Reduce Emotional Stress By Falling Madly In Love With Yourself

Loving yourself 100% is the best way to deal with life’s stresses. The stresses of the 21st century are now making this a goal we all must achieve. Why? Because stress is caused by the collision of the pressure to do something and negative beliefs we hold about ourselves.

When you are overly stressed, your desire and ability to be intimate may be greatly affected. You may become over reactive to your partner or you may withdraw. In either case, you and your partner will suffer.

It's time to reduce your emotional stress by falling madly in love with yourself.

Start believing you can do it. You can have a happy life, and you can be successful in all of your relationships and you can have the intimacy you dream of having. I know you can, because I have done it and I started at rock bottom to reach this wonderful state of being. It’s time to fall madly in love with your self.

The first step is developing compassion for your self. Oddly enough most people don’t give themselves a break ever, and only sometimes give other people a break. Is this true for you? Here’s a personal example: You are enjoying a beautiful sunny day at the beach. The sand is so hot you cannot walk on it without shoes. A little girl who is barefoot is running across the beach crying and no one tries to help her. The beach has plenty of people on it too! She’s 3 or 4 years old, confused, in pain and crying loudly, and not even her mother has any compassion to help her.

This is an extreme example of lack of compassion. Please put your self in this little girl’s situation. Imagine for just a moment that you are 3 years old yourself, and you are running on very hot sand. What would you want someone, especially your mother, to do? Rescue you by picking you up? Exactly!

You want someone to care enough about your current struggle to help you get out of it. Instead, what did this 3 year old get? She got a cold, judgmental mom, who had lost her ability to be compassionate toward her 3 year old child. This is an example of a toxic relationship.

How sad. How tragic. How common. Without a doubt, this mom treated her own struggles with the same lack of compassion toward herself. Life is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be harsh. We can recognize a reality of life which is that struggles happen, and we can relearn to accept them with love, and kind support toward ourself and toward others.

That’s right. We can relearn a skill we were born with. We can relearn to trust and show true love in our relationships with ourselves and others.

Imagine a struggle you had as a child. Remember the pain, the fear, and the anger, because no one was there to help you. Let yourself really get into the memory of this difficult experience, but this time, let’s change the outcome together.

See a kind person lift you up, hold your hand, or guide you to safety and comfort or whatever is necessary to get you back to feeling okay and safe. With this image of kind support being given to you, now go back to our 3 year old running on the hot sand at the beach. What would you do for that 3 year old if you were on the beach with her? Would you run over and pick her up?

The second step is loving yourself unconditionally. Once you develop some compassion, it makes it easier to accept yourself, and to nurture your real self. Your real self is kind, caring, witty, intuitive, brilliant, competent, creative, special and unique, no matter what you have learned from family, friends or anyone else in your life. The lucky people who were raised with kind and nurturing support already know this, but most of us were not raised with good enough parenting. Nor were our parents, and that is why so many people are handling the stresses of life so poorly.

The third step is complimenting and admiring others as often as possible. Look for the best in others and learn the joy of also discovering wonderful qualities about yourself that you may have forgotten or completely repressed. That’s right! You cannot compliment someone or admire another person for anything without also possessing it yourself or wanting to possess it. That is why this is a powerful way to accelerate positive beliefs in yourself, and hence, your own self-love. Try it. You will be pleasantly surprised. Reduce your stress and develop a healthy relationship with yourself.

Falling madly in love with yourself is worth all the effort you will put into it, and if you develop the habits of compassion, loving yourself unconditionally, and complimenting and admiring others, you will experience true joy. You will no longer be stuck in the loneliness of negative, self-judgmental thinking. You will be open to the world, and the world will miraculously be more open to you. All of your love relationships will improve, since your relationship with yourself forms the basis for all of your relationships with others.

By Sandra Dawson, MA
Love and Relationship Coach
America's Most Loving Relationship and Trauma Expert