The Pillars of a Positive Relationship with Self
In today's episode, I'm sharing four pillars of a healthy relationship with self, that go beyond "self-love". These are more concrete, actionable focus areas that you can explore as you build a stronger and more resilient sense of self, and in so doing, reap the rewards in your relationship with others.
We'll cover:
Self-compassion
Self-care
Self-respect
Self-trust
The Four Pillars of a Healthy Relationship with Yourself
If someone asked you to define self-love, what would your answer be? For many, it's an elusive concept often associated with unattainable standards and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. However, it doesn't have to be this way. In the latest episode of On Attachment, the focus was on the pillars of a healthy relationship with oneself. Let's break down the four pillars that serve as the foundation for a healthy, thriving relationship with self.
1. Self-Compassion: A Road to Understanding
Unpacking the first pillar, self-compassion, reveals a shift in perspective from self-blame to self-understanding. It's about embracing self-compassion, not as an excuse for irresponsible behaviour, but as a step towards acknowledging, accepting, and holding space for oneself. This practice of turning towards oneself with curiosity effectively replaces the futile cycle of self-criticism with a compassionate and questioning mindset. Self-compassion is the antidote to the toxicity of expecting immediate fixes for our emotional struggles. It's the first step in the journey towards self-awareness, and, consequently, the gateway to more nurturing, grounded relationships with both self and others.
2. Self-Care: Attuning to Your Needs
The label "self-care" has been over-embellished, often associated with superficial acts of relaxation. However, it's imperative to dive deeper into its true meaning – the practice of listening to the needs and rhythms of our bodies, minds, and souls. This goes beyond the stereotypical image of pampering oneself with luxurious treats, extending to genuine attunement to our internal landscapes. It involves a conscious effort to pause, question, and respond to the signals and feedback emanating from within us. By effectively addressing our needs and capacity, we give ourselves the crucial gift of increased self-awareness and, in turn, self-trust.
3. Self-Respect: Cultivating a Foundation of Values
Self-respect is often overshadowed by the quest for self-love, yet it stands as a fundamental building block for a healthy relationship with ourselves. Deficient self-respect often manifests as an uncertainty about personal values, leading to a reliance on external validation. Cultivating self-respect entails understanding individual values, identifying discrepancies between actions and values, and making conscious efforts to realign them. Embracing self-discipline is integral in this process, and it further strengthens self-respect. The imposition of self-discipline is not a means of punishment, but rather a means of personal growth and resonance with one's core values.
4. Self-Trust: Navigating Life's Uncertainties with Conviction
Finally, self-trust is the cornerstone of the internal environment that fosters resilience and courage. It's about trusting in our ability to navigate through life's uncertainties, regardless of their outcomes. This is not about guaranteeing the success of every endeavour, but rather about acknowledging the strength and resources within ourselves to handle whatever life throws at us. By confidently embracing the unknown, self-trust enables us to commit to our values and aspirations, instilling a deep sense of peace and freedom from fear and anxiety.
In the grand scheme of things, building a solid relationship with oneself is a work in progress and is achieved through small, conscious steps towards nurturing self-awareness, compassion, respect, and trust. These pillars intertwine and amplify each other, leading to a profound internal transformation. As old patterns dissolve and new, healthier habits emerge, the journey towards a more substantial, enriching relationship with oneself manifests as a tangible reality. The beauty of this journey lies in the promise of resilience, courage, and an unwavering sense of peace, ultimately paving the way for more meaningful and fulfilling relationships with others.
In conclusion, these pillars serve not only as a formidable guide to building a stronger relationship with oneself, but also as a stepping stone to fostering balanced and fulfilling connections with others. It’s a journey that transcends the notion of self-love as an unattainable destination, and, instead, encapsulates a holistic and nuanced approach to self-care and personal development. As we navigate the complexities of our internal landscapes with compassion, care, respect, and trust, we pave the way towards a life enriched with contentment, resilience, and enduring connections.
Questions for Discussion & Reflection
What patterns of seeking external validation have you noticed in your life? How has this impacted your relationship with yourself and others?
How do you approach self-compassion in times of struggle? Are there specific ways you can cultivate more self-compassion in your daily life?
In what ways do you currently practice self-care, and how do you feel about the term "self-care"? Do you think the concept has become overly commercialized, or do you find value in it?
Reflect on a recent decision you made based on your values. How did this decision impact your sense of self-respect and self-trust?
Think about a specific challenge or discomfort you've faced recently. How did you respond to it, and how do you think this reflects on your self-trust and resilience?
Have you ever felt pressure to conform to certain expectations to gain approval or validation from others? How has this impacted your self-respect and integrity?
What changes can you make in your daily life to tune into your body's needs and rhythms? How do you think this would influence your relationship with yourself and your overall well-being?
Consider a situation in your life where you've struggled with self-discipline. What might be the underlying reasons for this struggle, and how does it relate to your self-respect and self-trust?
Reflect on a time when you felt a deep sense of self-trust. What were the circumstances, and how did this impact your decision-making and overall well-being?
Think about a recent experience where you felt a strong sense of resilience. How did this experience influence your self-trust and your perception of your ability to navigate life's uncertainties?
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Check out my couples course, Secure Together (& save $200 with the code SECURE)
Save $150 on my Higher Love break-up course with the code PHOENIX
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:25]:
In today's episode, we're talking all about building a healthy relationship with yourself and more specifically, what some of the pillars of a healthy relationship to self are. Now, I've spoken many times on the podcast and elsewhere. If you've been following my work for a while about this idea of self love that is touted in a lot of personal development, content and circles, and how for me, at least personally, that kind of content has never really resonated. I think at various times in my life I've tried to pretend that it resonates and I've gotten kind of anthemic about self love and those nice little quotes and snippets that we might see, but it's never really resonated with me on a deep level because, let's face it, self love, particularly if you treat that as a destination that you're meant to reach a feeling that you're just meant to have. For a lot of us who've struggled with various forms and expressions of insecurity or low self esteem, just a wobbly kind of relationship with yourself and with others, feeling like self love is the destination that we're all meant to be striving towards and ultimately reaching, that can feel like a really big mountain to climb.
[00:01:58]:
And especially so if you've been told the story that self love is a prerequisite to you having a healthy relationship or being happy, living a life that you can be proud of and enjoy. I think if you're waiting for all of that to happen until you reach this nirvana place of self love, then that can feel pretty ironically, it can feel quite defeating and demoralising because that can feel really far away for a lot of people. And certainly for me, even now, I think I have a pretty healthy relationship with myself. I don't know that self love as some sort of destination. It doesn't really feel like a label that fits or that really means much to me. And so all of that being said, and you may have heard me say this before, my personal preference is to focus on some other pillars of self, things that are a bit more tangible and a little bit more specific, a little less abstract, and that are more readily translated into actions and practises that we can weave into our everyday in a way that we, bit by bit, we lay down the bricks and we build this foundation of a really solid relationship with ourselves that doesn't have to be self love as this big, all consuming feeling, but rather is based on just kind of a healthy, integrated, realistic relationship with ourself, that then, I think, allows us to approach relationships with others, whether romantic or otherwise, from a place of integrity and self confidence and self esteem and resilience, which I think should really be the goal for most of us. So in today's episode, I'm going to share four of those pillars of self. And this is inspired by or borrowed from the secure self challenge that I'm running, which starts in less than a week.
[00:04:03]:
So if you're listening to this around the time that it's released, there's still time to join us. It's a 28 day challenge and the four pillars that I'm going to talk about today line up with the four weekly themes that we're going to be diving deep into throughout the challenge. So if you're interested in exploring what I'm talking about today in the format of a challenge, which will have a weekly lesson and then a weekly practise or homework challenge, along with an online community, accountability, a couple of live calls with me, one of which is next week, and having that group experience, I would really love to see you inside the secure self, all of which is linked in the show notes or you can find it on my website. And this will be the last opportunity to join because as I said, we kick off next Monday, I believe. Okay, so let's talk about what it takes to build a healthy relationship with yourself. I want to start by giving you a permission slip, which kind of runs counter to everything that I'm going to say subsequent to this in the episode. And that is that if you are in this place of feeling really rubbish about yourself, feeling like your self esteem is in tatters, and maybe you've been trying therapy and podcasts and courses and books and everything, desperately searching for answers and solutions and fixes for why you feel the way you feel. Sometimes the answer isn't more searching.
[00:05:35]:
Sometimes the answer isn't continuing to seek the one thing that's going to provide you with the explanation that makes it all make sense, that then provides you with the roadmaps that will give you the solution or the remedy that liberates you from feeling the way that you've been feeling. Sometimes the solution is actually in just taking a break from all of that seeking and searching, because. And we'll come to this in a moment when we talk about self compassion. I think that depending on the mindset that you're in, when you come to any kind of self help, personal development, growth, work, it can either be really, really fruitful and a beautiful gift that you give to yourself, or it can reinforce all of the feelings of defectiveness and shame and brokenness and wrongness that you've been lugging around and that have led you to feel the way that you're feeling. So I think it's important to practise discernment and to get really honest around. Is consuming all of this stuff feeling supportive for me at the moment, or am I kind of frantically clutching at straws from this place of urgency and panic and needing to fix myself? And is that actually helping? Or is that making me feel even more defeated and hopeless and convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with me? So sometimes when we recognise that it's actually not helping, and sometimes we need to not take it all so seriously and maybe just step away from it and maybe do something different. Give ourselves the time and the space to just be and to accept the process that we're in and the season that we're in, without scrambling desperately to get away from it all. Sometimes there's real peace in that, letting go and realising that we don't need to treat ourselves as a problem to be solved.
[00:07:40]:
And actually that doing so can make things worse rather than better. So that feeds nicely into the first pillar of self that I want to talk about, which is self compassion. Again, this is something that I've spoken at great length about, not only on the podcast, but in pretty much all of my programmes, because it's completely essential in my mind, to the effectiveness of any of this work, that we are turning towards ourselves with self compassion and curiosity, rather than blaming ourselves, shaming ourselves, having a rigid mindset that tells us that we need to urgently fix and change something. So self compassion is not about coddling ourselves. And I think that's a really important distinction, because some people might have an aversion to the idea of self compassion on the basis of it seeming like we're just removing any accountability or self responsibility. We're giving ourselves a bit of a free pass to behave however we want to, because we're in pain or we're hurt. And I think particularly people can struggle with this in the context of giving compassion to others, of approaching others with compassion and curiosity. When you've been hurt by them.
[00:08:56]:
But it's so important to understand that the compassion is not mutually exclusive with responsibility, and certainly not in the way that I'm talking about it or the way that I teach it. I think that balancing self compassion with self responsibility is paramount and a really important part of actually making change. But I think as a first step, we need to, rather than spinning around in the stories of why am I like this? What's wrong with me? Why is it so easy for everyone else and so hard for me actually going, okay, what's this really about for me? Why does this thing feel scary? Where does that come from? And approaching ourselves with the starting assumption that our experience makes sense, because all of our experiences, all of our patterns, all of our fears, they don't just spontaneously arise in a vacuum. They are the sum of our experiences. And I think when we really realise that and appreciate that, we can see that it's really a matter of cause and effect, rather than something very opaque and mysterious and dumbfounding that doesn't make any sense and that we need to just try and eradicate. And the more that we can have this mindset and perspective of seeking to understand ourselves from a place of curiosity and from this starting assumption that everything we're struggling with probably makes sense on one level or another, then we can start to actually befriend those parts of ourselves that are afraid or that have these patterns or that drive us to behaviours that we maybe don't like. And we can go, okay, what purpose is this serving? How is it trying to keep me safe? And what do I need? What else could I do? Maybe to offer myself a sense of safety or a sense of security or a sense of whatever else I'm needing, such that this extreme behaviour or this extreme emotional response doesn't feel so needed anymore. So when we start to kind of zoom out and look at those things in a more spacious way, rather than with this clinging, gripping, rigid, fear based mentality of needing to solve our uncomfortable experiences and emotions, then all of a sudden a lot of space is freed up for us to actually start shifting things, but on a foundation of kind of a collaborative, internal relationship between us and all of those different parts and pieces that we are comprised of.
[00:11:31]:
So self compassion is absolutely essential to any of this work. And the more that you try and solve your anxiety or solve your fear, in the sense of making it go away and making yourself wrong for feeling it, I promise you that it won't work and that it will actually make things worse. And as a side note, the more we do that to ourselves, the more we can offer that to ourselves, the less likely we are to project those same harsh, rigid standards onto other people of perfectionism, of, well, you should just be better or do better or try harder and not having a lot of time or patience for the things that people are struggling with. So I think there's a really positive ripple effect there. Okay, the next pillar of a healthy relationship with self, which is the second week of the secure self challenge that I'm going to be running, is around self care. Now, I know that when a lot of you hear self care, you might have a bit of an eye roll around. I think that self care has been so commoditized in the past decade, probably, and it feels like the domain of glossy magazines and highly produced Instagram content, of having a towel wrapped around your head and like a lovely face mask and a bubble bath and all of the things. But while I'm all for a lovely bubble bath, it's not really what I'm talking about here.
[00:13:10]:
What I'm really talking about is how attuned and responsive are you to the rhythms and the needs and the capacity of your body and your being? That sounds a little bit esoteric. Let me expand. I think that once upon a time, when I was living a very different life to how I live now, I pretty much just pushed through all the time. So if I was tired, I would have more coffee. If I had a headache, I would take painkillers and keep pushing. If I had a cold, I would again just take something to dull the symptoms so that I could plough on with whatever I was doing. Because all of those things in my body were inconvenient and were getting in the way of my agenda, which was just to do what I had to do. When I look back on that now, I can see how disconnected I was from my body and the needs of my body and the rhythms of my body, and how detrimental that was ultimately, because it also meant that I was disconnected from the emotions of my body and to what I was just talking about around self compassion.
[00:14:31]:
When we treat all of those signals and feedback that we're getting from our body as kind of inconvenient and getting in the way of what we would prefer or desire or what we want to do, and we just try and make it all go away, stuff it down, that tends not to work, and it tends to really come back to bite us with a vengeance. So when I'm talking about self care here, it's really, can I become more attuned to myself. I think even the fact that this might sound kind of woo woo and esoteric to many of you speaks to how deeply disconnected we are collectively from our bodies, that we all kind of walk around on autopilot in this mode of busyness and to do lists and hustle, and how that really reliably leads us to feel burnt out and not only disconnected from ourselves, but disconnected from other people, chronically tired, chronically sick. And I think that it's really hard to have a positive relationship with yourself when you are living like that. So I think that the more that we can consciously train ourselves to cheque in on what do I need? How am I feeling? What is my capacity? How can I resource myself today to feel more grounded, more present, more energised? Do I need to take things slower or do I have more energy? Do I need to move my body? All of these things that when we, as I said, train ourselves to attune to that and turn towards that and cheque in with ourselves regularly, then that really feeds into this broader relationship of self awareness. And we then kind of indirectly build more self trust because we know that we're a really good caretaker of ourselves. Whereas when we ignore all of that and we just plough through and we bulldoze and we push on and we hustle, then we don't have much of a relationship of self trust because we know that we're not very responsible carers. Right? In the same way as if you were responsible for caring for someone else and you consistently ignored the signals and needs that they had, and it was making them chronically sick, tired and burnt out, then they probably wouldn't rely on you as someone who was going to be responsive and attuned to them in a way that cultivated trust and safety.
[00:17:13]:
So recognising that you have that same responsibility to yourself to build up that relationship and that it reaps so many rewards beyond just feeling better. It's not just about having a picture perfect kind of self care routine. That's again, not what I'm talking about. It's just this moment to moment practise of pausing and tuning in and going, how am I feeling? What do I need? So, self care as a practise of turning towards ourselves and becoming more present to what is here today and how we can bring more nourishment and groundedness to that is a really, really valuable practise in nurturing your overall relationship with yourself. Okay, so the third pillar of self that I want to speak about is self respect. And I am really bullish on self respect as a fundamental building block of an overall healthy relationship with self. So this is particularly one that I think, if the self love stuff doesn't land for you, focus on self respect. If you want to build self worth, focus on self respect.
[00:18:19]:
I say this as someone who, for many, many years, and I only realised this in hindsight, I had a pretty shocking relationship of self respect. And what this looked like for me was I didn't really know what my values were. I didn't really like myself very much. I relied a lot on external validation and wanting to be liked, wanting people to see me in a certain way. And so I just acted in ways and did things that, for whatever reason, gave me some hit of feeling temporarily good about myself, but very often left me with this residue of anxiety or discomfort, or just not feeling good about how I was acting, who I was being. And I think there was no internal foundation of knowing who I was or knowing what my values were. And that really easily and reliably led me off track and led me astray. And I really suffered as a result of that because I really didn't like myself.
[00:19:24]:
And I can see now, in hindsight, how clearly that came from a lack of self respect. So I believe deeply that building your self respect is one of the best things that you can do. And arguably, if you take nothing else away from this episode, think about self respect. Think about, do I have self respect? Or if I don't, why not? What leads me to feel a lack of self respect? Because I think that that's really deeply important. And it's something that, while we may not think about it very much, I think a lot of people, if they were to reflect and introspect on it, they'd probably find that, yeah, that is a missing piece in my relationship with myself, as I don't have a lot of self respect. So how do we go about building that? I've spoken about this as well before, I think getting really clear on your values and then doing a bit of an audit, going, okay, where am I not stacking up? Where am I out of alignment and trying to close the gap? There is a really useful and kind of practical first step. I also think that challenging yourself, so self discipline, I think, is closely related to self respect. It's almost like a sub bullet underneath self respect.
[00:20:43]:
Following through on the things that you say you're going to do and actually challenging yourself, doing hard things, rather than staying in a very small comfort zone and listening to those stories that tell you that you can't do certain things or that that's too hard, or I'm not that kind of person, really push those stories and go, if that's the kind of person I want to be, then what's stopping me? And if it's just a matter of you showing up and doing something hard and continuing to show up and maybe being bad at something to begin with, but then getting better, I don't think there's many more powerful ways to build self respect than through self discipline. And again, that's something that has been relatively new to my life. I don't think I've always been self disciplined, but certainly in the last five years or so, that's something that I've really embraced and that I now see as such a gift to myself rather than some punishment that I'm imposing upon myself. So learn to embrace hard things. Learn to embrace challenge and growth through challenge and discomfort, and self respect will flow as a natural consequence from that. And I think you'll really notice a shift in your overall relationship with yourself. Okay, last but not least is self trust. So again, I could easily talk for a very long time about self trust or any of these other pillars, but just to give you a bit of a feel, why is self trust so important to our relationship with ourself? I think in the absence of self trust, it's very, very hard to not only trust in others, but I would argue, more importantly, it's very hard to trust in our own resilience.
[00:22:27]:
And for me, this is really the kernel of self trust that is the most rewarding is. And again, I'll speak from personal experience. I think in cultivating a relationship of self trust within myself, I feel a level of peace around whatever might happen in my life. That's a big statement, but it's one that I do attribute to having a pretty solid foundation of self trust. It's this sense of, I know that a lot of things aren't within my control, but I trust in my ability to navigate what life throws at me. And so I can be decisive and I can back myself and I can take steps in the direction of what I value, what I hope for, what is important to me, while also surrendering to the unknown and the uncertainty and knowing that a lot of stuff is not guaranteed. I can't guarantee that my relationship is going to work out. I can't guarantee that anything in my work or my business is going to go the way that I would hope or plan.
[00:23:34]:
But all of that being said, and being true. I also trust that if and when something unexpected or something disappointing or something challenging arises, that I will have the tools and the resources and the support to deal with it. And so I think that having that kind of internal environment makes you not only more courageous, but far more resilient and much more at peace. Because you're not living in constant fear or anticipation of everything bad that could happen, and trying desperately and wasting so much energy trying to prevent something bad from happening. Because I think a lot of us, particularly those who struggle with anxiety, do just end up spinning your wheels and expending so much energy on playing out every possible worst case scenario and then reverse engineering to try and prevent that from ever happening, to this point where your whole life becomes about the thing that you don't want, rather than pursuing the things that you do want with presence and optimism. And I think, again, all of these pillars of self that I've spoken about in today's episode, I think they feed off each other and they reinforce each other. So the more self respect you build, the more self trust you'll have, the more you have a really caring and attuned relationship with yourself, the more self trust you'll have. And the more self trust you have, the more you're going to do those other things as well, because they all fit together really neatly, like puzzle pieces.
[00:25:09]:
And as you start to change the internal environment in one way, some of those older patterns around hustle and burnout, and ignoring boundaries and approval seeking, and people pleasing and doing things that aren't comfortable for you just to make everyone else happy, those behaviours stop feeling compatible with the new internal environment that you're building. And so you get this sort of full system upgrade as you start sowing the seeds of a healthier relationship with self, some of those old behaviours that have felt like a fit in your current inner world may naturally just fall away as they stop being a match for where you're at and the kind of relationship that you're really cultivating with yourself. So I hope that this has been helpful in, I suppose, broadening out the lens if you've ever felt a little discouraged by self love advice, or even you've heard about the importance of building self worth, but you haven't really known where to start or what that means or what that looks like. Hopefully breaking it down a level further into these subcategories or these pillars starts to crystallise what you can do. And as I said, I like these pillars because I think they do translate more tangibly into day to day practises and things that we can be consciously choosing. Kind of putting runs on the board every day. And it doesn't have to be big, dramatic things. It's just one step at a time, one day at a time.
[00:26:47]:
But with the passage of time, you can look back and realise that you've made really profound changes in the direction of who you want to be and how you want to live your life. And that is very rewarding work. So I hope that this has been helpful. As I said, if you've enjoyed today's episode and you want to join us in the secure self challenge where we dive into each of these themes over four weeks, I would love to see you in there. You've got about five days left to join before we kick off next week with our opening call. I'd love to see you there, but otherwise, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys.
[00:27:28]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of on attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com and if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
attachment, relationships, self love, insecurity, self esteem, self compassion, self care, self responsibility, self discipline, self trust, resilience, personal development, growth, self awareness, self worth, values, internal environment, boundaries, approval seeking, people pleasing, authenticity, community, guidance, knowledge, practical tools, healthy relationship, thriving relationships, secure self challenge, online community, live calls