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February is Valentine’s month. This is a time when thoughts turn to romance and “true love’s kiss”. We dream of having the greatest love of all! Unfortunately, most of us don’t know what true love is. For many people, true love is as real as the modern fairy tale, “Enchanted”, where the young girl is waiting for Prince Charming to give her true love’s kiss, after which they will live happily ever after.
We all long to have a rich, satisfying, mutually fulfilling relationship with another person. So why do so many people have shallow, meaningless relationships? I think that one possible reason is that many, if not most of us, do not have the greatest love of all.
In 1986, Whitney Houston sang a number one hit, called “the Greatest Love of All.” I disagree with one of the lines, which says “The greatest love of all is easy to achieve. Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.”
From my own experience, my eight years of intensive research and my years of private counseling as a stress relief coach, I believe that learning to love yourself is not easy to achieve.
Most of us were born into imperfect families. I heard one child psychologist say that he believed 97% of families were dysfunctional. Many of our parents did the best they knew how, using the level of skill and understanding they had at the time. But they were trying to deal with their own “issues” and weren’t able to give us what we needed.
Children don’t understand that their parents are having problems, are worried, sick or tired. All they see if that their parents (really, their Gods, at that age) are angry or unhappy. They internalize their parent’s negative emotions and/or actions as being their fault. “I’m bad. I’m not good enough. There is something wrong with me. I don’t deserve to be loved or happy, etc.”
Most of this conditioning happens when children are very young, usually before the age of understanding. Then their subconscious (below conscious level) mind buries these feelings because they are too painful. So we are not even aware that we have this negative conditioning. But we do and it affects every aspect of our lives.
How do you know if you have negative conditioning about not being lovable? Just look at your relationships. Are you able to commit to a loving relationship? How fulfilling or satisfying is it? Are you loved in return? Are you happy? Are you treated well?
If you’re not, you have a negative emotional block that is stopping you from loving yourself. It makes you believe that you are not worthy of being loved. Until that negative emotional block is broken, you will never feel good about yourself or achieve the loving relationship you want.
You might be given several opportunities for love but you will sabotage them because you have to be true to your belief system – no matter how damaging or false it is.
One of my clients is a beautiful, intelligent, charming woman in her mid forties, who has never had a marriage proposal. She says that any time a man that she is attracted to, starts to show an interest in her, she will point out every negative feature about herself until she literally drives him away.
As our coaching sessions have progressed, she has realized that because she doesn’t feel she is worthy of being loved for herself, she doesn’t trust anyone who expresses an interest in her. They must want to use her in some way. So she drives them away before she can be hurt.
The exciting news is that you can break these negative emotional blocks! They are not true. They are just bad programming. You can erase and then rewrite them so that you do love yourself.
The best tool I’ve found to break the negative emotional blocks that prevent us from living the type of life we want, is Emotional Freedom Technique; also called EFT or Tapping.
EFT can help you break free of the emotional chains that are holding you back from experiencing the love you want.
To learn how, I invite you attend the “Stress-Free Me” seminar that is being held in Abbotsford on Tuesday evening, February 16th. Click here for More Information.
If you can’t attend but would like more information, I invite you to visit: http://www.SherylStanton.com.
You can have, and deserve to be loved. Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. When this foundation if firmly established, the other forms of love will also come.
July 9th, 2010 at 6:47 am
A really inspiring post. There’s someone out there for everyone.
January 28th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
.:~ I am really thankful to this topic because it really gives up to date information ;*: