The Self-Love Ladder: A step-by-step pathway to loving yourself

Have you ever struggled to really love yourself, or even asked yourself, what does that even mean, to love mySELF? Isn’t that selfish or self-centred or something? How am I supposed to love myself? Aren’t I supposed to focus my love and attention on everyone ELSE?

Certainly, those of us who are women have been socialized to put others’ needs ahead of our own, to give and give, even to the point of self-sacrifice. And not it's not just society's programming! Biology also comes along, when we have children, and drives us to give everything we have, and then some, to our children, often until we have nothing left. And guess what? This takes a huge toll on us, on our health, our energy, and often on our marriage as well, so we really have to stop and ask ourselves, is this really the best way to function? Are we really doing right by ourselves, our families and our communities if we are draining our own energy tanks dry??

In my coaching and therapeutic work with women going through and recovering from divorce, I am saddened by how often my clients struggle to utter these three simple words: “I love myself.”?

I can identify. For years–no, for decades–my mind ran a nearly constant refrain, almost like a mantra, “I hate myself, I hate myself.” This harsh part of myself, developed through the shame of being sexually abused as a child, would tear me down any time I made a mistake, any time I said the wrong thing, any time I failed to meet my own exacting standards, any time I was less than perfect. Which, of course, was pretty much all the time. But I didn’t feel safe if I wasn’t “perfect,” so I chased myself around with this really mean stick, beating myself up constantly. It was exhausting. Can you relate??

Hopefully you weren’t this mean to yourself, but many women are, as I have learned in my work therapeutic work with them. I’m sure that many men suffer from the same nasty inner voice. A harsh inner critic is a hallmark sign of chronic complex trauma, also known as CPTSD, which afflicts so very many people on the planet.

How, in the presence of such a brutal inner voice, is anyone supposed to love themselves?

Here’s the thing: it is really difficult to go from one end of the spectrum – hating yourself – to truly feeling that you love yourself. So, you have to start with baby steps.

In my work with women, I use a powerful healing process called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT tapping) that requires clients to say, “Even though ____ (whatever is causing them pain), I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” Many women balk at this. Resistance comes up like a brick wall and they just can’t say it. To take the edge off, I redirect them to say “I’m open to the possibility that I could learn to love myself.” This is more realistic, they can get the words out. This opens a window in their hearts that allows self-love to enter, IF they believe learning to love themselves is important AND they commit to the process.?

And I should say, it’s not just women in coaching or therapy who struggle to love themselves. A 2021 survey commissioned by The Body Shop and conducted by Ipsos found half of women worldwide feel more self-doubt than self-love and 60 per cent wish they had more respect for themselves.?

Why do we, as women, have such a difficult time loving ourselves?

The answers could fill a book. I will highlight just a few. Consider this:

It can be hard to love yourself when you’re female because of attitudes you picked up about your worthiness in the cultural atmosphere. Some call it patriarchy, I call it societally entrenched misogyny. This comes in large part from religious teachings that women are inferior, temptresses, the undoing of men. In my generation and older, “good girls” sat with their knees together. It wasn’t proper to like sex and if you did you were “dirty” and “bad”—never mind that Mother Nature designed you to love sex.?

And of course women were not even legally recognized as persons in Canada until 1929, we were “chattels,” property of men. There’s more: being valued for appearance over character; impossible fake beauty standards; socialization to “be nice” and put our own needs last; not to mention the massive economic undervaluation of women’s traditional homemaking and child-raising roles.?

On top of social conditioning, we have our personal experiences: internalizing parents’ scolding to mean we are not good or worthy; childhood sexual abuse that made us feel ashamed; abusive relationships that stripped of us our sense of worth, bit by bit, day by day. You get the idea.

It’s an uphill climb to go from feeling fundamentally bad, unworthy and less-than, to truly accepting, loving and celebrating who we are. But it’s a climb we need to make to become the powerful creators Nature made us to be, and to generate the lives of love and abundance we deserve.

In the face of programming that produces ingrained resistance to loving ourselves, it’s important to take baby steps or the resistance will stop you altogether.

That’s why I have developed a concept I call The Self Love Ladder. This is a progressive upward path that will take you to the pinnacle of self-respect, self-appreciation and self-love, step by step.

It starts with having basic compassion for yourself as a human being who is suffering. You would have compassion for any other suffering being, why not for yourself? Why judge or berate yourself for your lack of perfection, or demand more from yourself than you would ask of anyone else??

Once you connect with compassion for yourself, you have an opening to forgive yourself for your mistakes and shortcomings.?

When you understand that 90 per cent of your behaviour— including self-sabotage— is based on childhood programming below the level of conscious awareness, it’s easier to forgive yourself.?

So, we progress from self-compassion to self-understanding, to self-forgiveness. From there we can begin to work on self-acceptance, self-respect and self-confidence.

Look inside to find your inner child, innocent recipient of the programming. See her pain to be living under a burden of self-denial, self-limitation, self-sabotage, even self-destruction. Ask her what she needs from you now, and give it to her. Understanding, kindness, affection. Speak to your inner child as if you are her ideal all-loving mother. It really is a process of re-parenting yourself—not that your parents didn’t love you, but they may not have known how to show their love in a way you could feel and accept.

I once asked an internationally recognized child psychologist what is the most important thing for a parent to do and he said without hesitation, “Notice the good!”?

How would this play out in your re-parenting of yourself?

What do you notice? Do you focus on the good and reward yourself with kind words and experiences, or do you find fault and tear yourself down??

Pay close attention to how you speak to (and about) your adult self. When something unkind comes up, stop yourself. But please do not berate yourself for your unkind self-talk! That is also unkind. Instead, apologize to yourself, remind yourself you did not deserve that, and promise to be kinder to yourself. It helps to recognize that how you think and speak is habitual, and it takes time and effort to change a habit.?

Once you make a habit of thinking and speaking about yourself kindly, you will find it easier to open your heart to yourself. From here you can start taking bigger steps, such as thanking yourself when you do something nice for yourself. This starts to produce a virtuous cycle of positive emotions, like appreciating yourself for how hard you work or how good you are at certain things. Caring enough about yourself to set boundaries that protect your time and energy from people who don’t appreciate you and don’t return the same kind of energy to you that you give to them. Caring enough about yourself to stop lying to yourself about the harmful choices you’ve been making, and to make better decisions for yourself, whether that’s in health or finances or relationships. And then respecting yourself for your new decisions.

Do you see how you will start to feel proud of yourself? How shame will release from your being? How your heart will open to loving you?

It is not narcissism, self-indulgence, selfishness or a sense of superiority that leads you to love yourself. It is the recognition that you, like everyone else, are an individual expression of all that is, a divine being, part of the fabric of the universe and deserving of the same care and love as every other part of the fabric of the universe. It is the understanding that you cannot fully express and share the fullness of your divine gifts if you are cutting yourself off at the knees. If you are not there for yourself, you are underpowered and you don’t have much energy to give.

Another key to loving yourself is understanding that love is not just a feeling, it’s an energy that permeates the universe. It’s a frequency you can tune into and embody at a deep level. When you choose to see the world through the lens of love, and let love rather than fear guide how you think, speak and act, you will find that deep love for yourself naturally emerges.?

Once you have taken the steps to self-compassion, self-understanding, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance, new feelings begin to more rapidly emerge and build on themselves. For example, self-truthfulness and self-discipline will emerge and lead to self-respect, which in turn will lead to self-confidence, self-care, self-trust, self-appreciation, self-pleasure and, eventually, self-love and even self-celebration. The rewards of this climb are manifold, including joy, satisfaction, rewarding and enlivening relationships, and a more expanded you with so much more to give.

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