You Were Never Meant To Love Yourself

By Serdar Hararovich
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We were meant to be loved by people who brought us into the world, by the communities that surround us.

The ones we were meant to feel a deep sense of belonging within.

You were meant to be loved, delighted in, guided, supported, celebrated and encouraged by those around you.

Your value and place in the world was to be so clear, that the very concept of self-love would be redundant.

You were meant to develop a positive view of yourself - one that allowed you to make choices that honoured your value as a human being.

Yet many of us missed out on these experiences.

Many of us, instead, grew up with deep emotional neglect.

This means you often missed out on:

• - Deep, attuned presence

• - Feeling seen & loved for who you really are

• - Your needs, desires and boundaries being welcomed

• - A sense of deep emotional safety

• - Being celebrated & cherished in your authentic self

• - A sense of security and reliability

• - A sense of belonging that is not temporary or conditional

These missing experiences leave a lasting impact on people, long into adulthood.

Some of the consequences of childhood emotional neglect include:

• - Insecure relationships

• - Earning love through outward success & physical appearance

• - Instability in life, work, finances, business

• - Self-abandonment and people-pleasing

• - Poor boundaries - and/or rigid boundaries

• - Trauma bonding with ungrounded gurus, shamans and individuals

• - "Your needs" vs "my needs" relationships

• - Shape-shifting to groups where acceptance is highly conditional

• - Fluctuating self-esteem

We are living in a world where many people are only just beginning to heal, not just from the trauma of what they experienced - but from the deep pain and absence of what they DIDN'T experience.

That which they were left without.

These missing experiences often shape our adult lives even more profoundly than the traumas that many have started to grapple with.

Part 2: The Self-Love Lie

The concept of self-love can be empowering for some - especially for those who see it as the better alternative to trying to earn other people's love.

But that's an example of going from one extreme to another that is so common in the self-help world.

For others, the idea of self-love is simply an extension of the emotional neglect that they experienced in childhood:

Like the wealthy person telling the disadvantaged person to "just find gratitude", we are told by the people who were fortunate enough to have been loved by many, to simply find "self-love".

And if you can't locate this self-love?

If it doesn't solve all your relationship issues?

You're told, "you just aren't doing it right".

The truth?

Self-love is an over-simplified pop-psychology trend, one that solves very few relational challenges, while often creating new ones.

When we don't understand what's happened to us in a nuanced way - when we are led to misdiagnose the problem as "a lack of self-love" - we will apply faulty solutions that actually make matters worse.

This is surface-level healing that simply does not even begin to address the depths of emotional neglect.

The emotional neglect of childhood is NOT healed through self-love.

Fluctuating self-worth is NOT healed through self-love.

Self-abandonment is NOT healed through self-love.

The truth is, in fact, the complete opposite:

It's healed through relationships.

It's healed through other people's love.

It's healed by finding places and people where we can receive everything we never had.

The unconditional love, safety, guidance, support, healing, security, and encouragement that we missed out on for so many years.

Healing begins by internalising a healthy relationship with ourselves.

Which we take in through the presence of someone who has learned to relate to themselves with genuine love, acceptance and compassion - so they can offer the same to us.

Through this relational process, we internalise a new relationship to ourselves.

Not just the parts of us we are already comfortable with being seen and met.

Not the parts of us we use to feel loved & accepted.

The parts that have never been met with the eyes of love & compassion before - or even believed that could ever happen.

Part 3: Why Romantic Relationships Are Often Not Healing

A small minority of people experience this without any deeper therapeutic work.

But for most people, that doesn't happen for several important reasons:

• - We are unconsciously trying to get our romantic partner(s) to meet the needs our parents didn't meet (which they can never do)

• - We are operating under familiar scripts we got used to, such as:

  • "I have to earn love - so I find flaws in people who actually like me", or

  • "I fear abandonment - so I only date people when there's a lot of intensity and constant contact".

• - We bring the unconscious resentment & anger that many people have from their childhood, into our adult relationships (directing resentment at our adult partners)

• - We weren't shown how to communicate in ways that get our needs met, so we end up in destructive power struggles in dating & relationships.

These and similar patterns make it unlikely for most people to receive the healing effects of healthy, secure relationships.

Importantly, these are all PREVERBAL patterns & scripts. What that means is no amount of awareness or knowledge changes them.

This is why many people aren't finding that their relationships are healing the wounds of the past.

Instead, those wounds are often being repeated - just with new variations and a new face.

Part 4: The First Steps to Healing

This is why deeper healing often starts in an intentional, therapeutic setting -

With someone who helps you to receive all those experiences that you missed out on.

A deeper healing process that is designed to help you experience relationships from a new, healthy script - not the scripts that keep playing out.

A safely guided journey where you process the old feelings you are unintentionally bringing into relationships:

Resentment. Anger. Shame. Grief. Sadness. Fear of loss or abandonment. Helplessness. Hopelessness.

All these are normal human responses to missing out on what you needed so deeply as a child.

They must be welcomed, felt, integrated, and then new ways of responding them will start to emerge.

Left unprocessed, these feelings can and do sabotage adult relationships.

Instead of bringing them unconsciously into relationships, this is about making contact with them consciously so that they are no longer shaping your relationships.

Part 5: Building a New, Secure Blueprint

But it has to go deeper than just healing the past.

The attachment-based work I do allows you to not only process the past, but just as importantly, to experience something profoundly NEW.

These new somatic, preverbal experiences of Secure Attachment will not just heal the old, but create a new, healthy attachment blueprint for future relationships.

When you develop a new, secure, healthy blueprint:

- Your relationship(s) with both yourself, and with others, radically changes.

- You start operating from a place of genuine wholeness & security.

- Your adult self is now running the show - not the neglected inner boy or girl looking for what it could never find.

This form of healing is profound, and it has been the missing piece for countless individuals - many of whom had tried many misattuned approaches that just don't go deep enough.

All of this is achieved without ever saying the words "self-love".

For this is a deeply RELATIONAL process.

It's relational healing because the original wounding was relational.

That's why doing this outside of a safely held relational container, through "self-healing" and "self-love", is often a symptom of emotional neglect:

- "I am not worthy of investing in myself"

- "It's not safe to be truly seen"

- "I can't trust anyone - nobody is safe"

Without such an intentional healing process - without going beyond awareness into embodied healing work,

The dysfunctional patterns associated with insecure attachment, emotional neglect and childhood wounding often just keep playing out indefinitely.

This is why right now, people have more awareness & knowledge about relationships than ever before in human history - yet the animosity, blame, and power struggles in people's relationships is actually getting worse.

Part 6: Returning to Wholeness

So,

If "self-love" and "self-healing" hasn't worked for you - you are not alone.

You were never meant to love yourself.

You were meant to be supported, guided and celebrated in such a deep, safe, attuned and compassionate way,

that that love starts to live inside you - because it was first poured into you and into every cell in your body.

That's when the wounded child in us can truly heal.

And in that healing, the grounded, secure adult in you fully emerges.

The one that can take care of the wounded parts in you with tenderness and care,

because those parts of you have finally RECEIVED the kind of care they always needed.

No more forcing self-love onto these parts of you.

Nor more abandoning them by trying to receive all this,

through partners who can never offer what they were never meant to,

or through ideas that force them to try to survive alone,

what was never meant to be survived alone.

Wholeness is every human being's birth right.

You were never meant to love yourself.

- Serdar