Unconditional Self-Love: Matching Your Love for Others

Welcome, everyone! In this week's episode, we're diving into the concept of loving yourself as unconditionally as you love others. Join us as we explore the journey of embracing every facet of who you are, including the parts you may not be proud of. We'll uncover subtle ways you might be subconsciously hindering your self-love and offer guidance to nurture it with care. Plus, we'll discuss the importance of self-forgiveness and embracing your imperfections. Stay tuned as I share my personal reflections on my recent experience with plastic surgery and the profound perspective shifts it brought. Let's dive in!


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Transcript

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You cannot love others more than you love yourself. For years, I struggled with toxic relationships and understanding my own emotions. I found myself repeating the same cycles with different people and living in victimhood. I am Maria, your host, and I specialize in self mastery coaching. I've spent the last few years working with various therapists in order to heal my own traumas and help others. This podcast is your dedicated resource for gaining emotional intelligence, nurturing self awareness, and cultivating healthy relationships. If you're prepared to master your emotions, improve your relationships, and create captivating self confidence. Then this podcast is for you. Thank you for listening and welcome to this week's episode. Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode. It is so early in the morning. I am in my closet. This is probably the last podcast. I'll be recording in this closet. I'm moving next weekend. Back to Wilmington, North Carolina. That's where my fiancee is. And also cat's out of the bag. I've engaged. I've been dying to talk about it on here, but we had not posted about it on social media. Um, we didn't post about it for like a month or so, and I am super excited and happy and elated and all of the things and happy to be able to share with everyone. And yeah, I'll be moving. So there's going to be a lot of changes there's not only changes in my personal life, but also in my business. And I cannot wait to share more of that with you guys. And if you have not yet joined my newsletter, I will be talking about how the engagement happened. Plastic surgery that I just had recently, which I'll touch briefly on, on this week's episode, because totally correlates with the self-love topic. And so much more about my past traumas, toxic relationships, divorce, depression, anxiety, all the things. That has helped me in my self discovery journey and has really helped me evolve and become my own muse and my own source of inspiration and how I dug deeper into myself. And these are all personal stories I want to share with you guys that I don't necessarily want. I put on a podcast because I love making my podcasts more specific to you guys and things that could help you. And in my newsletter, I'm just going to be sharing a lot more personal stories that will help you feel less alone and help you relate to people. Anytime that I've had a mentor that shares personal stories, I'm like, wow, they're going through it too. Or the. Been through it too. That makes sense. I feel less alone. I feel as judged by myself, I feel more free in a sentence. And so that is my goal with my newsletter. I'd probably be a weekly bi-weekly newsletter. And so if you have not yet joined, joined in the podcast notes, the link will be on there. And anyways, let's start off with this week's up. So. Like I said, I just got plastic surgery. Two weeks ago today, I got my breast redone and I got a lift and I got my implants exchanged. I got my breast surgery when I was in my twenties. I was 21. And growing up in Miami, that was normal. A lot of my girlfriends actually got them done right out of high school at 18 years old. So I was like one of the later bloomers and getting this procedure done in Miami and. Growing up in such a pretentious city that values. Physical. Exterior period appearance so much. It was really difficult for me too. Feel like I could keep up, but it also didn't feel right. Like, even though I love. Looking good and feeling good about myself. It didn't feel good to feel so superficial. And so. In my twenties. I didn't really dig too deep into it, but as I've grown and evolve, especially in my thirties, now I'm 34. I've learned that self love and self validation and self recognition, it all comes from within it's. How you feel on the inside. And also how you feel on the inside reflects on your exterior, right? Because you can wear that ISIS things you can put on a smile, you could put on makeup, you could have nice hair, you could buy a nice hair. You could put on lashes, you can. By a lash extensions. You can, I don't know. Get lip, fillers, whatever it is that makes you feel beautiful. But if you don't feel beautiful on the inside and you don't have unconditional self-love. None of that really matters. And so in the slow down here in the last two weeks with my breast implants and With my healing for my surgery. I realized that. I have to love myself in any way, shape or form that I count. And I almost started judging myself a little bit for even getting my breasts done to begin with. I did have a, a moment in time here in the last year where I thought I wanted to just take off, take out the implants and just go back to my natural breasts. And I decided against that because I don't have a lot of breast tissue of my own. And after having implants there for 10 years, I just decided that the best course of action and what felt right for me in this stage of my life was to just exchange them. And then I realized if I was already going under, I might as well get a lift and get them exactly how I want. And so. I started, I found myself judging myself the first week or so, because I was in pain because I had gone through all this emotional distress of surgery and recovery that I started judging my decision that I made. 10 plus seat or 12 years ago. And I realized that I caught myself and I stopped and I said, you know what? I can't judge something that I did so many years ago, because I felt right at the time. And this decision that I'm making now feels right now for me, anything could change. I could feel differently in 10 years. I can either love them, hate them, want them out of my body in 10 years, five years, three years, whatever it is. Right. And. That's all part of self love is like recognizing that you're not going to be perfect. You're not going to make what you think. Quote unquote, perfect decision. Are you going to make mistakes? You're not going to be happy with every choice you make, but ultimately. You have to be okay with it. You have to be. Happy and okay. With your imperfections. And so I want to go into some signs of. Ways that you're not loving yourself, then you're not giving yourself unconditional self-love because it's sneaky. Like we might not even notice you might think. Well, no, I work out like, I feel good about myself. I love myself. I've come a long way. You might be thriving compared to how you were maybe a few years ago, but unconditional self-love is another level. It's a deeper level within yourself. And sometimes we don't realize that there's certain things we do. That isn't unconditional self-love. And so let's start talking about some of them. Some of the ways that you don't, you're not giving yourself that unconditional self-love is that you don't feel free to be who you really are. So many times we put on a fake mask or a fake facade, and we think that that's what the world wants from us is how we feel accepted, but you're not allowing yourself to really be free and be who you truly are. Another way is that you're not spending enough quality time alone. I cannot tell you how important this is, even though people are just as important and cultivating healthy relationships. And having people that love you around is important spending quality time alone. It's super important. And I'm not talking about spending it on your phone on social media or no. Numbing out in front of a TV. Or drinking yourself to oblivion. That's not quality alone time. It's really enjoying yourself. Journaling taking yourself out on a walk, taking yourself out on a date. Doing things that bring joy into your life. Maybe you go buy yourself some flowers. Maybe you write yourself a beautiful journal entry or a beautiful poem. It's really romanticizing yourself and your life. Another way could be that you're not that you're looking for outside love and validation that you're not able to give to yourself if you didn't grow up with the right amount of love and validation, which most of us didn't. So there's no judgment there. It's just, it is what it is. Most of our parents couldn't give us that because they couldn't give that to themselves. So if you're constantly looking for that outside of you, you're not giving yourself this say the right amount of self love that you need and ways that you can give yourself love and validation is. Judging yourself less and appreciating and validating yourself more. We do so many things that are amazing in a day, in a week and a month. And we tend to put very little focus on those things. If you're a mother listening on here, I worked with. With a lot of mothers and there's a lot of mom guilt. And I, myself has I've I've my ex-boyfriend had a child and I was a mom figure in his life because his mom wasn't in his life. And I've talked about this on here before, and I remember feeling guilt because I. Wanted to do stuff that didn't maybe like did didn't correlate with his schedule or I felt guilt and I wasn't even his biological mother. So if you're a mom on here and you're listening, you are doing an amazing job. You have a role in this lifetime as a mother that is so precious and so amazing. And it's so hard for you probably to not judge all the things that you feel like you should be doing, that you don't have enough time to do. But what your, the love that you're giving your child is the most important thing that you can do. And. Be proud of that. Give yourself the validation that you're doing, an amazing job. You're raising a whole other human being and you're probably doing in a ways that you feel are best. Because of the lack that you had growing up, so validate that you are doing an amazing job. If you don't have kids, like I don't have my own kid. I am always constantly looking at how can I write in my journal every night? I am so proud of you, Maria. You're doing great. You're doing amazing. I have to give myself that validation and that recognition so that I can feel good about myself. And so when I get that outside validation, whether it's in business or in my romantic relationship or with friends, it feels good, but it felt so much better because I was already validating myself. Um, another way that you might not be giving yourself unconditional love is that you might be speaking to yourself negatively, negatively. You might be putting yourself down this correlates with what I was just talking about. Sometimes we're like, oh, I should have done this better. I should have done that better. Or gosh, why would I do that? Or I'm so stupid or I'm so dumb. It's like the little things. So we say to ourselves, you have to speak life into your own life. If you're constantly saying, oh, I feel crazy. Or. I'm a mess today. It's like the sneaky things that we say about ourselves. There were con were subconsciously. Just programming ourselves to think while I'm a mess. So I have you start off, let's say in the morning saying, oh my gosh, I'm a mess. I can't believe I spilled that. Now subconsciously, you're going to be thinking for ways to validate that you're a mess all day. Well, we speak out words about ourselves or even inwards. If we're not even saying a louder, we're just speaking in our mind is what becomes our story. It's where it becomes what we believe. And our brains are so powerful that it's going to look for evidence. Uh, of what we believe. So if you believe I am amazing, I'm going to kill the day. I am. Abundant and love health and wealth. I'm abundant in all great things. Your brain is going to look for ways to validate that your brain is going to be like, okay. Well, this is what's happening. This is the truth. This is reality. And the opposite is true. If you're saying all these negative things about yourself, your brain's going to look for voice to validate that, and then you're going to feel exhausted or you're going to feel drained and you're going to feel like you're not doing good enough. Another way. I'm just going, I'm giving all these examples because it's, it's so important for us to realize that. There's these ways come into our life or these things we do in our lives matter. And when we put some focus onto, okay, oh yeah, Maria said. You know, I'm giving you different examples and some of them resonate. I would just want to put a spotlight on it because if you can see where maybe you're not giving yourself unconditional love. Something shifts after you listened to this episode, things will shift. So another way is that you over apologize for everything? I about two years ago said, I am not saying, sorry anymore. As women, we say, sorry, so much you bump into somebody or somebody actually bumps into you and you'll be like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Or you share too much of your emotions and you're like, I'm so sorry. I can't believe I said all that. Whatever reason you feel like you have to apologize you over apologize. And it's, it's a trauma response to over apologize. But also we do it because we don't feel worthy of taking up space. We don't feel worthy of letting our voice be heard. We don't feel worthy of just being us and being truly who we are. And so we have to apologize. We feel sorry that we took up space. So if you find yourself. If you tend to over apologize and you find yourself constantly over apologizing. No that it's okay. Most women do it. A lot of the women that I know do it and what clients I work with, do it. And I work on that with them, because I want you to only apologize for things that you truly think hurt somebody's feelings that you acted in ways that maybe weren't your highest self. Those are reasons to apologize for, not for bumping into somebody, not for speaking your emotions. If it comes from a grounded, loving place. Not for do saying what's true to your heart or being authentically who you are. We don't apologize for that. We, we are allowed to take up space and we are worthy of it. Another example is that it's hard for you to say no to people. When we don't have radical unconditional self-love. We want to over-give we want to overextend, we want to find that in other people, we feel like if we can say yes to everyone and be everyone's hero and help everyone, and in a sense. Quote-unquote save everyone in the ways that maybe you feel like you want it to be saved. It's going to be hard. It's going to be hard for you to say no, but that is a way of self sabotaging, your happiness, your self-love. Your time, you won't have enough time. I had a mentor once say. And she made this example so beautiful and it made so much sense to me. She's like, pretend you have a personal assistant and your personal assistant is yours. She is yours. You hired her, you pay her and your personal assistant says. Oh, Maria. You know what? I, I didn't have time to do anything on your list today. All the things you needed to meet to actually do for you. I didn't have time to do because your mom needed me. And then your sister asked me to Do a favor for her and then, oh yeah, your old friend on Instagram from high school, she had a bunch of questions, so I answer all her questions. And then after that, I decided to just like take a drive because I needed some time and space. And then after that, I decided to help out your other friend. And then I. Oh, your, I called your client back for you. So I had no time to do any of the things that you needed to meet to do. What would you do to that personal assistant? If that was the constant thing that they did in her, in their role, you'd fire them. And so we, our own personal assistants, and if we are spreading ourselves thin, right, this is the whole point that my mentor was trying to make with this example is that if. We are doing everything for everyone else. We have nothing left for us. And then, so if somebody was acting in that way and you were hiring this person to help you specifically and be there for you, which is your role in this life is to be that for yourself to give yourself unconditional love. Time. Validation if you're just so busy doing it for everyone else. And it's hard for you to say, no, you have no time for yourself. You would fire that personal assistant. And this would actually, I'm going to go into the next one. And they kind of correlate is that you're in one side and toxic relationships. A lot of the times when we are over givers and overextending ourselves constantly, we tend to get into these one-sided relationships because people. The need us that want that. Our soul sucking and they're like little men pyres. Buyers and they attach to us. And there's portions of us when we're not in, when we're not healing yet, when we're, when we haven't healed yet, when we feel like we want to help others and love others and the way we want to be loved ourselves. That we will do this in order to feel fulfilled, but at the end of the day, it doesn't fulfill us. We know to our core that it is a one-sided relationship, that it doesn't feel good. And yet we stay stuck in that loop. And I'm going to just give you the last one here. And then we're going to get into some ways that we can really just give ourselves more. Self-love. But this one's a really big one. And a lot of people. Struggle with this, even if you might not know it, or maybe it's to a lower degree, or maybe it's still high degree. But using destructive. Substances to numb ourselves. And numb our feelings and. Having a dependency on things is one thing. I was really dependent on alcohol. And these are one of the things that I'm going to share on my newsletter is that I had a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol. And thankfully I stopped drinking for a year and that changed my relationship with alcohol because I was able to not need it anymore. I didn't physically need it. I didn't mentally need it. I learned ways to cope with my emotions and understand my emotions. But I had to give myself that separation from alcohol in order to be able to do that. And we do this, not only with alcohol, we do this with food. We do this with social media. We do this with TV. We do this with sex. We do this with attention. There's things that we use that are destructive to our wellbeing. And we tend to go to it because we want to feel numb. We don't want to feel things. It could be drugs too. It could be anything. And so I want you to ask yourself. Where am I. Using things to numb ourselves because that's not giving yourself unconditional self love. And there's absolutely no judgment on it, but just bring some awareness to it where you can see the patterns you can see where maybe you've fallen off, or maybe you're not giving. Where. See the patterns of where maybe you have what you go to when you're feeling uncomfortable, when you're feeling stressed out, when you're feeling anxious or you're feeling depressed, what is your go-to? Most of us, don't go out for a walk. Most of us don't go and journal. Most of us don't go to, you know, tap our emotions. Um, or UC of T or, or talk to the therapist. That's usually not our go-to our go tos are things that just help us numb. And so those are some ways that you are not practicing unconditional self-love and they're sneaky and they start to compound. And. Give yourself as you're listening to this and maybe you're thinking, my gosh, I have one of those things or two of those things, or three of those things are actually all of them kind of resonate. It is. Okay. And I'm here to validate that that is okay because. That list that I gave you. Not only have I gone through all of those and sometimes still struggle with some of these. But I see clients go through them as well. And this is just human parts of us, especially as women. This is our, our normal DNA we're givers. We're nurturers. We're lovers. And so it's easy for us to give that to other people and not give it to ourselves. But when we do that, we become tired. We become angry, we become perfectionist. We feel shame. We feel guilt. We feel anxiety. And so with that being said, One of the most important things you can do and knowing your shortcomings, knowing that you're not perfect, knowing that there's things you want to still work on is forgiving yourself and forgiving yourself quickly and moving on. We tend to. See what we're not doing, feel so much shame, so much guilt that it keeps us stuck. And then we don't move that energy. We don't transition. We don't Uplevel. We don't. Transfer regress into the higher version of ourselves because we get stuck in the shame and the guilt. But when we learn to forgive ourselves, because we are worthy of forgiveness. If you can forgive other people. How can you not forgive the most important person in your life, which is yourself? You are not perfect and it's okay. You have to learn to start accepting all your imperfections because that is the beautiful part of you. All your imperfections and the things that you wish you could do better are your lessons that you're needing to learn in this lifetime. And it's a lifetime. It's not, these are the lessons I need to learn by 30, because if I'm not doing this right by 30, then I won't find somebody to marry me. And then I won't have kids. And then. Or maybe even worse, maybe I do have kids and then I haven't fixed all these things about me. And then I'm going to give them all to my kids. And then my kids are going to be messed up like I am and, you know, blah, blah, blah, all these rabbit hole thoughts. So we go down and. Ideas of doomsday and things that we think that we need to fix and do by a certain age and by a certain lifetime and by a certain limit and social media makes it seem like everyone's healed. Everyone's amazing everyone. Oh my gosh, that person started going to therapy or they changed their life within a year or two. And people don't realize that all the work, a lot of these people that have made it or have changed or started healing all the work that they've done in the background and how they're constantly, always judging themselves still. And. There's parts of them that still have to heal in this still have to transition and they still have to grow. And so accepting yourself and accepting yourself. And accepting yourself and being able to forgive yourself quickly is where things start to shift. And these are things that I still struggle with guys. To a certain degree. I still struggle with. Validating myself to a certain degree. I still struggle with accepting myself fully and giving myself unconditional self-love there's times. And there's days that I'm so exhausted. That I'm like, it's hard for me to find. What's really positive that I did that day. And it's a practice it's every day that I'm practicing it. And I write it in my journal. I find more and more things. It's easier for me to. Notice and put value into what I did right. Versus what I did wrong. And then forgiving myself for me. Like I just didn't know any better. Let me learn better. Let me do better. And that's okay because there's a future version of myself. That's going to be so proud of the evolution that I've had so far. And then also having self compassion for yourself. It goes into the same topic and category of forgiving yourself quickly. You have to have compassion for yourself and everything you've been through. And understand that your shortcomings are a beautiful. And so some ways that you can start practicing self-love. It really is like dating yourself, like everything. What I tell my clients is as women, we romanticized life. We've been listening and watching Disney movies for me, novella. Growing up being a Latin girl. Andy. Or whatever, you know, any melodrama, love, drama, whatever we watch on TV. It's always this idea that there's this love story. That's hard, that's tragic, but then there's this amazing love at the end. And so we're conditioned to think that love has to be hard. And then somebody has to come and save us. And so what I tell my clients is. Give yourself the same self-love that you wish a man would give you? And whatever that looks like, and you'll start noticing, because when I started doing this, I was like, man, there's a lot of like, Saving aspects that I would want a man to do for me. And so I started to, actually, this is part of the shadow work we do as humans is that we started noticing like, wow, this is this isn't. On my highest self. Why would I want a man to do this for me, without me being able to do it for myself first. And so you start putting light into these parts of yourself that you're like, wow, I didn't realize I needed or wanted a man to do these things for me. But now that I'm doing them for myself, this feels a lot better. I'm not waiting or sitting around for somebody to come and do it for me. And for me, I'll, I'll give you some examples for myself was I wanted somebody to come validate my emotions, my feelings, and to tell me. That I was so amazing for so many years. I was mothered my own mother. I did so much for other people, for my friends. I was always a go-to for everyone. And I never got the validation and the recognition I want to, no one ever said to me, Marie, I guess what your. Amazing. I cannot believe that you're in my life and you're the most incredible person in the world. Whole white world. I wanted somebody to say that to me so badly. And I realized that I had to say it to myself. I had to truly believe that. And once I did now, my husband to be has. In so many words said so many beautiful things to me and I can actually accept it now and I feel worthy of it, but because I've given it to myself, I also wanted for whatever reason. And I noticed this after my last breakup was, I always wanted a man to get me flowers and be consistent with it. Right. Not just giving me flowers every once in a while. So I started giving, buy myself flowers on a weekly basis. I haven't been so good about it lately. But even in this relationship, I've still continued to do it. Because I want to give that to myself because if I don't. I'm going to, I'm going to rely on TJ to just buy me flowers. And why would I just rely on somebody else to do something for me that makes me feel so special. So yes, he buys me flowers as well, and it feels so good when he does. They're beautiful. And I'm so amazed by them and makes me feel so good. But I still give them to myself as well. And it's little things, but those little things compound magic within us. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like, wow, I am so worthy of being loved properly. I'm giving myself all the self-love. That I need. And again, if you're a mother and you're listening to this. You love your child unconditionally. Even if your child slaps you in the face, toddlers are crazy. I've seen the craziest stuff happened. Slaps you in the phase bites, you steps on you. I don't know, ruins your outfit for the day with some. Milk or something you don't care. Like you might be upset for a second, but you don't care. You love them unconditionally. You're like, oh my gosh, I can not even imagine my life without you. Imagine you felt that way about yourself. Imagine how your life could start to change, how magical things can start to feel. If you can give yourself that same amount of unconditional love. And I'll leave you guys with that. And I hope that. I gave you a lot of insight to where maybe you're not giving yourself unconditional self-love. And where you can start practicing some of it. I want you guys to know that I appreciate every single one of you. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with somebody and rate the episode rated on apple podcasts. A lot of changes are coming, especially with the podcast. I'll talk about it in the next episode. And I will, in-depth talk about it in the newsletter. It's my inner circle. You're going to know so much about me than not many people know only my really close, inner circle. That's why I named it inner circle because only the people. In my inner circle, which is literally like a handful of people know. These parts of me, and I want to share them with you because in stories we find pieces of ourselves. We can relate with others. You'll be able to relate to parts of me. And you'll feel less judged. You'll feel less guilty. You'll feel less shame. And that is my goal with anyone. And everyone listening to this podcast is to help you. Uh, evolve and within my own growth and my own journey and my own healing. Give you guys, examples and ways that could help you become the best version of yourself. So I hope you guys have a wonderful day and I will talk to you guys next week.