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Self Love and Accountability
The path to happiness and self love sometimes begins with a period of isolation. This happens because you realize that you have been abandoning yourself. You find yourself alone for a while in order to start nurturing a relationship with yourself.
After a while, you might start to wonder if your self love is becoming selfish. This thought will come up for many reasons, but also because some of the more toxic friends in your life will point out that your self love is you being selfish.
So, as with anything, there is a balance. Moving into a phase of cultivating a love for yourself, can cause some selfishness at first, but not for the reason that others point out. You will have to focus on things like what you want, and what you think, or how you feel etc. for a while.
But as you move through different phases of self love, you will find that your self love actually begins to increase your accountability. Here are a few reasons why:
Your Friends Will Change and So Will Your Impact
To start, your self love journey will lead you away from people who might be crossing your lines, or doing you harm. You do not need to declare some type of relationship battle, but you will start to see those who are not aligned with your highest self, act out or take space from you.
Given that you are building internal resources to support yourself, you will be able to cope with this shift.
Furthermore, you will start to have a different expectation of how you are treated, but also how you treat and impact others. Your current friendships that are already solid, will start to change and have more depth because there will be a high level of expectations and accountability for all of you.
Also, you will start to attract people who are also more confident in their self love. New people entering your life will be on a different level and will begin to feel they can have psychological trust with you.
Your Boundaries Will Reflect Your Care
While the authentic people who were already around you, and the new friends who vibe on your level support these positive changes in you, you will also develop very loving boundaries.
Boundaries develop in a few stages, but in the end they are not only a communication of what you will and will not tolerate for yourself, they also communicate something profound for those around you. What your boundaries tell others is that you trust them to run their lives. This is an advanced way of loving yourself AND others.
Your loving boundaries become not just a wall between you and others, they communicate how much faith you have in others to be kind, respectful, understanding, and flexible. Boundaries can shift based on this trust. They hold you and others accountable to each other.
Your Emotional Reactions will be Under Control
Part of self love is learning to manage emotions and cope with difficulty. Self love moves from, “I want to learn to love myself more” to, “I want to become and love the best version of myself.”
This happens because you begin to love yourself, but also start to see that there are layers of yourself from the past that need this love. You do inner child work as see how your negative emotions impact your current self love and happiness. This means that you need to start to cope with negative emotions and thoughts.
If you take on this challenge with a mindset of self love, you will learn how to label your emotions, meditate to understand your own mind, set affirmations, stay present during difficult times, etc.
All of this work leads to you holding yourself accountable for your own emotions. As this happens, you start to connect with your emotions and learn to manage your reactions.
It All Adds Up to a Profound Life Change
The beginning of your self love journey will be completely imperfect and beautiful at the same time. There will be struggles that you will look back on and shake your head.
Yet, you will start to develop an expectation of yourself and others. This type of accountability will lead to profound change in your life. Your relationship with yourself will be deep and rich because you will be accountable to a vision of the best version of yourself. Through this, you will see a vision for those around you. People will notice that you hold them to this and it will make them feel capable and loved.
Consequently, your connections with others will move to a phase of appreciation that will hold all of you accountable to love, forgiveness, communication, and repair.
Dr. Autumn Thomas
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