It’s still love month, and we’re focusing on loving yourself here at The Princess Guide. This post from three years ago is appropriate for today’s Flashback Friday …
February can be one of the hardest months if you’re single. It seems like everyone around you and everyone on social media is being celebrated and loved.
I dated a couple of guys who disappeared around Thanksgiving and didn’t reappear until the flowers began blooming. Make no mistake … They disappeared so they wouldn’t have to do anything for me during Christmas and Valentines. It made me feel terrible and less than important. I began making one of the qualifying questions to get a date with me, “Do you celebrate holidays and look for ways to make it special for the woman you’re dating?”
Being in a long-term relationship with someone who chooses not to do things for you can make you feel even worse.
In my Lifecycles class (in graduate school), we learned that women who are highly educated and professionals have a higher rate of divorce. My instructor said it has something to do with women having more choices today with increased income. (Previous generations of women got married to have an income.) While being married appears to be the goal for many women, some find that staying married is a lot more work than anyone will tell you about.
“We see Christian young women who love the Lord, get confused about their role in marriage or whether marriage is even worth it to start with. And you take that into sexuality, they’re very confused about sexuality and how to express that in a way that honors the Lord,” author Juli Slattery told Focus on the Family.
So, what can you do to honor yourself if you’re all alone this Valentines Day (season or any time during the year)? Relationship expert Dr. Margaret Paul gave the Huffington Post these suggestions:
- Listen within to your own feelings. Many people easily tune into others’ feelings yet have no idea what they feel. If you ignore a child’s feelings, that child will feel unloved. Ignoring your own feelings has the same result — your inner child feels rejected, abandoned and unloved by you.
- Be compassionate with your feelings. If you judge your feelings, telling yourself you are wrong for having them, your inner child will feel rejected and abandoned by you. If you are kind, gentle, tender, understanding and accepting of your feelings, your inner child will feel loved by you.
- Be open to learning about what your feelings are telling you. Just as an actual child feels loved when you are compassionately interested in why he or she is hurting, your inner child will feel loved when you explore what your feelings are telling you. All feelings are informational. Just as physical pain alerts you to a problem that needs attention, so does emotional pain. Painful feelings are telling you that you are abandoning yourself, or that someone is being unloving to you, or to themselves or to others, or that a situation is not good for you. Compassionately attending to your feelings, learning what they are telling you, and then taking action to remedy the situation, will make you feel loved.
- Create a solid connection with a spiritual source of love, wisdom and comfort. Love is not a feeling we generate from our mind. It comes from the heart when our heart is open to our source of love. When you open to learning with your higher power about loving yourself and others, love flows into your heart and you feel loved.
- Choose to be around loving people. We don’t always have a choice — such as in work relationships — but when we do have a choice — such as in personal relationships — choosing to be around caring, supportive and accepting people will make you feel loved. If, when you have a choice, you consistently engage with unkind, judgmental or abusive people, the message you are sending to yourself is that you are not worth loving.
- Take loving actions for yourself around others. When you are around someone who is being unkind, speak up for yourself, letting the person know that you don’t like being treated that way, and then either open to learning about what is going on, or lovingly disengage from the interaction. Allowing others to treat you badly sends a message to your inner child that he or she is not worth loving.
- Take care of your body, your time, your space and your finances. You will feel loved and lovable when you feed yourself healthy food, and get exercise and sleep. When you ignore your health, you are giving yourself the message that you are not worth loving. When you respect your own and others’ time and space, you are letting yourself know that you are worth it. When you overspend, putting yourself in unnecessary debt, you are not taking loving care of yourself, and your inner child will feel scared, alone and unloved. Just as an actual child needs to feel safe regarding the necessities of life, your inner child needs to feel the same way.
- Find work you love. Since work takes up a big part of your day, finding or creating work that fulfills you is vitally important. If you continue to force yourself to stay at jobs you hate, the message to yourself is that you are not worth doing whatever it is you need to do to create a fulfilling work life.
- Create balance. We need balance in our life to feel loved and lovable. We need time to work and time to rest and rejuvenate. We also need time to nurture our body and soul through activities that bring us joy.
Loving yourself and practicing those loving actions will not only help you get healthy self-esteem that no one can take away from you, but it will also give you the skills you need to love others when the right relationship comes into your life.
You can find these Flashback Friday blogs posted every Friday. If you want to know more how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, you can get a free PDF sample chapter of “The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart” by filling out the form in the sidebar on this page.
