Dear College of Education Community,
This week we celebrate Valentine’s Day and a time to focus on love. Love of those most important in our lives, romantic love, but also self-love! To paraphrase a famous TV celebrity, “How can we love others, if we can’t love ourselves?” So how do we define self-love? Self-love means taking care of our own needs and not settling for less than we deserve. Self-love is different for each of us, since each person is best able to determine how to take care of themselves. In a recent Psychology Today blog, LMFT Cortnie Baity elaborates on what self-love is and why it’s important. Below are her suggestions for engaging in self-love:
1. Make good decisions. By design, life is hard enough all by itself, so it is imperative to be mindful of how your decision-making impacts your quality of life. Some decisions can reduce life quality outcomes like financial condition, mental and physical health, and relationship quality, while others can enhance them. When you love and care for yourself, you make strategic decisions that will enhance and protect your life quality and reduce undue burden, stress, and strain. Poor decisions that create avoidable stress, strain, and undue problems are a form of self-hate and sabotage.
2. “B” for BIG BOUNDARIES. Boundaries are rules that protect you from behaviors of outside others that could potentially reduce your quality of life (intentionally or unintentionally). Boundaries inform others of what’s okay for you and what is not okay for you. Boundaries, simply stated, are the terms in which I feel safe interacting with you—if these terms are broken, our interaction will become limited or terminated. When we fail to establish and enforce boundaries, it permits low-quality experiences to occur in our life. This often results in feelings of frustration and resentment that can negatively impact your inner psychological world, others connected to you, and the way you show up in the world. Boundaries are a vehicle of self-love and -care–they say, “I care about you, and I care about me too.”
3. Be kind to yourself. Many of us have inherited harsh internal voices of criticism and judgment from at least one place or person with whom we have crossed paths in our lifetime. The more you are exposed to voices of harsh criticism and negativity or the more you value the opinion of the person who spews the harsh criticism, the stronger the lasting impression. Sometimes the impression is so strong that you adopt (internalize) hypercriticism of yourself as your internal voice. The harm of the harsh criticism continues, even when the external voice of harsh criticism is no longer present. If you tend to be hypercritical and unforgiving of yourself—if you tend not to allow yourself to make mistakes, and when you do, you beat yourself down for it—stop! This is a form of self-perpetuated abuse. Instead, when you make a mistake, shift the narrative you are telling yourself about yourself and the mistake. Recognize that you are a human and humans are flawed by design–perfection in human nature does not exist. Making a mistake does not decrease your value or worthiness. It simply makes you human. When you make a mistake, permit yourself to be human. This means acknowledging your personal disappointment but also offering yourself kindness, forgiveness, patience, and grace. Hold yourself accountable, learn from the event, and commit to change that will prevent similar mistakes in the future. This is self-love and self-care.
To read more, go to https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/make-it-make-sense/202207/self-love-is-self-care
For a list of other self-care options, please go to our COE self-care website for resources for faculty, staff, students, and the community at https://www.csun.edu/eisner-education/self-care/articles-information-self-care May you have a Happy Valentine’s Day full of love for others and for yourselves!
Warmly,
Shari