esteem, self appreciation, self-confidence. They are all revolve around the meaning the same thing which is basically it’s like this attitude toward yourself and how you think and feel about yourself.
But back to what I was saying that, there are many things that make up and create the attitude that we hold toward ourselves. It can be the family you were raised in, where you were raised, the religion you were raised in, the religious leaders who taught you or who you are around a lot. I know in my personal religion that I was raised in we had church every Sunday and then we also had like weekly midweek activities as youth. So light between the ages of 12 and 17 you would go to church on Sunday and meet with your religious leaders in your classes for a couple of hours that day and then during the week you would have liked a 1 to 2 hour activity night where you would either go learn something religious or go to a fun activity or something and you had specific leaders who you were with so that can also make up and create the attitude that you hold toward yourself. Other things that can go into this can be society in general, social media especially in today’s world but obviously this is nothing new because we have always had magazines. We’ve always had movies, television. I mean not always, but things have been around for a very, very long time. But there are so many other things. Culture. Neighbors. And so many things go into and morph around how we think and feel about ourselves. The attitude that we hold toward herself.
I just finished reading an incredible fiction book. It is called Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. First of all and just give a shout out to this book. It is so, so freaking good. If you have not read it I 100% think that every woman in this world today needs to read this book. But I digress. This book talks a lot about the socialization of women. The thing that is really amazing and I really love about fiction is even though it’s not true in the sense that the story is made up, it is still made up of facts. I think it was Cassandra Clare, she has another author, who said, “Fiction is true, even if it is not fact.” And in my opinion I think we learn things more easily and become aware of things like, socialization, patriarchy, sexism, injustice so many things in that arena when it is presented to us in a fictional situation. Again, that was a total different tangent that I wasn’t planning on going on, but let’s get back to the point, and the point is there are many things that make up our attitude about how we feel toward ourselves. About how we look at ourselves. About how we think about ourselves. And our self love and are self-confidence. And this is important to know because even if you had an amazingly incredible childhood with everything given to you. Your parents were loving and they were together the whole time and they loved you when they supported you when they let you be who you wanted to be in the taught you all of the most amazing things and they provided for you and they kept to say and all of the things, right, even if you had this what one could consider a perfect childhood you still can end up struggling with a negatively skewed attitude toward yourself leaving you feeling self loathing or self hatred because of so many of these outside influences that occur in every single one of our lives. And I think that is really important to know.
And I think that it is vastly underestimated how much socialization and our culture influences that part of us. And of course I’m speaking specifically of American culture mostly because that’s where I live. It’s is where I was raised. It is my lived experience. There is so much about socialization that plays into how we as women come to think of ourselves and see ourselves. And it is really important to understand this when it comes to learning to love yourself and I will tell you why in this podcast as we move through it.
In this Western American culture women are taught that their value comes from what other people think of them and how useful they are to others. There is a term for this and it was turned by, I believe Amelia and Emily Nagoski, in their book Bu