Question:
Hey Adam,
Will you make a post sometime in the future on how someone can love or validate themselves when they're not getting validated by others?
Response:
Sure.
From very early on we are trained to get validation and approval and love from other people. It feels good when people are shining good energy on to you, it feels nice, and it helps to ease any resistance you have against yourself. Unfortunately, people can be fickle, their minds can change, and at the drop of a hat, they can suddenly find you less acceptable, or even unlikable, and you might be left waiting for someone’s permission to let down the barriers to loving or accepting yourself once again.
What is loving oneself anyway? It could be said to be what is naturally there when you have less resistance to who you are, or who you think you are. As life goes on, people may meet you with some kind of resistive energy, usually because they want you to behave in a certain way. If you don't meet the expectations of other people, especially as a child, you are met with resistance instead of acceptance, and so your sense of ease or self-worth is gradually learnt to be conditional. We don't often grow up with a conscious awareness of the love and ease within, and so we gradually start to believe that the only source of it must be when we win some kind of outside approval or success.
One way of finding your own validation, sense of self-worth or self-love, is to let yourself imagine how it might feel. Is it possible to try an experiment where you see what it would be like to feel at ease with yourself, or to feel love for yourself? Making it a hypothetical experiment will help to take the seriousness and conditionality out of it. You are just playing a game. A game of "How would it feel?"...
How would it feel to feel love?
How would it feel to be loved?
How would it feel to be kind to myself?
How would it feel to have an inner sense of worth?
Asking these questions with a simple sense of curiosity, and letting the FEELINGS come to you, can be a quick way of beginning to access these feelings and sense of self-love that you are after.
From there, it is helpful to see that experiencing any kind of easing of resistance towards yourself does not have to be conditional. It is not based on anyone else’s behaviour or anything happening in your life. It is about your attention and willingness to be open to energy that is finer and lighter than the old energy of resistance that has been taught to you by other people.
Remember that learning to only accept yourself or feel good under certain conditions has been a very effective way to control you. If you need someone's approval to feel good, then you are their slave. They are in control of when and where you can ease your resistance to yourself and therefore become fully aligned with who you truly are, and since this alignment is what we all crave, you might even jump through hoops to get it.
If you can make your own sense of well-being more important than the behaviours or opinions of other people, then you will be on the right track. How to actually connect to well-being is far easier when it becomes your priority. Usually thoughts about the past or other people, or worries about the future get in the way. If you are willing to experiment with letting go or at least easing resistant energies within you, finding any way to get out of your head, appreciate anything pleasant in your life or even imagine anything pleasant that makes you feel good, then you are beginning to access an energy of well-being, which is synonymous with self-love or self-validation.
You can even imagine how acceptance from others feels. If it feels good when you imagine it, then isolate the feeling. Realise no one is in the room with you. You are simply choosing to stop resisting yourself, you are choosing to love yourself, and you are simply letting acceptance from other people be your excuse to do it. But you don't need an excuse. It is all an inside job. Give less importance to other people and what they think. Don't take them so seriously, be open to connecting to a broader, wider part of yourself that lives within and beyond your body, and let your thoughts come from a higher intelligence.
The main thing in all of this is to realise that you have been waiting for permission to feel love or acceptance. You have been asking people to say it’s OK let down the barriers and resistance against loving yourself. If you give yourself the permission to stop asking for permission, then you are on the path to freedom.
Follow up questions are welcome.
All the best,
Adam