Learning to love yourself is one of the most important aspects of living with peace, joy, and fulfillment.

It’s also one of the hardest things to do.

One reason it’s difficult is because it requires unconditional self-acceptance.

Unconditional self-acceptance is acknowledging all the facets of your personality, habits, attitudes, and behaviors – good and bad – and seeing them for what they are: A part of you.

It’s acknowledging the positive aspects of yourself, along with the faults, flaws, and failures, without sugarcoating, justifying, rationalizing, or judging them.

Acceptance is NOT condoning attitudes or behaviors that are harmful to yourself or others.

It IS seeing them objectively.

And that’s where it gets tricky.

Many of your beliefs about yourself simply aren’t true.

They’re based on faulty evidence from earlier life experience that you accepted without questioning.

Someone you trusted told you something about yourself, and you believed them.

You tried something, got different results from what you expected, and you incorrectly made it mean something about you.

Self-acceptance requires you to take stock of your thoughts and beliefs about yourself, hold them up to the light, and examine them for truth. Only then can you decide which ones are worth keeping and what you would like to change about yourself.

Just as you can’t use a map to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are, it’s impossible to make significant changes to yourself or your life without acknowledging and accepting where you are.

It’s also impossible to love yourself if you attempt to do so without all the facts about you.

Get the facts. Acknowledge and accept them. Make amends and forgive yourself where you need to. Then decide what to do going forward.

The sooner you do it, the sooner you will be able to love yourself.

If you want help, feel free to schedule time with me.