103: Self-Love: Why So Many People Struggle with Self-Love & Why Self-Compassion is the Key

Travel

Jun 5

In this episode we talk about self-love. I answer a question from a listener who wants to know how do you love yourself if you can't remember a time when you ever loved yourself. I also talk about why so many struggle with self-love and why self-compassion is the key.

This post contains affiliate links to some of my favorite tools and resources. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Full terms & conditions here.

LISTEN ON APPLE

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON OTHER CHANNEL

Poems 📝

Here is my poem, Snow White, which I read in this podcast episode

Recommended Episodes 🎙️

76: why do i feel like i’m not good enough? how to heal the feelings of low self-worth, shame, and inadequacy

Timestamps ⏱️

Introduction: 0:15
Poem: 2:20
Question: 3:28
Outro: 19:22

Have you followed and left a review for New View Advice?

Let me know what you think of the podcast! Podcast followers and ratings help bring new listeners to the show, as well as help me to continue creating content. So if you enjoyed the show, I’d love to ask you to follow and leave a rating on your podcasting platform by:

Head to New View Advice on Apple or Spotify
Click Follow on your podcasting platform
Scroll down (or when promoted) click the 5 star rating!

Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hey, beautiful soul. My name is Amanda Durocher, and welcome to New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I answer listener questions about the healing journey. I don't believe I have all the answers. I believe you have all the answers you seek.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:28]:
You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. Today, we are talking about self love and how do we learn to love ourselves if we don't feel like we've ever loved ourselves. I think that the experience of this question, not knowing how to love ourselves is extremely common. But so many of us feel alone and we feel like we're the only ones who don't know how to love ourselves or we feel like we're the only ones who struggle with self hatred and blame and really difficult feelings. So today, we are going to dive into self love. Why is it that so many of us struggle with self love And how do we continue to love ourselves deeper? My intention for this episode is to help you to feel less alone if you struggle with self love and also to reiterate over and over again that there's nothing wrong with you. You have always been enough.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:14]:
You have always been worthy. You've always been lovable. And life is a journey of learning how to love ourselves, and wherever you are today is okay. Today, we're gonna talk all things self love. And before I jump into the episode, I always like to mention that you can find the episode show notes at noviaadvice.com/103. And if you haven't checked out my website, I invite you to check it out at noviaadvice. Com where there's free journal prompts, free meditations, and where I recently added a new section with poems. And you know what? I'm actually gonna read a poem for this episode.
Amanda Durocher [00:01:45]:
So this episode, redo a poem that I wrote. I invite you to go check it out. These are poems that have helped me to heal throughout my own healing journey, and I'm pretty excited about it. My poems are pretty intimate. I didn't share them for a really long time because I felt like such a piece of my soul. But the more I love myself, the more I wanna share with you my heart and the inner workings of Amanda. So you can check those out at newvia advice .com. And before I jump into the episode, I'm gonna read a poem because to me this poem was my journey with self love.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:10]:
So with that, let's jump on in. I call this poem Snow White. I fell from the ivory tower when dark and stormy night. I was sent out into the woods resembling Snow White. I was naive and innocent, also running for my life. The hunter almost got me, but I sprinted out of sight. I ran through the forest as the demons chased me, screaming for help, but found no outside safety. I stumbled through the trees looking for the light, but time and time again saw nothing but the night.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:44]:
I soon began to see Prince Charming was not coming. I waited for the 7 doors and experienced quite humbling. No one came to save me. I waited long enough. So after years of torment, I picked myself back up. I got lost many times because it can be really hard to see the forest for the trees. But I found a place to call my own with the help of Mother Earth. She was the prince I waited for, the one with me since birth.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:07]:
At first, this refuge was bare, not built on solid foundation, but through the years became my most beautiful creation. Thanks for listening, and thanks for letting me share. If you wanna read more poems about my healing journey, you can check those out at noovieadvice.com. Hey, Amanda. Thank you so much for creating this podcast. I've been learning so much about myself through your words and it's been a great help. My question is about self love. I was recently journaling and realized I don't truly love all of who I am.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:39]:
As I was writing, I then realized I've actually never once loved myself. I was taught at such a young age everything that was wrong with me and got so much negative feedback about who I am and all the things I did wrong from my friends and family since I could remember. I do know the first time I said I hated something about myself was when I was 4 years old and I just started pre k. I just wanna know how am I supposed to love myself when I never once knew what that even felt like to begin with? Thank you so much for this question. This is such an honest question. I just wanna honor that in you, your truthfulness, and your vulnerability with asking this question. Thank you so much. And I also wanna thank you for your kind words about the podcast.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:14]:
It always warms my heart to know that this podcast I've created helps others because I don't always know that. So thank you. Thank you for that. So first, I wanna say I'm so sorry that you feel this way, that you've never loved yourself, and that you experienced such criticism and negative experiences from such a young age. I think, unfortunately, this is all too common, is that when we are children, we receive negative feedback about ourselves from the world, from friends and family, as you said, and we receive criticism and judgments, and we internalize that there's something wrong with us. I talk about that a lot on the podcast, feeling like there's something wrong with me. That's probably one of my deepest wounds. The belief of what is wrong with me.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:58]:
Why is so much wrong with me, what did I do to be so wrong, can I be normal? Those are all beliefs I've really struggled with for a very long time, And I can't say I don't struggle with them at all anymore. And I just wanna honor you with that in this question because self love is a journey. I think that we can always love ourselves deeper because love is that deep and that true and that large and that grand and it's also fierce. Love isn't just sunshine and rainbows. Love is that force that wants you to look at all those lies you tell yourself. So when you say that you don't even know how to love yourself, I wanna challenge that because I believe you do love yourself. You wouldn't be asking a question about self love if if you didn't love yourself. You wouldn't be healing if you didn't love yourself because healing is a radical act of self love.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:50]:
Choosing to look at yourself is self love. So for anybody out there who's listening to this podcast and thinks, I'm not sure I love myself, I can assure you, you do. You would not have found Neovio Advice if you didn't love yourself. Because this isn't an easy podcast to listen to. I've accepted that. For a long time, I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to be for everybody. I'm for the masses. No.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:13]:
I'm really not. I am, I don't know, A dark queen. I'd I've been trying to grapple with who I am recently and accept a few things about myself. And one of those is that I love myself really deeply and that's not always easy because I have proclaimed recently that I'm in my villain era. And I didn't realize that by saying that that I'm in my villain era. And what I meant by that is that I'm dumb people pleasing. Amanda's gotta follow her happiness. But I didn't realize that in order to follow my happiness, how many hearts I would break, how much pain I would cause, how much destruction there would be in the wake of me loving myself.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:51]:
But why is there destruction when I choose to love myself? It's because I sacrificed myself along the way. So to make others happy, I made myself small. To make others happy, I didn't speak up for myself. To make others happy, I sacrificed my own happiness and that was not loving to myself. And where did I learn that? I learned that at a really young age. You mentioned age 4. I think so many young women, and I'm sure men have this experience too, but I see it so much with women. We are taught to put our needs to the side from like the time we come out of the womb and we watch our mothers do the same and we watch teachers and we watch the world people please and we watch people tell us and give us the message as women that we need to be a good girl.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:36]:
Be a good girl. Don't be too loud. Don't run too fast. You can't do that. And we begin to put ourselves in a box. And when we do that, we learn not to love ourselves because we learn there are things that are wrong with us. And as I unravel the places in my life where I was still people pleasing because of different beliefs, I see how often I was still trying to be the good girl. Truth is I was trying to have it all.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:05]:
Trying to have my cake and eat it too, whatever you wanna say. But I was trying to be the good girl and also Amanda and everything she wants to be in this world. And what I came to this spring is that they can't both exist. And so I mentioned that because you say you struggle with self love and I'm right there with you. I am learning to love myself more and more every day, and I can tell you that the choices I am making in this moment are incredibly painful and difficult, but they are radically self loving. And I'm sure I'll talk more about them in a future episode, but right now my world is unraveling, and it's terrifying. But, I have never been more honest about what my heart needs and how to love myself. All of that is to say that I think self love is a journey and it's hard.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:56]:
And I believe hard things are a good thing. I always say, Glennon Doyle says we can do hard things. And I reread her book untamed recently and I was like, we can do hard things. Yeah, Glennon. Because we can. And the truth is, in order to be happy and love ourselves we often have to unravel the lies we've told ourselves. And so for you, you mentioned this memory in pre k. That breaks my heart.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:23]:
Breaks my heart that we tell little children. There's something wrong with them. Oh, I feel that in my heart right now. I know I received those messages too, but then compassion comes in. I believe when learning to love ourselves self compassion is the key. Where do you start when learning to love yourself? It's learning to be kind to yourself. It's learning to stop beating yourself up. When we hate ourselves we often are judgmental and critical, and it's like there are 2 people fighting within us.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:56]:
And self compassion is that spirit of grace that comes in and says enough. Enough. No one deserves the 1st 18 years of their life to be what I survived. And I know I'm not alone. I don't say that because I think I'm special. I just say that because it's true. No one deserves those 1st 18 years to be what I survived. And I don't know what heartache you've been through.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:20]:
I don't know what traumas you've survived. I don't know what demons you battle at night, but I know you didn't deserve it, neither did I. And that right there is the voice of love. Love is the voice that tells you that those voices in your head that criticize you are wrong. Not you. You are not wrong. The voice that tells you you're unlovable is wrong. And so, as I mentioned, the first step is self compassion.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:47]:
Be kind to yourself out there my friends. You deserve it. And so with your question, the next thing I wanted to mention is that you mentioned having this memory when you were 4 years old of hating yourself, and, again, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry that you hated yourself from that young of an age. I take a moment to honor that. Breaks my heart. I know exactly how that feels. And what I have found and what I wanted to mention here is that we are healing the inner child because that's what I consider this year is that you have a child memory that has come forward and wants to be witnessed, loved, and healed.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:20]:
And how do we heal it? We really allow ourselves to feel the whole experience to let it go. And when it comes to the inner child, I wanna emphasize here that it's not about the details of the memory, it's about the feelings it elicits. I find so many people get stuck in healing by focusing too much on the details. What exactly did that person say? What happened there? What was I wearing? What is the experience? You know, when reading your question, I was really reminded of healing from being sexually assaulted as a child. And when I was doing that, I was so obsessed with knowing exactly what happened to me. Like, I wanted to know what I was wearing. I wanted to know the date. I wanted to know every little detail and that kept me stuck.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:02]:
It wasn't until I would surrender that I didn't need to know the details, but I believed myself and allowed myself to feel the treachery of rape that my heart healed. And I mentioned that because I've talked to other survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I know that's not part of your question, but I just wanna mention it because I know my listener base, a lot of people have experienced sexual trauma and really any kind of abuse. It's not about the details. It's about the feelings. The feelings are what move us forward. I just can't reiterate enough. It's not about the detail of the experience, Nuvia advice community and when I talk about my teen experience I have a lot of details of that experience.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:43]:
So it was really different than healing from my childhood assault and a lot of the people who I've struggled with for press memories had childhood assaults that I speak with and they don't relate to my teen experience, the one I talk about the most here on the podcast where I have all the details. They're like, I don't know if I really had repressed memories because I don't actually remember it. I just know it happened. And I wanna say that for anybody here doing inner child work, it isn't about the detail of the memory. It's about the feelings and it's about the knowing. You know, when we are healing from childhood wounds, many times we feel absolutely insane, but sane for the first time at the same time. You know, when I remembered being sexually assaulted in my childhood at, like, age 25, that was my experience. I felt absolutely crazy, but I also felt like everything made sense for the first time.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:32]:
And so I wanna offer that here because when we're healing from past self hatred, you know, like, you may think to yourself listening to this episode, well, I don't even remember the first time I hated myself. You don't have to. It's about knowing that that happened in childhood and just allowing that child to come forward, and any details you need to heal will come forward. You know, I think about that with my teen assault that really I think the only reason I have so many memories are two reasons actually. 1 is that I was older and so I think I remember more. And the second is that so many mini traumas happened within a big trauma that my body held on to every mini trauma. Because I can't tell you, like, every detail of what happened to me, but I know every traumatic piece of it and I think that's because they got stuck in the body. So I share that because when we're learning to love ourselves we're gonna have to be courageous.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:24]:
You know, healing is a journey for the willing, the courageous and the brave. I think there's a reason that we live in a world where so many people don't love themselves and where there's a lot of suffering and a lot of hate And it's because relooking at these moments in our life is really hard. It's painful. It hurts. I have been looking back on my healing journey and it's so hard to put into words how painful it was, but it was also incredibly liberating. The place I'm at now, even though I'm still unraveling, is a place I dreamed of being because the happy days are days I didn't know were possible. And the amount of love that fills my heart? Oh, baby. This is stuff of fairy tales.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:09]:
I didn't know you could feel this much love. Dang. Holy shit. And then I go back into hell and I unravel and I feel heartache and I feel like a felon and I feel broken. Then I come back out. And I remember love and I allow myself to connect with a higher power. And I wanna mention that here at the end of the episode that when we are learning to love ourselves, leaning on the support of the divine, the higher power, God, whatever you wanna call it, is important. I don't talk about god a lot on the podcast but I am only here by the grace of god.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:48]:
And in my darkest moments, I have always had to surrender to that higher power and say, God, I can't carry this anymore. I'm lost. I am lost. You know? It's darkest before the dawn. In those moments I pray and the light comes. A lot of times that light is an insight and it can be a really painful insight and yesterday I was at one of those moments where I was like why do I feel this way? What is happening? And I was shown this abandonment wound and I was like dang, Oh, that hurts but yes. Yes. That has been keeping me from loving deeper.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:26]:
Show me it. Help me through it. Show me the way forward. And I'm still learning how to love myself if I'm honest, you know. It's a journey. But before I wrap up, I really wanna emphasize that there's nothing wrong with you and there never was anything wrong with you. The more I have healed, the more I have seen that every time I thought there was something wrong with me, it was lie of this world. It was a lie that somebody else told me because they likely felt there was something wrong with them.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:51]:
And I view a lot of this self hatred and this self criticism and this self judgment as a disease of the world that we pass from one another. When we don't feel enough we pass that on to somebody else. And that can be through family, through school, through friends. But when we don't feel good about ourselves, we pass that on because we don't know what to do with it. It's like vomit. Like we vomit it onto somebody else and then it just keeps moving like a disease. But the radical thing about self love is that when you learn to love yourself, it is the antidote to that disease. Because the more you embody that love of self, the more it spreads out and it ripples.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:26]:
And that disease of others doesn't hit you. And instead you share with them love. And they may accept your antidote or they may turn away from it, but that's not your responsibility. Your job here on earth is to love yourself and the more you love yourself the more you'll wanna share that love with others. That's what I find is that I've reached this new place in my life and I had these 2 weeks where I was like, Yay! Bliss! And then I was like, Wait. Is this it? And I went out in the world and I saw so much suffering. And I didn't notice it before because I was lost in the woods, the metaphorical woods of my mind. But I've spent, like, the last decade living in the past, it feels like, healing it, navigating it.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:06]:
And now that I'm in the present, I see all this pain. And I had somebody ask me recently, how do we feel joy in a world with so much suffering? Joy is the antidote. Joy is what will heal the world. Love is what will heal the world. I know. I know what that sounds like. Cheesy. Amanda, don't be so cheesy.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:25]:
Why saying that? Don't be so cheesy, Amanda. But the more I love myself, the more I'm like, holy shit. This is radical. We gotta share this. We gotta share this with people because people don't know, because we don't see it. Right? Back to you and your question. If people were giving you negative feedback as a 4 year old, sounds like there wasn't a lot of love in your world. And, again, I don't think that's uncommon, and I'm so sorry because you have always been worthy.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:49]:
You have always been enough. You are so lovable. When I say beautiful soul at the beginning of this episode, I mean it. You are a beautiful soul. It's also a reminder to myself that I'm a beautiful soul because I can be a little hard on myself. So I hope something in this answer was helpful. Self love is such a large topic, and it's really a journey of following your heart. Your heart knows the way for you to love yourself and again I really think the key is self compassion.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:17]:
So I hope something in this answer was helpful. Thank you for your question. I am sending you so much love. Thank you again for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. As always, I am so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on healing and self love. If you haven't already, I invite you to leave a rating and review for the podcast. Ratings and reviews really helped me to grow the podcast and for people to know that this is a safe space to come and heal. So thank you so much for everybody who already has left a rating and review and for everybody who reaches out.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:50]:
I am always so grateful to connect with people over this podcast because this podcast is my heart on my sleeve and it's vulnerable for me to share all this, and I'm just grateful. So thanks again for joining me. If you have any questions, you can reach out at contact at newviewadvice.com. And thanks again for joining me for another episode of New View Advice. I hope I was able to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next time.