I know we've probably all heard the saying, "Nobody will love you if you don't love yourself." It's been around for longer than I've been alive, I'm sure, and at this point, it's viewed as good advice to people who are having trouble finding love and/or maintaining healthy relationships. I've heard it in movies. I've seen it in books. I see it online a lot.
Those of us that live with mental illness, trauma, and who have survived abuse or bullying know how impossible it can feel for us to love ourselves. All of these kinds of things that we live through can make us hate ourselves because we feel that we're "broken" or we're "damaged" or we're "worthless." Mental illness can literally tell us we're so terrible that we SHOULD hate ourselves.
As someone who has lived with a mental illness for my entire adult life, and as someone who has only recently gotten to a place where I can say that I LIKE myself and truly mean it, the above-mentioned statement has always felt more like a judgement than an actual useful piece of advice. It almost feels like the statement is telling me that because I'm unable to love myself, then that means that I don't deserve to be loved by anyone else either. When the reason someone is unable to love themselves is something outside of our control like a mental illness, trauma, or some kind of abuse, the idea that nobody will love us if we don't love ourselves can be particularly damaging. It can support the faulty belief that we're inherently unlovable and that, even if someone tries to love us, we don't deserve it.
It took me so many years to get to a place in my healing journey to be able to see that the above-mentioned statement isn't the useful piece of truthful advice that people think it is. What it actually is, is a myth that needs to be debunked.
Family, friends, and romantic partners can and do love their loved ones that don't love themselves. They often love them in spite of the fact that they don't love themselves. They love them because they can see all the good bits that people who don't love themselves have been conditioned not to see. They love them because humans are inherently loveable.
The above-mentioned statement gets something wrong about love, to me. What it gets wrong is the transformative, healing nature of (healthy) love. It's the love we receive from others, especially the love we receive when we feel broken, damaged, or worthless because of our mental illness, our trauma, or the past abuse that we survived, that can help us on our journey of healing. It's that love that isn't conditional on our (self-assessed) worthiness or wholeness that can help us see that we deserve to love ourselves as much as these other people are choosing to love us.
I'll end with this: We should all be able to love ourselves, but, boy, do I know how hard that is to actually do, especially if we live with mental illness, have been through trauma, or have been abused or bullied. When we don't love ourselves, it can be hard to believe that someone else might love us, especially with the statement, "Nobody will love you if you don't love yourself," weaved into society like a mantra. But...that statement is a myth. People can and do love us (in a healthy way), often in spite of the fact that we don't love ourselves, and it's that love that isn't conditional on our (self-assessed) worthiness and wholeness that can help us heal so we can grow into loving ourselves. And remember, even when you don't love yourself, you still deserve love from yourself and from other people, no matter what your mentally ill, traumatized, or abused brain tells you.
