Why Loving Yourself Is The First Step To Fulfilling Relationships (And How To Do It)

How often do you look to others to validate you—to make you feel that you are important, valuable and worthy? How do you feel when you don’t receive the validation and approval you are seeking?

Do you really want to leave your self-worth in the hands of others? Do you really want other people to determine whether or not you are OK? Do you want to be a victim of others’ judgments?

How often do you feel anxious that you’re not performing well enough or that you don’t look good enough to be approved of? Imagine how exhausting it would be to spend your life worrying about whether or not other people value you.

There’s only one way to stop the cycle: Learn to validate yourself. Learn to give yourself the attention, approval, love, and acceptance you seek from others.

Validating yourself is not just a matter of looking in the mirror and telling yourself that you are a wonderful, beautiful child of God. It’s not just a matter of telling yourself throughout the day that you are OK.

Your inner child—your essence—won’t believe you if the approval is coming from your limited, programmed mind (your ego-wounded self). Your programmed mind is like a child or adolescent. Whose opinion would you be more likely to accept? A child’s or that of an older, wiser person? Probably the latter.

Two Keys to Self-Validation

So, the first step to self-validation is learning to access the truth of who you are from your higher mind—your evolved, spiritual self. It’s only when the truth of who you are comes through you that you’ll believe it.

Hearing the truth from your higher self isn’t as hard as you may think. When your sincere intention is to learn the truth, you will begin to feel it.

Access this truth by imagining an older, wiser you. Ask this version of yourself to reveal your soul’s essence. Imagine that you can see yourself as a small child, before you learned to judge, undermine, or devalue yourself. Imagine all the reasons your older wiser self adores you.

The second key to self-validation is in the way you treat yourself. It doesn’t matter how many lovely things your higher self tells you about who you are. You have to stop judging yourself and abandoning yourself in numerous other ways to internalize that truth. Ignoring your feelings, numbing your feelings with addictions, and making others responsible for your worth will trap you in feelings of unworthiness.

You need to practice treating yourself as a cherished being. The more you learn to see, love, and validate yourself, the more validation you’ll find in others.

When you treat yourself in unloving ways, you invite others to do the same. When you learn to love and validate yourself, the energy you project tells others you are worthy of being loved and validated.

Life will only change for the better when you learn to love and validate yourself.

Originally written by Margaret Paul and published on Mind Body Green