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Relationship With The Self and Others

As social beings, we all crave connection and belonging. But we also need to work on our relationship with ourselves.

Do you love yourself? Cliche, right?

Addiction and other avoidance/impulsive behaviors often stem from discomfort with oneself and one's beliefs about themselves, leading to attempts to escape from solitude and one's own company.

The way you view yourself greatly influences how you interact with others and perceive yourself in relationships. You've probably heard about attachment styles in popular culture, which suggest that your early experiences with caregivers shape your beliefs about your worthiness and what love should be like.
The concept of self sabotage, another common theory, suggests that even when something stable and secure comes your way, you might undermine it because it feels unfamiliar or you doubt your deservingness of something good.

When you don't love yourself the way you deserve to be loved, you constantly seek it from someone and expect them to soothe the hurt that you feel, but your belief about yourself and your relationship with yourself makes it almost impossible.

You put yourself in dangerous and painful situations (because either your requirements are too strict, or the person too emotionally unavailable or incapable of doing what you want from them) thinking if you were worthy of being loved, they would do this or they wouldn't do this. Often these circumstances that you create are crafted such that its almost impossible to challenge your initial belief that you don't deserve to be loved, or that you're too tough to love.

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Jung

All these knowledge can make you beat yourself up trying to understand the role you play in your own suffering. One battle we all fight when we first attempt to understand ourselves is the battle of self-criticism versus self compassion.

What do your inner voices constantly tell you? Do they argue with each other?

The person you spend the most time with is yourself and you'd be surprised that how mean you become when you get involved in internal monologues whether it's about how stupid you are to not be able to accomplish something or how disappointed you are or how you don't trust in yourself. To overcome the self-criticism and to head towards journey of self love through compassion, you have two frameworks to communicate with the inner voice that just doesn't know how to stop berating you.

  • Internal Family System (IFS) talks about how we have parts within us that constantly engages in internal conversations and conflict. This technique gives tools to how you can be curious, compassionate and courageous as you try to understand why you do/think the way you do. It explains how we often contradict ourselves, have polarizing views on any issue and can’t make a decision that we can stick to. For instance, you decided that you are going to take that expensive programming classes but after making the full payment you can’t seem to gather enough motivation to continue it. Or when you promised your friend you would go to the trip but you don’t want to join her anymore just a minute later.
  • Reparenting yourself is the concept of recognizing what your needs were fulfilled as a child or a growing adult and doing that for yourself. Parenting is a tough job and even though our parents may not have done a good enough job by providing you with security and resources to develop skills that was needed to be learned in each of your developmental stages, you now have the responsibility to go back and do it for yourself now that YOU are that adult that can provide love, security and resources to that inner child within you.
  • There are other plenty of other approaches like CBT, DBT and RECBT techniques that can be learned and practised after being taught by our professionals which focus on recognizing and managing difficult emotions that can go hand in hand.

Are you comfortable being in solitude? Do you allow yourself to be vulnerable in relationships?

Being in platonic or romantic relationship with somebody means that you will get to see yourself through their eyes based on what you feel about them and what you feel about yourself in their presence. Contrary to the belief of some, you don't have to wait till you completely heal to be involve other people in your lives. Each conflict is the opportunity to learn about yourself and the people who are important to you. Practicing boundaries, mutual respect, shared sense of community, belonging, love, purposefulness, conflict resolution and meaningful bonds are all important aspects of a healthy relationship.

Being comfortable in your solitude doesn't mean you shut everyone out of your life. It means that just because you're lonely, you don't invite people in your lives that are not good for you mentally, physically or in any other way.

  • Relationships, especially community based relationships are important to engage in activities that you find purposeful.
  • Relationships, however, shouldn’t be your only source of meaning in life, you should also cultivate individuality.
  • Romantic relationships are not the only relationships that are important for us to feel loved, belonged and accepted. Friendships, activity based connections, family, community can all be the ways you can fulfill your need to have meaningful connections in life.

Learn. Practise and Heal

To know more about how you can implement IFS technique on your own or with a therapist, or learn how to reparent yourself as we help you through the journey, join us in our programs. You can also be a member of one or more of our communities involved in various issues to better themselves each day. Heal together, track your progress and help each other in the journey.

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