YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF DICTATES YOUR R ELATIONSHIP WITH OTHERS B AYO U H E A LTH BY S HAN N O N DAH LU M
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e may be culturally obsessed with money and power, but humans are ultimately driven by our need for love. We chase success through the best educations and most prolific careers, we build security with savings accounts, and create a sense of worth and acceptance by purchasing nice homes and cars. At the end of the day, though, the one thing that money or education can’t secure for us is what provides the most value in our lives: true connection with others. I’m certainly not a love and relationship expert, but like most, I am a person who’s had significant relationships, lost significant relationships, and battled my relationship with myself. The things I’ve learned so far through these experiences have enriched my life far more than my education, my income, my career, and my possessions, combined. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.” I’m not sure who can be originally credited with this quote, but it’s one I’ve come across in several places and it’s really struck a chord with me. It’s the word “learn” that really hit me. I think we’re conditioned to believe love is something that happens to us; a feeling that randomly hits us upside the head and sweeps us off our feet. Love isn’t something that falls out of the sky, though; it’s generated from within us and then expressed outwardly. We only have the capacity to love another to the extent with which we love ourselves. It’s the relationships we have with ourselves that dictate how we relate with others, and there is definitely a learning (and unlearning) process to cultivating a true love for oneself. As babies and children, we have an innate need to fit into our family unit. We depend on them for our survival, so it’s important that we’re accepted by them. We instinctively learn how to behave in order 92 FEBRUARY 2022 | WWW.BAYOULIFEMAG.COM
to gain what feels to us like their love and approval. We may learn not to express certain emotions because we can see that our caretakers pull away or get angry with us when we do. We may learn that we feel more approval when we participate in the activities they want us to, rather than in the things that bring us our own sense of joy. We may find that expressing ourselves authentically leads to feelings of rejection, so to stay in the good graces of those near to us, we suppress parts of our true nature and perform for their approval. As we grow, this desire for approval carries over into our friendships, too. Peer pressure can shape our choices about what to wear to school, what music to listen to, who we associate with, and the opinions we express, all because we just want to fit in. Our sense of self worth depends on the acceptance we feel from others, rather than an innate sense of worthiness or unconditional self love. To a certain degree, we learn to be who others want us to be and continue suppressing the parts of ourselves we feel wouldn’t be accepted. These desires to be accepted by our families and peers don’t suddenly disappear when we reach the stage of physical independence. Up to this point in our lives, we’ve learned what we need to do to and believe to gain approval of others, and those behaviors and beliefs have subconsciously become woven into our personalities. Some of us have learned that performing well earns approval, so we’re deeply driven to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Some of us have felt more love from others when our bodies look a certain way, so we become obsessed with diets and/or exercise programs. Some of us have learned that confrontation feels like rejection, so we don’t always express our emotions or opinions when they aren’t in alignment with the emotions or opinions of others. We’ve learned to choose the approval of others, rather that choosing ourselves. Our desire to be in alignment with the expectations of others drives us to abandon our true nature. It becomes easy, then, to mistake the high we feel from gaining the conditional acceptance from another for feelings of unconditional love between us. When we fail to love ourselves and search for validation from others, we easily mistake attachment for love. While we may be physically independent, attachment forces us to remain dependent on others to provide our sense of self worth. It motivates us to control how others react toward us. Our desire
to gain their approval is so strong, that we subconconnciously use manipulation tactics to illicit these reactions from them. Manipulation doesn’t only involve big lies and guilt trips; any time we aren’t expressing ourselves authentically in order to gain approval, we’re being manipulative. This may be hard to swallow, but consistently sacrificing our own needs for someone else’s isn’t necessarily an act of service, it’s often an act of manipulation. We may feel like we love someone so much that we’ll deny our own emotions and desires over and over in order to honor theirs, but that behavior may be driven by a lack of love for ourselves and the desire to feel worthy in someone else’s eyes; not love toward them. For example, suppressing anger or disagreement
with someone is a manipulation tactic that can be used to avoid facing confrontation or criticism from them, which can feel like rejection. We do it to maintain a sense of closeness. It usually backfires,
