Responding to Stress and Overwhelm: An Invitation to Learn to Love Your Self

It’s February which means for many people in the western world this month is associated with the celebration of Valentine’s Day. The history of Valentine's Day is not a clear-cut one. In fact, there’s quite a bit of mystery and disagreement as to when and how this tradition first started. The Catholic Church associates the holiday with St. Valentine who died in the first century A.D. while celebrations can be linked even earlier to Lupercalia, the Pagan festival of fertility dating back to the Roman Era. Although the origins of Valentine’s Day may be debated, it seems clear that the impact on our current society is a day, a month, that invites us to celebrate love. 

More often than not, we celebrate the love we have for others, be it romantic, platonic or familial. While relational love is wonderful and essential for mental wellbeing, I want to propose that the most important love for us to consider is our capacity to love ourselves. It may sound like an easy task, but for many of us there are barriers to true self-love that go beyond our awareness.

What does it mean to love?

Scholars, poets, and philosophers have contemplated this question for, well, ever. I’m not going to pretend I have a hard and fast definition of what love is, but I will turn to the wisdom of author bell hooks. In her book all about love; new visions, hooks defines love as an action; something you do, not simply feel. She identifies six necessary elements to love: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. With a slight shift of perspective, we can begin to see how these relational stances are the foundation to loving ourselves. This post will explore three core elements of self-love: self-knowledge, self-care and commitment to self.

Self-Knowledge

Where and how we learn to love.

You may be familiar with the psychotherapy joke reaching back to Freud that suggests all issues are rooted in one’s relationship to their mother. This notion has become a fairly blasé way to think about the mental-emotional-psychological challenges we face, however there is some truth to the statement. Not in that we’re justified in blaming our primary caregivers for all of the challenges we face; certainly not. But there’s truth to the idea that many of our emotional and psychological templates are established by and in our families of origin.

As the field of psychology and mental health has accumulated more research, we’ve come to understand that the mental health of all caregivers –  not simply that of the mother – has an impact on the psychological wellness of the child through adulthood. In other words, the home you grew up in taught you what it means to take care of yourself. 

Consider, for a moment, your daily routines as a child, your basic needs, your relational needs. Were those needs met? Did you experience a safe place where you could get to know yourself, your interests, your longings, your joys? 

For many of us the answer is, “kind of.” And this is where self-knowledge becomes essential. When we take time to examine our roots, we gain an increased understanding of ourselves. We can begin to notice automatic reactions to certain situations. We can start to get curious about patterns of behavior or relational dynamics we find ourselves in. And, we can start to explore ways we struggle to relate to ourselves.

Why can’t I take care of myself?

Oftentimes a client will tell me, “my mom didn’t really take care of my needs, but how could she when she didn’t receive care from her mother?” When we start to explore our childhoods we begin to learn that the environments we grew up in were often a copy/paste of the environments our parents or caregivers grew up in, and theirs a copy of their parents or caregivers. Simplistically, this is generational trauma. 

In the mid-1990’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente collaborated to research the impact of negative experiences and environments of childhood on their long-term health. This study was known as the ACE Study (ACEs). 

Familial lineages of neglect, addiction and abuse are one form of generational trauma, but it would be insufficient to suggest all of this is anchored in individual family systems. It’s important to note that individuals exist within a familial system, and family systems exist within a society. To that end, generational trauma results from greater community and societal experiences such as war, racism, and poverty. Understanding ourselves requires us to look at these larger cultural contexts as well.

Self-Care, an act of Self-Love

Love as a verb.

As described above, love can be understood as the actions we take to care for ourselves and others. In other words, loving ourselves is intimately woven into our ability to care for ourselves; self-care.

I’ve been a therapist for over a dozen years, a yoga and mindfulness teacher for more than a decade, and a self-compassion teacher for about eight of those years. Despite dedicating my life’s work to understanding and embodying mental-emotional growth and healing, I continue to come up against moments when I struggle with self-care. 

I experience a visceral reaction to the phrase self-care. I know it’s important. I teach my students about it and explore it with my clients, yet it still feels like a slippery little fish I can’t quite get a hold of. For a while I assumed it was simply about the language and the overuse of the phrase; the associations of self-care with pedicures and massages. It all felt so superficial to me. As I’ve come to understand myself better I’ve learned that my struggle is rooted in my history; I never learned what it meant to take care of myself. So when we don’t know where to start, when we don’t have a template of what it means to be cared for, what does caring for yourself look like in action? 

• Doctors appointments 

• Dentist appointments 

• Cooking and planning nutrient dense meals

• Time with friends

• Time alone

• Exercise

• Time outside

• Therapy

• Wearing out an outfit I like

• Packing my lunch

• Tidying up 

• Putting clean sheets on the bed

• Brushing my teeth and washing my face at night… and in the morning

• A haircut

• Reading a book

• Listening to music

• Saying “yes” to something new

• Saying “no” or holding a boundary

Being with myself in the experiences I enjoy… which requires me to know what I enjoy. 

The barriers we face.

Stress, overwhelm, depression, and anxiety can be external manifestations of the unloveability or not-enoughness so many of us experience on the inside. The idea of slowing down enough to become intimately connected with ourselves can seem scary and overwhelming in and of itself. As a result we stay busy. We numb with whatever substance or activity distracts us from our more tender selves. We buy into a narrative of scarcity by telling ourselves we don’t have enough time or money to slow down. What’s often underneath these obstacles is that deeply rooted sense that I am not worthy or deserving of love simply as I am.

Deep down I don’t believe I’m worthy. No one ever took the time or patience to attune to me, ask me what I was feeling, check in with my needs. There was no space for my emotional world. I have no capacity to respond to and nurture myself and my needs. 

How do we begin to relate to ourselves in a way that allows us to do things differently; to move beyond the patterns and barriers to self-love? 

Self-compassion as an opening to loving yourself.

With the practice of self-compassion we turn toward the tender, aching, broken, suffering parts of ourselves with compassion. We notice, "ahhh, there is a part of me that's hurting," and then we offer that part comfort, validation, and acceptance. This practice is the very first step we take toward loving ourselves. 

In Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) we talk about a phenomenon called backdraft coined by program co-founder Chris Germer. It’s an experience that happens for a lot of folks when they start practicing self-compassion for — quite possibly — the first time in their lives. The idea is that we hold an immense amount of pain in our hearts. Pain from all the times someone hurt us or let us down. Pain from all the disappointments we’ve experienced. Oftentimes when we start offering ourselves kindness in the form of self-compassion the doors of our hearts open allowing self-compassion to creep in. This is a lovely experience, but as those doors open the pain from all of the times we (or others) were not loving and compassionate with us floods out. It can be an incredibly painful experience.

“We need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. We need it to work with our emotions. We need it in order to stay.” - Pema Chödrön

I’m pretty sure backdraft happens for those of us who did not receive adequate care in childhood. When we start to take care of ourselves all of that old pain comes flooding out. For me, this can show up when I do something to try to care for myself and I get stuck because I don’t know how to do it. I’m met with a deep sadness that these “simple” every day acts of self care are difficult. They bring up a lot of pain and, as a result, I avoid them.

Commitment to Self: breaking through the barriers.

Start Slowly. Start Gently. Start Close In.

If you’ve struggled to be kind to yourself, or to forgive yourself, or to love yourself please know you’re not alone. For the vast majority of us, this is lifelong work. The first step is awareness. Knowing that self-love and self-compassion are not automatic for you allows you to begin to notice when you’re being hard on yourself, when you’re falling into patterns of overwhelm and stress as a result of unrealistic expectations you’ve set for yourself. 

Once you bring attention to the moments when you’re falling into these old patterns, you can then begin to practice new ways of being with and responding to yourself. There are many practices and techniques you can use to support yourself in this process, but one small first step I like to take is to hold the mantra: 

Pause. Breathe. What do I need?  

This simple saying invites us to pause and step off the perpetual treadmill, to take a breath as a way of going inward and connecting with ourselves, and to ask ourselves what we truly need in this moment. The answer will likely be different one time to the next, but that’s the point. The more often we slow down and connect with ourselves the more we get to know ourselves, and to respond to ourselves. Remember, love is a verb.

Awareness and the practicing of new skills are the foundation for change, but it is not the end goal. As Vienna Pharaon describes in her book The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love, “awareness without accountability is just knowledge. You can’t rely on your knowledge alone to live a life of authenticity, ease, and peace. Awareness with accountability is wisdom. This is where growth happens.”

Finding and working with a therapist who offers you a space to explore the blocks you experience can be a powerful first step. Even while we’re learning to love ourselves this work is best done in relationship. If you’re interested in working with someone on our team, reach out here.

Why Now?

Why am I writing about loving yourself now? There’s so much happening in the world and in the United States at this moment it might seem like self-love and self-compassion are the least important topics to consider. I, however, believe wholeheartedly that self-love is an act of resistance. As writer and professor Audre Lorde said, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” We must care for one another and to do this we must also take care of ourselves.

Written by Kristen Genzano, a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, yoga instructor, and founder of North Star Therapy Collective. She works with perfectionistic women to break free of the narratives that have been fed to them and to step into living their fullest, most aligned lives.