8 Symptoms of Lack Of Self-Love, Self-Compassion, and Self-Acceptance. Why lacking Self-Love and Compassion for self, can cause overwhelm, stress, and self-destruction. Why lack of self-love and self-compassion can impact every area of your life is extremely disempowering and disabling is so common in trauma and empaths who struggle with healthy boundaries.
8 Symptoms Of Lack Of Self-Love
8 Symptoms and Signs of Lack Of Self-Love and Self-Compassion that you can overcome and heal.
Lack Of Enough: I believe most lack of self-love and self-compassion stems from a lack of feeling enough. Believing and feeling you are not enough, leads to all sorts of self-destructive behaviors like unhealthy addictions, lack of self-care, and the need to be busy or constantly doing all the time which leads to anxiety, stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion. Know you are enough, know you are more than enough, Understand that we don’t have to do anything to be enough.
Lack Of Assertiveness: The inability to stand up for one’s wants, needs, and opinions. Lack of boundaries is a common sign you lack Self-Love, Self-Worth, and Self-Esteem, Unhealthy boundaries, and lack of assertiveness are common in empaths. As a people-pleasing empath for many years, I know how vital it is for you to recognise and own that your needs and wants are just as important as those around you. It is important to value yourself, set healthy boundaries, and learn how to say NO.
Hypervigilance: Constant hypervigilance or anxiety, especially over observation of others that leads you to constantly alter your behaviour to please others is another symptom of lacking self-love, self-worth, and self-esteem. This type of behaviour tends to stem from very distorted and negative thought patterns where you will do anything to fit in. Become more mindful of your thoughts and actions when you are around others.
Perfectionism: Where there is a constant drive to be perfect and have perfection in your life and everything you do or have. This need to have perfection such as always needing or wanting to be the best, dressed, most beautiful, most successful… This all stems from low self-esteem, lack of self-love, and need to control. Sometimes just allowing yourself to be imperfect for the day, allowing yourself to let your hair down, and knowing it is okay to make a mistake can help perfectionists feel freer.
Feeling Stuck: Feeling stuck in a job, relationship, a situation is where you allow a lack of self-worth, esteem, and lack of self-love to disable you from making healthier proactive choices. That is why procrastination is common in those who don’t love and believe in themself. Recognise that loving yourself is also owning your unique, special, and powerful gifts. You deserve to be happy, you deserve a healthy relationship, you deserve a job you love.
Highly Self-Critical: Being highly self-critical is another symptom of chronic unworthiness, lack of self-love, and self-compassion. It demonstrates a real struggle to love, accept, and value oneself. This self-criticism can take on a lot of different forms; being highly critical of the decisions and past choices you have made, highly critical of how you look and behave.
Constantly Feel Overwhelmed: If you are constantly feeling overwhelmed there is usually a lot of fear, and inner and external conflict with yourself and the world around you. Beliefs and feelings that you cannot cope or survive with what you are facing or dealing with.
This is based not just on innate survival fears but lack of self-trust which goes hand in hand with lack of self-love. We often give our power over to so many externals, to so many things that are not that important. The more you love and trust yourself, know that inside you have all you need you will start to let go of a lot of inner and external stressors that you were previously allowing to impact your health and happiness.
Self-Harm and Self-Abuse: Self-harm and self-abuse take the lack of self-love to a whole new level. This involves a high degree of self-loathing which usually stems from all sorts of neglect and abuse. For those of you who are struggling with any form of self-harm or self-abuse, it is vital that you get the right sort of help and choose a therapist or Dr who is not just suitably qualified but compassionate.
Sadly I have met a lot of people along my journey as a therapist who had been displaying all sorts of self-harm and self-abuse for years, who felt more traumatised by the system or by practitioners. Sometimes it’s a lack of compassion or the wrong sort of support or form of therapy for that person. The positive thing today is there is so much advancement in this area, so many highly effective trauma therapy techniques from all around the world so take back your power and choose someone who you feel aligned with who is suitably qualified and experienced enough.
Overcoming Lack Of Self-Love And Self-Compassion
I believe we all suffer from some lack of Self-Love in some form or another. We have all learned unhealthy patterns which often leads us to do everything but face the issue. The problem is most of us unconsciously try and fill that void. We self-soothe with lots of unhealthy habits and addictions. Common examples are comfort eating, compulsive shopping, alcohol, overworking, overbusyness, and medication…
Every single one of us is worthy of not just love from others but more importantly worthy of love from ourselves. No matter what you believe about yourself you are more than enough. You came into the world just as precious as the friend, child, or family member next to you.
Self-love begins by letting go of those distortions, those attachments, and stories that are keeping you in a space of lack and unworthiness. Spend more time connecting with your heart than your head. Spend more time in stillness than in chaos, there is an inner beauty of being able to connect with the self. The never-changing aspects of oneself, that is why meditation is such a powerful tool that can support not just more calm and peace but more self-love and self-compassion.
4 Ways To Nurture More Self-Love And Self-Care
As someone who struggled most of my life with self-love and self-care being a highly empathic over-giver, very much the nurturer. I struggled with self-love and self-compassion from a young age. But the most simple but powerful things that I have learned that can help nurture more self-love and self-care is.
Learn To Be Still and I don’t mean being physically still, of course, that helps to but the ability to still the mind from the chaos from your inner critic, old conditioning is so powerful. When you learn to be still any lack of self-love dissolves away. That is why Meditation and Mindfulness have become so popular over the last decade.
Connect And Open Your Heart, the more you connect with your heart, the more you open your heart, and the easier it is to start nurturing more self-love, more self-compassion, and more self-acceptance. We close our hearts when we are afraid when we are wounded but a closed heart blocks us from the energetic and spiritual beauty of life.
Know You Are A Spiritual Being, having a human experience, you are so much more than you possibly could believe you are. Your spiritual being is much more powerful than you see because you are seeing yourself as only human, you are over-attached to the human form, the human life.
Connect And Nurture Your Soul, the more we can connect with our soul and build up our soul connection the more sovereign and powerful we can be.
Meditation And Mindfulness For Self-Compassion And Self-Love
Mindful Self-Compassion is widely used to help nurture more self-compassion and self-love. It helps you become more mindful of negative and highly critical thoughts, it helps you move into deeper states of compassion and kindness for yourself.
