You don’t have to love yourself before you can love someone else or before someone else can love you.
Loving yourself first
You could turn that statement into one of the biggest self judgement game that you can play with yourself.
One way that this could happen is:
We make a list of all the qualities that our beloved should have
And then the teaching goes as
You need to have these qualities before you attract similar partner
Then you make a list of must have qualities of your ideal mate and try your best to embody all those qualities.
But the problem is that it take a perfect person, to have those qualities all the time.
Here is just one example of the popular list of ideal soulmate
Emotional stability
generosity
empathy
honesty
understanding
Trustworthy
When you look at that list and ask yourself, if you could be all those qualities, two things will happen.
You will say yes, unaware of underlying doubt in your subconsciousness. That doubt will prevent you to really love yourself first.
Or
You will see that you just can’t be all that all the time.
And then you start JUDGING yourself because you couldn’t not be the perfect person from your Soulmate wish list
And then you gonna internalized as if there is something wrong with you
I’m not good enough and similar.
and then you will use one or more of self help processes to get rid of them (Some teachers will even claim that that they will fall away if you only use the process right
way- call the certified instructor to teach you)
Trying to release believes that are not yours in a first place and are not true for you.
You actually don’t even believe in them.
And if there were no expectation the mind could not judge you. Any you would be fine.
Judging yourself that you are not good enough- excuse to not get closer to your potential soul mates
In reality making list of your expectations about your potential partner and then try to live those expectations and failing at them
will serve you as excuse to NOT OPEN YOURSELF TO OTHERS, to seek others who will love you on the outside.
But in the inside sabotage that.
Mind will create all this expectation that you cold not reach and when you don’t reach it, the mind will
judge you and said I told you that is impossible.
And you will rush to attend another workshop or email course or recorded seminar about how your life will be better, when you finally figure out how to love yourself.
Expectations that prevent you to love yourself
You could not love yourself until you have expectations how you supposed to be.
All the games that we play when we are on the quest to love ourselves are build
around the expectation, how would that look like, feel like. Like watching commercial of happy couple, happy family. Blissfully happy woman from the Instagram or relaxing and calm
and spiritual from latest Oprah magazine, or successful business woman.
That are expectation in the back of our mind, that we sometimes are even not aware of.
Then we try to be all those images, because that will supposed to make us love ourselves.
Following somebody else ideal of self love. After doing all this, the only thing that you will succeed is loving the ideal image instead of yourself.
Disappointment and judgment that you could not love yourself even if you try hard, will follow.