"You have to love yourself before you can love someone else." We've all heard this, right? It is a common belief in our society that if you are not finding the love you're looking for, you need to look at what you're doing wrong. If you're struggling with your past, that has to be fixed first. If you're struggling with your self-esteem, you need to raise that up before entering a relationship. The message is this: if you are broken, don't look to someone else to fix you. You have to figure it out on your own. 

What a challenge that can be. You see, we don't come out of the womb knowing anything, let alone what love looks like or how to give it to ourselves. That is all taught and learned. If you grew up in a caring, loving household, you have a leg up. If you grew up in a household with absent or abusive parents, you're at a disadvantage. If you're lucky, you find this love in other places, perhaps through friends or other family members as a child. But if others aren't showing it to you, there's no way you can learn how to show it to yourself. 

For a long time, I held fast to this belief as well that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. I am fortunate enough to have grown up in a family with two loving parents (who are still married), a great brother, and other family members living close by who I saw regulary. I developed friendships quickly and easily with others as a child from a young age. It all seemed to come naturally because it was all that I had known. It was only as I got older and that I started to see as a teenager that not everyone has the experiences I had. Not everyone has parents who show them love like my parents did. Not everyone has people their own age who they have grown up with since the age of 3. I was the exception and not the rule. 

A lot changed for me again when I learned about attachment theory years ago. The idea behind attachment theory is this in a nutshell: if you were shown love as a child, you learned that you were good and the world could be a safe place to explore with your parents as a safe "home base" for you to go back to if anything was wrong (leading you to develop a secure attachment style). If your parents were unpredictable and didn't give their attention or affection easily, you learned you needed to make a fuss to get it and you'd likely feel a little panicky wondering if they'd be there for you or not (leading you to develop an anxious attachment style). If your parents just weren't there at all or harmful to you, you learned to detach and draw back, believing that neither they nor the world were very safe and you better start figuring things out on your own (leading you to develop an avoidant attachment style). 

It's not so simple to just figure out how to love yourself without learning through experience how to do that. That would be like asking me to become a chef without going to culinary school. Could I watch a million cooking shows, try out a bunch of recipes, and maybe get pretty good? Sure, I could do that. But that's going to take a lot of time and effort and finding a good job that would want to hire me as a chef might prove challenging. It's the same with love. If you had caring parents and others in your life, you went through the "culinary school of love." Forming relationships of any sort, romantic or otherwise, is going to come easier the same way that it would be easier for someone who has gone through culinary school to find a good job after. So can you really blame those who are self-taught with love when their relationships aren't going so well or they keep getting down on themselves? I don't think you can. They've been through a hell of a lot to get them there. 

I'm sure there are some of you reading this blog that are thinking to yourselves, "Yep, I didn't get the love I needed when I was younger. I don't like myself very much, my relationships keep failing me, I need to do something different here and I want to love myself." And I can sit here and tell you some things you've probably heard before (that can all help, by the way): make sure you eat right and exercise, find something you love to do and do it regularly, pamper yourself every once in awhile. That's all great. But the same way that a chef only becomes a chef by actually cooking, you're only going to learn how to love by doing it. Love is not an isolated act. So what I really recommend is this: start engaging in acts of love with others. Show kindness and care as best as you know how - to your pet, to your family members, through volunteering with others, whatever it may be, and start seeing what you get back. Start noticing if you begin feeling better about yourself as you're impacting others in a positive way. If you have someone in your life whether it's a therapist, a friend, a co-worker, a pet (they really are some of the best teachers when it comes to love) who shows you that they care, soak that in. They are showing you how to love yourself by the kindness they show you. When you get hard on yourself, think about how they would encourage you instead. It's powerful when we start treating ourselves like how the people who care about us treat us.

So what do I really think about if we need to love ourselves FIRST before loving others? I don't view those as different things. I think they occur together. I think we learn to love by giving it. I think we learn to love ourselves by receiving it from other people. I think it's time to forget this notion that love can be learned all on your own, without anyone else there to teach you. Think about what you can do to learn to love yourself and others more by giving and receiving love in your own life. It's never too late to learn.