How to Have Healthier Relationships Through Self-Love

Do you wonder why you seem to keep choosing toxic relationships? Are you stuck in unhealthy relationship patterns? Do you make promises to yourself about how you will “never” allow someone to treat you "that way" again, only to find yourself right back in the same situation again and again?

If any of the above resonates, this episode is for you. 

In this episode, we will examine how loving yourself is the key to having healthy relationships.

As you heal your relationship with yourself through self-love then four things will begin to happen:

1.Your “chooser” will begin to heal
2.Your “tolerator” will begin to heal
3.Your “attractor” will begin to heal
4.Your “needer” will begin to heal 

I hope that by the end of this episode, you will see that the greatest gift you can give yourself and others in relationships is to first love yourself. 

“I can do nothing for you but work on myself...you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!” – Ram Daas

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Healthy people do not choose unhealthy people, and unhealthy people do not choose healthy people to be in relationships with. Why? Well, a healthy person isn't going to tolerate unhealthy behavior and an unhealthy person isn't going to be comfortable being around somebody who's healthy, because it's going to expose to them where they're unhealthy. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I am your host, jerry Henderson, and I'm grateful that you're here, as always. Now, today I've got a super exciting announcement my book Returning has finally been released. It is a collection of meditations and reflections on self love and healing, and it's just come out today, so hot off the press as of today. So you can either pick up your paperback version or your ebook version by seeing the show notes in this episode, or you can simply go to wherever you get your books from and you can either download your copy or order your copy there. So, so, so excited to be able to get this book out, and I know that it will help you in your healing journey.

Speaker 1: 1:11

Today, I'm going to be talking about a very important and powerful concept in relationships, whether they're romantic relationships or relationships that we have with family, friends or other people and it's the principle that when we love ourselves first, when we value ourselves and we place ourselves first, all of those other relationships actually do better in our lives. We show up better and then the relationships themselves are more healthy and better because we're healthy. Now, a lot of us really struggle with that concept of, well, loving myself first or putting myself first just doesn't feel right or even sound right when it comes to relationships, and a lot of that's because of culture or the way that we were raised, or movies that we've seen, or just a whole host of things that programmed us and taught us to think that putting ourselves first is selfish, that loving ourselves first is something that's actually bad, that we shouldn't do, that we should put everybody else first, and that's an act of love and that's an act of service. Well, the greatest act of love that you can do for other people is to make sure that you're healthy. You see, our relationships with other people flow out of our relationship with ourselves. Now, you might feel a lot of guilt in practicing this in the beginning, and that's normal, because if you're a parent or you're in a romantic relationship or you have friends, family members that have been used to, depending on you, your ability to say no is going to be really wired to a sense of guilt, in a sense of shame, that you're being a bad friend or you're being a bad daughter or a bad spouse or a bad partner, or whatever that narrative is. That's going to be very normal to feel that in the beginning, but it doesn't mean that it's wrong. It doesn't mean that it's wrong for you to prioritize yourself. So let's talk about why it's so important for you to love yourself first when it comes to relationships, and why that's so important.

Speaker 1: 3:22

And what begins to happen. Well, the first thing that'll happen when you love yourself is your chooser will get fixed. What do I mean by that? Well, one of the quotes in my book is this you didn't choose, or you didn't just choose, toxic relationships. You chose what felt familiar to you, what felt normal to you, which was how you treated yourself. And as you begin to love yourself, your chooser will get healed as well.

Speaker 1: 3:54

You see, when we don't love ourselves, we choose what we believe that we're worthy of. We believe, even at a subconscious level, when people treat us bad, we deserve it. I mean, think about it. Why else would you stay in an unhealthy relationship? Why would you allow people to treat you in ways that are not healthy, that are not good for you? Because at some level, it's serving you, and the most common thing that people will say about how it's serving them is that they feel like they deserve it, or they feel like that's what they're worthy of, or they feel like they won't find anything else better, which all comes back to a core message that this is the best that I get and this is what I deserve. Well, as you begin to love yourself, your chooser who you choose, what you look for in relationships will begin to change. You know my story. If you've been listening to this podcast for any time at all, you will know my story of being twice divorced.

Speaker 1: 4:57

Now, I'm not saying that I chose bad people. I chose what I felt like I was worthy of. I chose toxic relationships because I was toxic. You see, that's the thing that we're not really often willing to face. The reality is that if I'm in an unhealthy relationship, it means likely that there's something unhealthy about me. You know, one of the things I like to remind myself of and others is that healthy people do not choose unhealthy people and unhealthy people do not choose healthy people to be in relationships with.

Speaker 1: 5:38

Why? Well, a healthy person isn't going to tolerate unhealthy behavior and an unhealthy person isn't going to be comfortable being around somebody who's healthy. Because it's going to expose to them where they're unhealthy and it's going to call them up to a higher level. It's going to cause them to look at their own lives and examine things. Now, if they're willing to heal, then yes, a healthy relationship can help spark that. But if they're wanting to stay unhealthy, they're not going to be able to stay in that relationship. They're going to move out of that relationship or they're going to try to turn that other person unhealthy and to turn that other person toxic, because water is always going to seek its own level and the energy that we emanate is what we're going to be comfortable with when we're around other people.

Speaker 1: 6:27

So the first thing that self-love is going to do in relationships is it's going to heal your chooser. So if you've been choosing toxic relationships, if you've got a pattern of repeating being in relationships that are unhealthy for you, you've got to look at you first, because your chooser is broken. Your chooser is continuing to choose people that are reinforcing your core belief about yourself. And when you heal your core belief by loving yourself and practicing self-love, then your chooser will become more healthy and you'll start choosing people who align with how you feel about yourself. Now the second thing that's going to begin to happen as you love yourself, the second thing that'll start happening in your relationships is your attractor will begin to heal. What do I mean by that? The people that you attract is going to begin to change. You're going to begin to attract more healthy people because, as we just talked about, the energy that you're putting out has changed and people are attracted to that energy. They want to be around a healthy person. They want to be around somebody who resonates at the same level that they are Now.

Speaker 1: 7:40

I do want to just make one note here that sometimes healthy people will attract unhealthy people because they can help them. That's very different than being in an intimate relationship with them. When I was a pastor, obviously at times I would attract unhealthy people because they wanted to heal, they wanted to change. That's very different than me attracting people who could be a potential partner or long-term relationships or friendships, etc. There's a difference between attracting our more intimate and personal relationships and them being unhealthy, versus attracting people that we know that we can help or want help, or see something healthy in us and want to be mentored, want to be coached, etc.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Now here's one more other caveat about this that I want to add in. You got to be careful with this about attracting unhealthy people and helping mentor them. If you're a person who's a rescuer, a people pleaser or codependent because you'll start making up stories in your head about how you need to rescue this person, how you need to help them, that's really about you at that point and it's not even about that other person. A good litmus test is am I doing this for me because it's giving me some kind of kick or some kind of chemical hit that I'm the rescuer, or some emotional need that I'm eating for myself, or is it really genuinely about the other person? Am I really wanting to help them? It's hard to separate sometimes, but as you begin to sit with it, as you begin to meditate on it, it'll become more and more clear. One of the signals that'll help with this is when you start to self-abandon to help somebody else, that all of a sudden you're crossing your own boundaries to help them and you're doing things that you said or promised yourself you wouldn't have done before, and you're doing all of that because you have a story in your head about how much they need you to help them. That's not healthy behavior, that's not self-love behavior, and as you begin to love yourself, you'll actually start to attract people who really are interested in change, instead of attracting people who just want to suck the energy out of you. So I want to encourage you that if you're attracting unhealthy people, either relationally or people who want your help, as you begin to love yourself, you'll be able to discern whether or not that's a relationship that you should be connected with.

Speaker 1: 10:02

Alright, so let's move on to the third thing that's going to happen in your relationships. As you begin to love yourself, your tolerator is going to get healed. What do I mean by that? Well, the things that you tolerate in relationships, the things that you put up with from yourself and from other people. You'll stop tolerating your own self-abandoning behavior. You'll stop tolerating your own people-pleasing behavior, because you'll begin to sense how that's violating yourself. You're violating your relationship with yourself and you won't tolerate that anymore. And you'll begin to reflect and look at yourself and understand that these are areas that you need to heal within you.

Speaker 1: 10:45

You'll stop blaming other people. You'll stop blaming Mary or Bob about how they always ask from you and how you have to do these things for them, because you'll realize that those are all your choices and that they're not self-loving choices if you're doing them with resentment, if you're doing them out of a self-abandoning energy. So you'll stop tolerating that behavior from yourself in relationships. But you'll also stop tolerating the way that other people treat you. When it's not healthy. You'll begin to move away from those relationships. You might find yourself irritated when you're on the phone with them, where before you weren't so irritated with it because it resonated with your own energy. But as your energy changes and you get healthy, you start to notice things about other people that you go. You know I don't want that in my life anymore. I don't want the gossip, I don't want the complaining, I don't want the negativity, I don't want the drinking. I don't want the only way to socialize and going out and going to a club or going and getting drunk or whatever that story is, because you're seeing yourself as more worthy than that, because you're learning to love yourself. So you stop tolerating all of those things in your atmosphere.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Now a couple of caveats on that. You are going to have people that will get frustrated with you. They're going to get annoyed with you. They're going to say things like, wow, you're just not the same person. Or they'll start judging you or shaming you and trying to pull you back into their orbit. And that's normal, because that's often a relational, rescuing behavior that people will begin to demonstrate in order to get you back into their life. You're going to have to love yourself enough to set some boundaries.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Now, the other thing about this is that doesn't mean that you have to be mean. Okay, you don't have to be aggressive and mean in separating people from your lives, but I do want to point out that sometimes that feels like the only way that we can go with some people right, that some people just don't listen and we feel like we have to be so firm, we have to get like rude about it. You still don't have to be rude about it. You can continue to give the message that this isn't a relationship or a behavior that you're going to tolerate in your life and then begin to move away from it if you need to, or hopefully that other person will respect your boundaries. They don't respect your boundaries. Definitely a relationship to begin to move away from.

Speaker 1: 13:13

But I want you to honor yourself in this process, because getting angry at them is normal, but then becoming rude and lashing out at them is going to violate you more than it violates them. You're not going to feel good about yourself in doing that. You're going to beat yourself up and I know I know that that may have been a survival mechanism that you developed. I know it was one for me that I felt like my voice couldn't be heard or wouldn't be heard unless I raised the dial on it or I raised the temperature or I had to just be rude to get another person to really understand what I was trying to say. And while that's understandable that that is a part of how we learn to live life and cope, it's still unhealthy and it's still not something that we want to live in moving forward. So finding healthy ways to communicate our boundaries, communicating what we tolerate and don't tolerate, and finding healthy ways to extract from a relationship is really important because, yes, it honors the other person but, most importantly, it's a self-loving act towards yourself, because you won't have those regrets, you won't beat yourself up about it and you'll be able to move forward in a way that you feel good about yourself, which is a loving behavior.

Speaker 1: 14:30

All right, the last and final point that I want to talk about, and how self-love will heal you and then heal your relationships and what you allow in your atmosphere and in your orbit, is that loving yourself will heal your neater Okay, my neater, what are you talking about? The things that you need from other people? We will often shame ourselves in this narrative that we have about. Well, why am I so needy? Why can't I just be healthy? Why am I so needy? Why am I so clingy? Why am I so desperate for the attention and the affection of these other people? Well, it's because we're not feeling our own love tank and we've become so dependent on other people to do that for us that our neediness okay, and I'm going to talk about why that's not shameful here in just a second but our neediness has gotten so high because we have this whole inside of us that we're supposed to fill. There are places within you that only you can fill.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Your love tank is your responsibility to keep full. Now, does that mean that other people can't help us with that? No, it doesn't mean that at all. Obviously, the love of my wife is extremely important, the love of my children extremely important, the love of my friends really important to me. And so you get what I'm saying in this right, that that doesn't mean that we don't need relationships and that other relationships can't give us that love and help meet our love need.

Speaker 1: 16:06

But the challenge is that we're often starting with our needle on empty, our love tank needle on empty, and we're depending on other people to really get us to that fullness, that full place, and when they withhold their love or they're disappointed in us, it takes our tank down back to zero almost immediately because we've got no reserve. They're our needle mover and we're not our needle mover, so we've given them complete control over the way that we feel, our self-esteem, our self-worth, and then we shame ourselves for that right we feel so bad about. Well, why did I always go back to that relationship? Or why'd I always let my parent or my spouse or whoever treat me that way, when I know that I deserve better? Well, because we've become conditioned to them being our needle mover and without them our needle goes to empty. Like I said before, it just tanks out.

Speaker 1: 17:07

And so we have to fill our own love tank, with our own love. We have to be able to connect with ourselves through the way that we feel about ourselves, our actions towards ourselves, what we say about ourselves and what we think about ourselves, to continue to keep our love tank high so that when somebody does withdraw or when somebody does act a certain way that hurts, it doesn't take our needle down all the way. And so, if our needle gets taken down all the way, what do we do? We begin to abandon ourselves, we begin to apologize for things that aren't our fault, we begin to try to figure out how to mend the relationship, even to our own harm, and that keeps the cycle of shame going. And we've become so needy and understandably so, because we are dependent on everybody else's love to keep us in a place of feeling good about ourselves, of feeling that we are enough.

Speaker 1: 18:02

You see, what's going to happen when you put that power in other people's hands is you're going to have the message in your head that if that person leaves, then it means that I'm unlovable. If this person does X, y or Z, then that means that there's something wrong with me. Why would they do that to me? You see, this is the reason that practicing self-love is so important in relationships because your neediness quote unquote neediness is going to begin to heal and you're going to begin to see how you can meet those needs in your life. And then you're going to show up in relationships in a way that's not always going to try to take out of the relationship, because when your love tank is empty, you really don't have anything to give, and so you're there extracting all of the time, and then the other person can begin to sense that and feel that as well, and it gives just way too much power to the other person, so healing that part of us that feels so needy, that was trained that way from childhood or in other painful relationships that taught us that we were dependent on another person's love for our value, or other people withheld their love, and it taught us that we were unworthy or unlovable. And we weren't trained or taught as a child how to give ourselves love, how to not be so dependent on other people, and so we just don't know how to do that.

Speaker 1: 19:30

Well, the practice of self-love is going to teach you how to do that. It's going to teach you how to begin to fill your love tank by treating yourself the way that you're wishing and wanting and hoping that everybody else would treat you. Listen, you are worthy of your own love. I say it at the end of every episode, and it's so important to understand that because as you begin to show yourself love, you heal your relationship with yourself. And healing your relationship with yourself is going to heal the relationships that you have in your life. It's going to heal them in one of two ways it's going to begin to transform the ones that are in your orbit and they're going to stay in your orbit, or it's going to begin to remove relationships out of your orbit, and that's okay.

Speaker 1: 20:20

A part of growth, a part of change, is letting go of that which does not serve us, and sometimes that is relationships. And you might be thinking that that sounds very cold and very mean. You couldn't possibly do that. You can do that. It's not cold, it's not harsh. Listen, it serves the other person just as much as it's serving you for you to begin to move away from a relationship that's unhealthy because they're in an unhealthy relationship with you. You're in an unhealthy relationship with them and as you begin to move away from it, you can begin to get healthy again and hopefully they'll begin to learn how to be healthy as well. Well, that's all the time that we have for today and I hope that helped you in understanding how important it is to love yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Then, in loving yourself, you're going to heal your chooser, you're going to heal your attractor, you're going to heal what you tolerate, or your tolerator, and you're going to heal your neater or that sense of feeling overly needy, which you're not. You're not overly needy. You are just trying to get needs met that have not been met in your life. And of course you have some desperation for that and of course you feel that way. It's okay, but realize that that relationship is never going to give you what you need. You need for you to love yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:46

And as we close, I just got two more quick announcements for you. Number one coaching. If you're interested in one-on-one coaching, you can see the link here in the show notes or you can simply go to my website at GerryHendersonorg forward slash coaching and you'll see the various options that I provide. I would love to work with you, love to work with you on your journey of healing your relationship with yourself. That's the area that I specialize in how you can heal your relationship with yourself by learning to love yourself and transforming all of the beliefs that you have about yourself as to why you're unlovable and why you're unworthy of your own love.

Speaker 1: 22:25

Now the second announcement is about sleep reset, a little program that I've recently partnered with, and it's an app-based slash coaching-based app that helps you get a better night's sleep. So if you struggle with sleeping and you've tried other ways to get a good night's sleep, I encourage you to check out sleep reset. It's been researched by Stanford University as an amazing methodology to help you get a better night's sleep. So if you struggle with it, as soon as your head hits the pillow, all those thoughts begin to come up, all that anxiety, all of that tossing and turning or waking up in the middle of the night. This program can really help you. So check out the show notes in this episode to find a link to learn more information about sleep reset. So thank you once again for taking your time to be a part of another episode of the Permission to Love podcast, and I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.