Have you ever had a relationship that ended badly, then another relationship comes along and it ends badly as well? This did not happen to me just once, but a number of times!
After this happened to me the seventh time I had to be honest enough with myself to see that if I wanted to have a different outcome I didn’t just need good relationship advice, I needed to approach my relationships in a completely different way.
Most of my relationships lasted a couple of months if I was lucky. It was quite a familiar pattern – a guy would be interested in me and I in him, then the game would begin. Firstly he needed to prove to me how much he liked me and cared for me. If I felt that was enough and I liked him too, then we would get together. As soon as we were together I would become a bit obsessed, I would think of him all the time, lose myself in him and become a dedicated ‘I will put up with anything’ kind of lover. As you can imagine this put quite a lot of guys off! When they did lose interest this would leave me somehow more obsessed and more ‘into them’, which was quite distressing really.
With most of these failed relationships came an intense feeling of falling in love, then not long after would come the familiar feelings of hopelessness and a desperation to not lose the relationship.
Looking back I can see I had no regard for myself, I had many beliefs and ideals, which kept me locked in an emotional prison of how a relationship should be and how I should be within that. I had set unrealistic ideals and standards of what this should look like.
I realize now I was being shown time and time again that I had to look deeper into what I was creating. I could no longer deny the fact that I must be responsible in some way for attracting the same situation to develop and be repeated again and again – just with a different person. I could no longer play the victim; I had been offered the choice to see how I (yes I, no one else) was creating these repetitive heartbreaks.
I started to be really honest with myself as it was now becoming very obvious how my lack of self-worth was infiltrating and affecting many relationships in my life. Inspired by the love in which I was held during Esoteric Healing sessions I began to make changes to the way I lived. Choosing a greater level of love and care for myself worked magic in breaking past self-sabotaging momentums.
I now am fully aware that until we deal with our hurts we can never move on: we may get a new partner or we may move to another country, but the momentum is still there hidden, waiting to manifest itself again and again.
The deep pain I experienced in all my relationships was undoubtedly caused by the lack of love I had for myself. I realize now without a foundation of loving myself, all my relationships were destined to eventually crumble.
With lack of self-worth I was ultimately setting myself up time and time again to allow heartbreak and abuse. Through developing the love I now have for myself, for the lovely lady I am, I have healed huge wounds that kept me from developing loving relationships.
Now, as I have developed my own self-love and have faced the pain that I had held onto, I find myself in my longest ever relationship (now 4 years) and engaged to a beautiful man. We are both committed to being and bringing true love into our relationship – to deal with our stuff and to evolve together. Of course there have been rocky times and I am sure there may be a few more to come, but overall our foundation is strong and built with a love and truth that pulls us back when we are off track to constantly remind us of our truth.
With the inspiration I have received from Universal Medicine, its practitioners and the women’s groups held monthly in London, I have deepened my level of self-worth and this has had a positive effect on all my relationships, whether they be with family, colleagues, friends or my partner.
I didn’t need good relationship advice – I simply realized that without self-worth and self-love I will always be looking for others to fill my need, which ultimately never truly works.
by Samantha, UK
Further Reading:
Self-Worth: Honouring the Beautiful Woman I Am
It is as Simple as Loving Myself First
725 Comments
Samantha, this makes sense to me
“Looking back I can see I had no regard for myself, I had many beliefs and ideals, which kept me locked in an emotional prison of how a relationship should be and how I should be within that. I had set unrealistic ideals and standards of what this should look like.”
we are so conditioned from a young age, we are given pictures, ideals, principals of what love looks like and should be like but I have discovered it is totally false and can lead us into another cycle of not claiming ourselves so that at some point in our lives we feel let down, disenchanted with life as it did not match up to the lies we were peddled, that Mr. Right will come along sweep us off our feet and we will live happily ever after.
If we don’t deal with what makes us live with lack of self-worth, we will have to deal with the reflection of it that soon or later others will bring into our life.
Looking at what we create from a curiosity rather than a critical eye allows us to learn more about ourselves.
How we are with ourselves will reflect in every other relationship we have wether it is with the lady on the check out til a stranger or our intimate partner, working on ourselves and healing past hurts are vital therefore for healthy relationships.
“I simply realized that without self-worth and self-love I will always be looking for others to fill my need” A beautiful realisation of truth.
What would our social systems look like if we were all taught to be at-least self-loving from day one of school? Maybe we would all live in a harmonious state with others with joy-full interactions, which would include everyone and there-fore every relationship would be an out-standing realization of how we can live together.
We live what we create and we create what we live, so when we depend on another to give us the love we crave we don’t realise that this, love, is something we already have within us but we have created the belief that it has to come from outside of us.
The relationship with ourselves definitely plays out in our relationships.
Loving and caring for ourselves first and foremost is a prerequisite for all of our relationships.
Without a relationship based on self- love and self-care we just do not have the foundations to possible love another.
If a situation keeps repeating then there is something within ourselves that we need to look at and address.
I think one of our biggest downfalls in relationships is that we see each relationship as a separate entity – rather than what manifests in one relationship is going to manifest in the next relationship until we deal with it. We think by leaving someone or closing the door that’s the end to whatever happened – not realising that we take it all with us and that whatever happened in our last relationship will naturally occur in a fresh relationship.
Life has a beautiful way of repeating the same scenarios over and over again , until we get the message to change something and be willing to explore our part in the ongoing cycle and then make new choices from a foundation of loving ourselves and then bring all of us to others with no expectations of them fulfilling our needs.
I love your honesty here ‘I had to look deeper into what I was creating.’ not very comfortable to do but something I know from experience when we do start looking at what we are creating in our life and start to change the healing is very beautiful.
Without a good foundation of self-worth and self-love we cannot expect to ever have a proper functioning realationship with another for there is nothing to build it on.
Building our own self love, through constant choices to care more deeply for ourselves, is a fundamental part of our foundation that supports us to hold steady, to know ourselves inside and out. Without self love and self care, we leave ourselves wobbly, precarious, unsure and unsteady and at the mercy of life, instead of solid and with ourselves.
As relationships are such a wonderful reflection of the way we approach life it is no wonder that many ‘fail’ if we are still holding on to unhealed hurts from our past, Those, hurts will be triggered in many ways and will continue to be triggered even if we leave one relationship for another. It is when we acknowledge the trail of ‘failed’ relationships behind us that it’s time to stop and wonder why. And I eventually found the answer was that I didn’t have a loving and caring relationship with myself and that was the most important one of all.
I totally agree, self love and self worth are a prerequisite if we want amazing and deeply loving relationships, and also to be able to offer amazing relationships to others.
This blog renders all the relationship books, men are from mars and women are from venus type books unnecessary – what is the point in going into any relationship if we have not first secured and solidified the relationship we have with ourselves – it’s like selling a car with only two wheels – the other person doesn’t get all of us and everything they also deserve.
Unless we bring all of ourselves to a relationship we will always be dependent on others to fulfil our neediness – not a recipe for success. Deepening my own self-love has impacted all my relationships as I support myself and am so much more open to what unfolds each day.
Coming to realise that we are everything before we are anything offers us all an opportunity to build a sense of self-worth and self-esteem that is not a delicately balanced juggle at the mercy of what happens around us or what relationship we are in. Building that sense of who we are as a solid lived foundation sows seeds that feed us back in all aspects of our relationships and we can start to recognise what takes us away from that ease and knowing in our bodies.
Absolutely there is nothing that we need to search for as we are already everything – so contrary to the messages that we are fed by society.
The divine design of our universe is its repetitive nature. I used to hate that I couldn’t just move on, it used to drive me bonkers and I blamed everyone and everything that reminded me of an issue I felt I had dealt with for reminding me that I had, perhaps, not dealt with it at all and was instead using a coping mechanism to distract myself from this fact!
Self love and self worth are the keys in developing relationships that bring true love, which allows each person to evolve. When these are lacking in our lives we become needy, always looking outside of ourselves for someone else to fill our void. It is beautiful Samantha, that you have come to the realisation that by bringing self love and self worth into your life, you are now able to have a beautiful loving evolving relationship.
It might be uncomfortable to feel how we create situations in life that we don’t like ourselves but, when the most intense feelings are over it gives us space to actually observe and change the pattern we were in.
Each relationship we have can be a space to heal our hurts or/and a space to confirm what we truly bring in essence.