Did you know that if you type, how do I learn to… into Google, the #1 searched skill is—you guessed it—love myself.
Why is it that so many of us never learned this essential and vital ingredient to living a life of wholehearted happiness? Oftentimes, it’s the negative messaging that we received as kids that has become our conditioned and programmed response to life. Like an operating system that’s been running in the background, it affects our self-image and the way we see ourselves in relation to the world.
My negative programming was installed and had been operating beneath the surface since childhood. My dad died when I was ten years old and my mother died when I was sixteen. The six years between their deaths were not happy times as my mother, a widow with five kids, suffered from a debilitating heart condition and a broken heart. She spiraled into a deep depression and we parented her most of the time. She was angry and critical and nothing I did ever seemed good enough. So I doubled down, striving all the more to make her happy and earn her love. I became the proverbial people pleaser and mistakenly believed that love was conditional and I was only worthy of it if I performed well.
At sixteen years old, I was parentless and rudderless, set adrift in a sea of sex and drugs and rock and roll and looking for love in all the wrong places. Such a cliché, I know. But looking back, I can see how all of it became the driving force in my life to figure out this thing called love.
Other people would constantly tell me that I was way too hard on myself, never satisfied and always striving to better myself. That’s a bad thing? I thought. I had to be hard on myself because, heaven forbid, I rest on my laurels and stop achieving. Then who would love me?
I remember the time, over thirty years ago, a friend and colleague in the National Speakers Association, held my face in her hands, looked right into my eyes and proclaimed, “Kathleen, it’s time to have a love affair.”
I recoiled and broke free of her gaze and sputtered, “I’m already married.”
“No silly,” she responded, “I mean, it’s time to fall in love with yourself.”
I felt naked and vulnerable, like she could see right into my soul. But she said it with so much love and compassion that it made me pay attention and I became curious about this foreign concept of self-love. I read every self-help book I could get my hands on, but I was reading them from the perspective of trying to fix myself so I would be loveable.
One of those books was “One Day My Soul Just Opened Up” by Iyanla Vanzant. While reading it, immersed neck-deep in an old cast-iron, clawfoot bathtub, sobbing as my own salty tears dripped into the scalding hot water, I cried out to God, “When is my soul gonna open up?” That vivid memory was over twenty years ago. I didn’t know it then, but now I see that what I was really asking was, “When am I ever going to love myself?”
