5 Tools For Building A Healthy Relationship With Yourself

5 Tools For Building A Healthy Relationship With Yourself



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This video is loosely part of the attachment style series (where we talk about anxious attachment, dismissive-avoidant attachment, fearful-avoidant attachment and secure attachment) but it's really more of a building block than anything else.

Until we understand what a self-relationship is and how we can work towards building one, it's challenging to do any real, deep attachment healing. This video is very much a non-exhaustive list – and I'm sure it's one I'll follow up with many more videos of the sort.

But if you – like me – have often struggled to understand WTF people are saying when they talk about ‘self love,' this video's for you.

LOVE YOU ALL (and hope you love yourselves too).

hey guys heidi preeb here i decided to make this video today as kind of part of my attachment series but it's not going to be directly about the attachment styles so we're not going to talk about the four styles anxious secure avoid and fearful avoidant instead we're going to talk about one thing that i frequently come back to when i talk about attachment healing but that i've never really fleshed out in detail which is how to build a relationship with yourself and start showing up for yourself in such a way that your attachment style can begin healing from the inside out so when i started getting interested and like curious about healing work and attachment healing i would talk to people who were further along in the process and something i heard a lot was i have a great relationship with myself now i love myself i can depend on myself and i was always like amazing like love that for you just quick question literally what does that mean like when you say i have a fantastic relationship with myself when you say i learn to love myself i learned to re-parent myself i learned to show up for myself in tangible terms what did you do to get there because it always felt very much to me like there was this gap between the way i knew i felt about myself and the way that i wanted to feel and the place that i wanted to get to but i didn't know how to bridge it like words of affirmation don't do anything for me so i'm not a stand in front of the mirror and tell myself kind words kind of person and it's totally cool if you are but i find that that's the only type of self-love advice that is kind of frequently distributed is like talk kindly to yourself give yourself nice words of affirmation but there's so so so so so much more to building a relationship with yourself than just giving yourself kind words if anything i think that giving yourself kind words but then not backing those words up with action can work against you in terms of building a relationship with yourself it's literally the equivalent of let's say you're dating someone and they're constantly telling you they love you they care about you they're there for you and then they never show up on time when you're meant to hang out they criticize you anytime you say something even a little tiny bit wrong they sabotage opportunities for success that you want to go for there's a term for that kind of person and it's a boy someone of any gender who manipulates you with their words and tells you one thing and then does another don't be that person for yourself okay don't add another boy to the world we have enough of them we don't need another one but anyways similar to my last video this is just going to be a lot of what has worked for me so you can feel free to take or leave whatever advice you feel like would work for you as well um everyone processes differently everyone falls in love with other people and themselves differently so this isn't your process that's totally cool but if there's anything in here that feels resonant to you where as you're listening to it you're like oh i could use a little bit of love in that area then i really encourage you to try implementing it and see what happens so the number one thing that i think is incredibly important when you're trying to build a relationship with anybody but especially yourself is having accountability to yourself so if you're constantly telling yourself i love you i accept you i believe in you i want good things for you but then you're also sleeping through your alarm every morning eating foods that make you feel lethargic and unhappy skipping important events that you wanted to go to bailing on the plans that you make with yourself backtracking on your goals the minute that they get hard yourself does not believe you when you look in the mirror and say i love you because you've not given yourself any proof that that's true so the first step you have to take is giving yourself proof that you are going to show up for yourself why because this builds self trust and self accountability and self-trust is the basis of self-love if you can't trust yourself to follow through on any of the things that you want for yourself it's very very hard to feel nice kind happy things towards yourself and i encourage you to start really really really small here if we're always putting this insurmountable pressure on ourselves to do huge amounts of work or huge amounts of change or transformation on ourselves in short periods of time we're just going to burn ourselves out really really quickly and the goal here is not to accomplish something humongous the goal with building self-trust is literally to just start to get your mind in the habit of thinking of yourself as a trustworthy person so actually the smaller a goal you can set here the better pick one thing that you want to do a very small thing and then do it for a set period of time only because you said you would so when you are doing something because you want a certain result it gets really easy to reason your way out of that thing as soon as you feel like oh i found another way to get to that result or oh i'm not feeling inspired or motivated today or oh maybe i don't really need that end result anyways and that's what happens a lot of the times when we set goals and then don't end up going for them we reason our way out of the process but here the goal is different the goal is not to accomplish or reach anything it's literally just to show ourselves i will show up for myself so when i decided to take this on i decided that i was going to listen to an audiobook while walking to and from my co-working space every single day my co-working space is about an hour away and normally i have this habit of listening to music while i walk and i completely dissociate go into fantasyland and give myself this kind of unhealthy hit of dopamine by imagining a life that i'm not actually living and i really wanted to break that habit and i wanted to start doing something healthier for myself so i decided it would be cool to use that time to learn instead of dissociate so i decided i'm gonna do this for five days and day one and two felt really great day three the morning was great the afternoon i noticed i was losing my focus as i was walking home and i would have to continuously bring my attention back and day four and five were a lot harder so in the afternoons because i was already pretty mentally spent by the end of the week i was having a really hard time keeping my focus on the audiobook rather than wanting to kind of go off into fantasyland while i was walking and if i had been reasoning with myself i would have gone okay well my focus isn't really here i'm not optimizing my attention i might as well let my attention wander for let's say two walks out of the five and then i'll have a pretty even balance of educating myself and also allowing my brain kind of room to breathe and do its natural thing and that's pretty reasonable but i didn't let myself do it because the point of me implementing these reading and walking sessions was not to stalk my brain up with as much knowledge as possible it was to prove to myself i'm capable of fulfilling a promise that i made myself so i told myself at the beginning after five days i'll reevaluate and the next week if something about this routine isn't working for me or it needs tweaking then i'll change the promise i make to myself maybe i'll say okay three days out of five you have to listen to an audio book to and from your co-working space and two days out of five on the way home you can listen to music or shop and that's totally fine you can adapt this promise to yourself as you go along but the whole entire point is doing what you said you would do solely because you said you would do it you need to train your brain to trust yourself and it won't trust you until you give yourself proof that you are trustworthy because you do the things you say you'll do in the book atomic habits by james clear he talks about setting a goal that just puts you in motion but doesn't actually drive you towards anything meaningful right away so he talks about giving his clients goals let's say they want to start going to the gym and exercising more he's like for the first week just drive to the gym and work out for five minutes and then drive home don't let yourself do a longer workout than that because the mental resistance around going to the gym for five minutes is very low the mental resistance around going to the gym for two hours is probably very high but the important part right away is not at all to worry about the progress it's just to worry about building that self accountability so that you can look at yourself and go i know i will do the things i said that i will do and the cool thing is it doesn't take that long after a couple of weeks of keeping these little promises to yourself you start trusting yourself more and that self-trust takes away anxiety it takes away stress it takes away that part of your brain that's always beating itself up because it doesn't know whether it is or is not going to do the things that said it was going to do building self-trust is the absolute basis of self-love just like trust between people is the basis of a healthy relationship so that's step one with learning to build a relationship with yourself and it's the most important step step two and this is gonna be a really difficult one if you're insecurely attached in any form so if you're anxious avoidant or fearful avoidant you have to start learning where your boundaries are both with other people and with yourself and you have to learn the feeling of what it's like in your body when a boundary has been crossed and what's interesting is that i feel like the responses around boundaries are kind of polarized for different attachment styles like anxious people might feel like they have a really hard time keeping their boundaries avoidant people might feel like they have a lot of boundaries not realizing that avoiding others and avoiding situations you don't want to be in is not setting a boundary fearful avoidance will struggle with both ends of that spectrum probably the next video i make on attachment style is going to be attachment styles and boundaries because it is a giant wealth of information but for any of these types a really really important practice you can get into is just noticing the physical feeling in your body of what happens when a boundary has been crossed so for me it can show up in a couple different ways if a boundary has been crossed in a way that pushes me into my anxious energy as a fearful avoidant i will feel like my entire body is on fire like i will do anything on the planet to get someone to pay attention to me um for me it usually feels like blind rage i know for others it can feel more like a fond response so they feel desperate to get attention or validation of some sort and when i am in my avoidant responses because i do tend to lean more towards the dismissive avoidance side of the spectrum i will suddenly find myself criticizing other people so i'll be thinking about someone who normally i love and enjoy the company of and all of a sudden i hate the way they breathe i hate everything they say i start fantasizing about cutting them out of my life and never talking to them again i don't want anything to do with someone who normally i want quite a bit to do with and that's how i know okay some boundary has been crossed somewhere that's pushed me into either my inner or outer critics that inner critic is a part of the self that is self-abandoning and that wants to go get love validation care from other people because we don't know how to give it to ourselves so for me it's that body on fire feeling i don't know what it is for you and our outer critic is that part of ourselves that thinks only i'm okay everyone else is a mess and i need to push everybody away so that i can self-soothe and feel okay on my own and when i tell you that it took me 30 years to start realizing how many boundaries i have that i'm not aware of to recognize how many behaviors in other people i'm not okay with engaging with and to realize how many bad situations i was putting myself in and then hating myself for afterwards i promise you it is a long exhaustive process that takes a while to realize so don't feel bad if you currently don't really have a big awareness about where your boundaries are it's gonna come to you but the thing you have to do is start paying attention to your body and noticing when your body is reacting in extreme ways because if you're continuously allowing your own boundaries to be crossed you will on some deeply unconscious level absolutely hate yourself for that i promise you and the fact that you didn't learn to set boundaries is not your fault very early on if you're insecurely attached you probably adapted properly to the environment that you were raised in by not having proper or clear boundaries but now you have the opportunity to do something different so you need to get really clear on what it feels like when a boundary has been crossed inside of your body and then how you can respond in a loving way to yourself when that boundary has been crossed so that does not mean going out and trying to get someone else to fix it for you and make you feel better it does not mean cutting someone out of your life and just making the problem go away by avoiding it it means taking time to center yourself get clear on what you need that you can give yourself and then understand which boundaries you need to set whether those are behavioral boundaries thought boundaries emotional boundaries and you need to find a way to put yourself in better situations and again we're going to talk a lot more in a future video about what a boundary is a lot of people think a boundary is an expectation you place on someone else you tell them you have to do this and that's not really what a boundary is a boundary is all about yourself and which situations you will and will not place yourself in i used to make these kind of rules with myself when i was in bad situations where i'd be like okay if this certain bad behavior happens five more times then i'll remove myself from the situation and i would make these excuses over and over and over and over again of why it was okay to keep trying or keep engaging with a situation that i knew was really really bad for me and my life did not change my relationship to myself did not change until i sat down with myself one day and asked myself how many more times is okay for me to put myself in situations where i am physically or emotionally unsafe and i listened to my intuition and it told me no more times no more times in your life every time for the rest of your life if you want me to start trusting you you have to immediately take yourself out of situations that are not safe or okay for you and man it's awkward i have had to ask someone to pull over the car on the side of the highway and let me out of the car i've had to change flights and travel plans to start removing yourself from situations that are unhealthy for you you need an awareness of your boundary and you have to be willing to respect your own boundary which brings us to point number three which is that you have to develop a deep awareness of why you are continuously crossing your own boundaries it is not anybody else's job to uphold your boundary for you okay if it were that would be an absolute mess because all of your well-being would lie in everybody else's hands and man that does not work the problem is a lot of us put our unfulfilled needs on the other side of our boundaries so what does that mean let's say i don't really love or respect myself very much and the only way i know how to get that feeling of love and care and respect is from someone else so now when that someone else crosses my boundary i'm in a pickle because i want to set a boundary and i want to show up for and respect myself but i'm going to feel like trash until that other person gives me the validation i need so i'm in a really sticky situation and the only way to get out of this situation is to realize what it is that i was getting from that other person and find a way to give it to myself in a safer way so you have to find a way to start meeting your own needs in a way that does not involve that other and i do have a video called self-love in the five love languages that talks a lot about how we can give ourselves love through whatever our dominant love language is and a lot of those practices are what i personally turn to during times like this when i feel like a boundary's been crossed i need to step back identify what the boundary is and also what feeling is burning in my body right now right maybe i want attention care and validation or maybe i want respect and acknowledgement and i have to find a way to validate that feeling within myself and figure out what i need to give myself to restore myself to equilibrium without allowing that boundary to be crossed again under every crossed boundary is an unfulfilled need okay let's say you come home one day and your partner hasn't done the dishes and you're really frustrated all of a sudden you're having all these negative thoughts about your partner and you realize a boundary has been crossed maybe i'm not feeling respected or you're feeling like the rules that we agreed upon were not followed and then let's say you get passive aggressive and just do the dishes without talking to your partner about it that's crossing your own boundary why did you do it maybe because you don't want to have a confrontation with your partner because you have this unfulfilled need for peace so you're willing to cross a lot of your own boundaries in order to feel an instant hit of that sense of peace rather than setting up clear rules that allow you to have that sense of peace more consistently or let's say someone said something to you that really offended you and you really didn't like it and you don't speak up you don't let them know that that wasn't okay you don't remove yourself from the situation maybe you have an unfulfilled need for approval and that person is giving you approval in other areas so you can't speak up for yourself and that's crossing your own boundaries because you're valuing your own need for approval over your need for self-respect so in both these situations what's needed is a different way of fulfilling those unfulfilled needs so this process is three steps one is taking a step back recognizing and acknowledging the feeling of oh my boundary has been crossed two asking yourself which unfulfilled need allowed me to let that boundary violation happen and three how can i fulfill this need in a way that does not cross my boundaries and i actually think that setting interpersonal boundaries should actually be the last step because if we jump too quickly into that a lot of the time what we're trying to do is preserve a relationship that needs some changing without having fully thought through what's going wrong is this person healthy for me is this situation safe for me to be in physically emotionally and mentally and could i get this need met in a healthier way and once those conditions are considered then you can set healthier boundaries but more often than not you need some time to think those things through and especially to focus on the where else could i get this need met part because once you figure that part out you realize that you never have to demand respect from someone else you never have to beg someone to follow your boundary you never have to get extremely livid when setting a boundary you can simply walk away from the people who are not being respectful towards you because you have another source of that unfulfilled need somewhere else it takes time to get there but it is potentially the most important part of attachment healing is learning that you will show up for yourself and respect your own boundaries 100 of the time that's what healthy relationships are based on self-love tool number four and this one is a little bit less concrete and more abstract but it's learning to divorce fault from responsibility so there are two kind of traps of thinking that i see a lot of insecurely attached people falling into option one is thinking that everything that is not your fault is not your responsibility to fix and the flip side of it number two is thinking that everything that is your responsibility to fix is also your fault fault and responsibility are not the same thing and we have to look at each one individually in order to figure out which actions are important for us to take so i'll give you an example situation one thinking everything that is not my fault is not my responsibility to fix so this is the mindset we can fall into if we start using our past negative experiences and challenges and traumas as excuses to treat other people badly for example people on the anxiously attached spectrum might feel like because there is this kind of hole inside of them where they need so much love and so much care and so much attention and they really do that's real they did not get that consistent caretaker bonding that they should have had as a young child and that's not their fault they think that it's not their responsibility to fix that now they have to find someone they have to get saviored by someone who can fill that hole inside of them and again that's kind of an unconscious one like you're not going to be consciously thinking that but it will allow you to justify a lot of bad behavior anytime your partner is upset with you you won't want to give your partner the authentic experience of their own emotions you'll want to manipulate and change their feelings so that they feel positively towards you it is not your fault that you're in pain but it is your responsibility to fix that pain for yourself and that sucks and i am so sorry if this is you that that has happened to you and that the life conditions that you have been through and the way that you've grown up did not give you the full wholehearted experience of love and care and acceptance and belonging that you deserve as a human being and you do deserve that however you cannot manipulate your way into getting it you have to take responsibility for showing up for yourself and learning to heal that wound inside of yourself from the inside out okay not your fault yes your responsibility now the flip side of this which you might see more in avoidance spectrum types though really this could be internalized by absolutely any style is everything that is my responsibility to fix is also my fault and the way this plays out is by overtaking responsibility for your life and refusing to allow yourself access to the softer and kinder and more forgiving emotions of things like grief and pain and self-compassion because you recognize very clearly no one's on their way to save me from my life if i want to make a change i'm going to have to be the one who makes it and it's my responsibility to turn things around for myself and what comes paired with that thinking is the idea that if i'm responsible for changing this it must be because on some level it's my fault that i got into this mess and what i don't see avoidance spectrum types doing very often because it is so deeply so deeply ingrained in their neurological makeup to think this way is recognizing that it is not their fault that they ended up where they ended up in life that they really did have difficult life conditions early on that gave them challenges to deal with later on in life that other people don't have to deal with grief work and self-compassion is very difficult for avoidance spectrum types because they survived early on by hardening themselves and believing that i am the cause of all my own problems therefore i can solve all my own problems and here is the magical part of this you can accept that you were not the cause of all of your problems that it's not your fault that you ended up where you did in life and also take responsibility for whatever happens next and all of the insecurely attached types need to find the balance and the fusion of these two philosophies not my fault yes my responsibility to change is the attitude that gets you out of the ditch of a broken insecure attachment style and to start acting on that attitude you have to be very deliberate about parsing apart fault and responsibility they're two different things and letting go of fault means grieving the childhood that you never had grieving the person that your broken attachment system did not allow you to become until this point and then responsibility means consciously and purposefully creating whoever you become next the last piece of advice that i would give when it comes to building a healthy and honest relationship with yourself is open a direct line of communication with yourself okay so imagine that you're running a company and on day one of the company you just tell everyone okay start working work hard and then you check in with them like maybe twice a year when something goes really wrong your employees are not going to understand when they're making little mistakes that are setting them off course they're not going to understand whether or not performance objectives are being met they're not going to understand what's expected of them and then when they make a mistake they're going to feel like garbage because no one carefully and lovingly checked in with them and guided them in the proper direction to build a relationship with yourself that is stable and long-lasting you have to open a direct line of communication with yourself that you regularly and systematically use to check in with yourself and i want to encourage you to keep this line of communication as neutral as humanly possible so this is where mindfulness comes in i'm not asking you to judge or evaluate your own performance all i'm asking you to do is notice every single day in some sort of formalized way what went really well for me today what didn't go so well for me today when did i feel happy and energized and full of life and when did i feel angry or frustrated or like my boundaries were being crossed you need to start noticing which sensations are regularly arising in your psyche and what those sensations are connected to in your environment or in your internal state so that you can understand what changes you need to make in your own life in order to build a better relationship with yourself so i personally use a journal called the five minute journal it's gonna sound like i'm doing an ad for them this is not sponsored in any way i just love this journal so much and every morning it asks you to list three things you're grateful for and then list three things that you could do that you give yourself the option to do to make the day really great and then at the end of the day you come back you check in with yourself and you write three things that happened that day that were great that you really enjoyed and then one thing you could have done to make the day better and i really liked the way that they were that because it's not what did you do wrong today it's what would have been better if you had done it today so let's say there's a day where i set out to do some work and then i got distracted and didn't do it and i felt this sense of that work gnawing at me all day and it annoyed me through the course of the day and i felt frustrated with myself for not doing it what i could have done better that day is finishing my work because it impacted the course of the rest of my day and i'm not beating myself up in the process of recording that i could have done better by doing my work i'm just noticing hey my internal system of thoughts emotions beliefs behaviors didn't work so well because it was disrupted by me not doing my work so food for thought in the future i might want to notice that gnawing sensation of not getting something done and sit down and do it right away because i know it's going to negatively impact the rest of my day and again that's not me telling myself you're an idiot you do everything wrong it's just me noticing here's something that would make the system that is me run more smoothly in the future and you might also be surprised by which positive things come up so i consistently found after a long period of time that the more i could respond to myself noticing now is not the time to do this piece of work that i thought i wanted to do the more time i saved so i ended up writing multiple days in a row one of the great things that happened today was i noticed that i wasn't in a good workflow and i stopped and i did something that ended up being a lot more productive and fulfilling and the important part here is to just be extremely extremely patient with yourself neutral with yourself and just get in the habit of noticing which things help or hinder your relationship with yourself learning to observe what makes you feel a bit mad at yourself versus what makes you feel really grateful towards yourself and the actions you've taken is gonna make the difference in your day-to-day life between how much you like yourself we dislike people who do things that make our days difficult and annoying and we like people who bring joy or novelty or comfort into our lives step five is just about noticing what makes you like yourself and what makes you not so much like yourself and i really encourage you to build a routine around it so sit down for five minutes every day and just ask yourself what could i have done to make this day better what did i really like about today start writing it down if it helps but keep that line of communication with yourself about yourself open and consistently engage in it you might find out a ton about yourself that you didn't know and that's the exciting part of any budding relationship is being curious and engaged with the other person and finding out more and more and more about them and as you learn to do that with and for yourself your relationship with yourself grows in incredible strides so i think that's all i'm gonna go through today there are many more things i could put on this list and many more things i encourage you to figure out and put on your own list of how to build a healthy relationship with yourself but i just wanted to talk about some of the things that have been working super super well for me in case you're at the point i was once at where you're like yeah my relationship with myself could use some work and i don't know what work to put into it this is where i recommend you start building self trust understanding your boundaries keeping an open line of communication with yourself and just staying as neutral as possible with yourself in the process we don't build a healthy relationship by hating ourselves and we also don't build a healthy relationship by over exaggerating our positive qualities just observing yourself and getting to know yourself is the basis of all of the personal development work that's going to come next so as per usual i'm very curious about your thoughts let me know in the comments where you're at with this process what you found really works for you i would absolutely love and we could just share as much as possible about what makes us feel happy and at home with ourselves because no one of us knows as much as all of us collectively do so drop your thoughts in the comments and until next time i love you guys i love myself i hope you love yourselves and i will see you soon [Music] you

#Tools #Building #Healthy #Relationship

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