Whilst Valentine’s Day has become a vastly commercial, and for some anxiety provoking event, its ethos is the idea of demonstrating our love to those who are special to us. I believe that this idea is a good one. This week I’m suggesting we show this love to ourselves. I’m also providing some ideas for demonstrating self-love.

As I reviewed my previous articles, and reflected on my work as a therapist, I pondered on what would be some ways of demonstrating self-love, which are healthy. In doing this 3 themes emerged. These were: Self-value, Compassion and Growth

1 – Self-Value

This theme is about finding ways to value ourselves and notice our strengths. From my experience as a therapist people are often much better at identifying their perceived weaknesses or flaws. These tend to be determined based on a comparison to an unrealistically high external standard. Like judging your ability to swim against the standard set by a world record Olympic athlete. Similarly, for many people a strength is only considered one if it measures up to an almost superhuman standard. Conversely, these same people will notice and recall many positive qualities of the important people in their lives. My experience from working with people in therapy is that it is difficult to live any sort of an existence without having some strengths and without having survived some kind of adversity. Once you start looking at your life from this perspective you will be surprised what you find.

Read more:

How to Increase Self-esteem – a bottom up approach

Finding your Strengths

2 – Compassion

Often we struggle to be kind to those parts of ourselves that we don’t like. For many people they dislike their anger and also have developed a very active inner critic. Understanding the origins of these parts is important. If we can understand enough to have compassion for them, we can be in a better position to choose to change our thinking and behavior. For our inner critic it may be we have internalized the harsh words and role of someone significant in our early life. Our ability to become aware of this and understand how this may have happened provides a pathway to starting to reduce its influence. Similarly with our anger, to gain awareness of its origins allows us to see that its original intent was to protect us, but again it may have developed without awareness to become a destructive influence. Having compassion for how this happened, opens up the possibility of change.

Read More:

Working with your Inner Critic

Understand your anger

3 – Growth

Growth can be exiting, but can often be a source of anxiety and stress. For those seeking personal or interpersonal changes, the solution approach gives you a framework for understanding what would be different if that change had occurred. It includes asking questions such as: ‘How would you know the change had occurred? ‘, ‘What would be different?’. Solution focused thinking tends to be innovative and creative. It also recognises that change is often incremental.

Whilst goal setting can make the difference between successfully making a change and just contemplating it, I’m suggesting that you take a realistic approach to this process . From a therapeutic perspective, not only is realistic goal setting more likely to result in achievement of the goal, but is more protective of mental health. Here, available time and resources are taken into account to ensure that success is possible. I have seen many people put together plans based on greater than 24 hours in a day. Or not taking into account existing work or family commitments. Often optimistic goal setting which is not grounded in reality can result in people giving up, therefore failing to reach the goal. This failure can then be generalised as a personal quality.

Read more:

Realistic Goal planning: Set Yourself up for Success

A Solution Focused Approach to Solving Life Problems

In finishing

Giving ourselves the St Valentine’s gifts of compassion, self-value and growth is a way of showing self love and demonstrating self care. This article provides a few ideas for doing this and the related articles focus more on each of these aspects. You will most likely find that one of these gifts resonate with you more than the other two Trust you personal intuition and awareness as to which gift might have the biggest impact at this time.

If you are really struggling or experiencing significant distress at this time, then the best way of showing yourself self-love is to reach out for support. Pleasse contact a counsellor or other mental health service for support. You are worth it !!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you, and to those who are precious to you.

Scott