How to Practice SELF LOVE to Stop Having TOXIC Relationships (4 steps)

Self-love isn't affirmations, mantras, or positive thinking. You know you never fully believe that stuff because what's stopping you from actually loving yourself is a deeply internalized negative energy that lives in your body and needs to be healed from your body so you can actually love yourself from a real place, which is what's going to transform your relationships and ensure that you never accept another breadcrumb situationship or emotionally unavailable guy into your life again. Today I'm going to show you how to do this so self-love becomes a natural reflex for you because it's become a natural part of who you are. Just like you can see in this picture, my self-love journey affected me to the very core of my being. This picture is me forcing a fake smile, struggling with self-abandonment, low self-esteem, and just going from one unhealthy relationship to the next to finally being free of the energy in my body that stopped me from loving myself so I could grow a strong connection to my authentic self and know what I actually need to feel loved and how to meet that need myself. My name is Amy Kerr and I help clients achieve this, so if you're ready to get the help you actually need to finally start loving yourself, please book a call with me in the calendar link below. Now the path to self-love actually requires you to build an ally within yourself, which is where you form an internal allegiance with all parts of who you are. So you can work together in harmony with both self-discipline and self-compassion. A good mix is 50% self-compassion and 50% self-discipline. Just according to whatever is going on in your life and what you need to act in a way that's really right for you, rather than what's currently happening, which is where there is a part or parts within you that's actually blocking your ability to show up for yourself and love yourself. Those parts aren't internal allies within yourself yet. They've gone rogue. They're acting out on their own against you and they have their hands on the steering wheel and they're not acting necessarily from a place of self-hatred, but from a place that prioritises familiarity and certainty over growth and discomfort. And I call these inner parts protectors. Having parts that stop you from loving yourself allows you to stay in a familiar and certain energy within you. And that is the way that you conduct yourself in life. Because these behaviours originally arose from learning to cope with your environment when you were growing up, how you organised yourself and your perception in the world in order to feel certainty and safety. So if you were brought up in a childhood environment with mostly happy, grounded, secure parents that loved themselves, you would have developed a secure bond with them and learnt how to treat yourself with that same level of self-love they had for themselves. But if you experienced any kind of emotional neglect, real or perceived abandonment and your childhood environment was chaotic or uncertain or not safe, these inner protectors arose in order to keep you safe psychologically. And the innate child response is because of you that you're not getting the love you need. Because that assumption allows you to have control in a situation where there is no control, which turns into you controlling yourself in order to be better or change your behaviour in some ways to get love. But the aftermath of that assumption is toxic shame. In assuming that you need to change to get love or you don't feel worthy of love just as you are and you don't develop a healthy environment of self-love inside you. You prioritise getting validation and self-worth outside of you rather than what it takes to love yourself, which is to accept the things going on around you and that they can't be controlled and that they will have no bearing on your worth or who you are as a person. And that there will always be uncertainty in life. So you prioritise connection to yourself to increase your resilience rather than doing what it takes to love yourself, which is to accept that things around you are going to happen that you can't control and that that all has no bearing on your worth or who you are as a person. And that there will always be uncertainty in your life. So you prioritise the connection to yourself to increase your resilience so you can keep showing up for yourself and let the world work around you the way that it needs to. So these parts within you that are prioritising familiar and safety are called protectors. And if you're wondering what I mean by parts, this is a psychological construct that says we have different aspects within our personality. In fact, like different shades of our personalities, which is why you can be very loving and kind to others and be very critical of yourself in exactly the same moment. Each role in that moment has a part to play that's actually trying to help you. It's actually trying to keep you safe from the world, whether it's actually succeeding or not. So for example, one of these inner protectors within you is called your inner critic. And you would have heard that term before. This is a part of your personality where you're critical of yourself as a defence mechanism to protect yourself from any kind of potential failure or rejection or harm. The inner critic acts like an overactive buffer between you and what's going on externally and anticipates that you'll fail and not do well so that you don't actually experience real time failure and rejection. So it thinks I'm going to create a scenario in my head of my life where I am a failure and I do get rejected so that I don't actually have to go through the real lived experience of rejection, failure, heartbreak or devastation in real time with people involved. Another inner protector is called the inner perfectionist. This part of you controls your environment around you so that you can feel a sense of control amidst so much uncertainty. So this part's constantly thinking as long as I do X, Y and Z in exactly this way, everything's going to be okay. And this part of you comes from growing up in uncertainty and maybe chaos, maybe your parents divorced or argued a lot, there was addiction or your parents were so preoccupied with their lives that you experienced emotional neglect. And your little child brain couldn't cope with the chaos. So in order to give yourself something to anchor to, something that gave you a level of peace inside of you and soothe that part that needed certainty, your inner perfectionist was born. And now as an adult, whenever you're feeling vulnerable or whenever there are difficult things going on in your life, your inner perfectionist rises up and starts to control and often elicits the help of the inner critic to actually put you in a place that will protect you from real time harm. Then there's the inner people pleaser. This is the part of you that prioritizes the needs of others over your own needs in order to maintain safety and connection with someone or with people in an inherently unsafe or loving environment. Your inner people pleaser grew in response to a childhood environment that was inherently not loving and not safe and came up so that you could find safety and connection in that environment. No matter the cost, no matter how much you self-abandoned or ignored your needs, you just became all about connecting to your primary caregivers because connection was more important growing up than being authentic and independent. It's this part of you that is constantly needing to feel safe and constantly scanning for people around you and in the external environment for opportunities to get safety. Then there's another part called your inner caregiver. This is similar to the people pleaser where you take responsibility for other people's needs and emotions so that you feel valued and secure and always needed in the relationship. You're probably parentified when you're a child, which means that your parents expected you to step up to a parent-like role or you as a child realized that you could step into a parent-like role and get more connection needs met from your parents in the way that they responded to you. The inner caregiver is actually almost a controlling part within you because you're making yourself indispensable in that relationship so that the other person doesn't leave. I'm going to be someone that you rely on, that you need all the time so that you never leave me. The inner caregiver deeply fears abandonment and comes out because of this fear. On some level, all of these parts believe that they're actually trying to protect you from pain or harm. They formed in response to harmful or neglectful experiences you had in your earliest relationships, but they're still operating the same way because they've internalized those lessons and believe it's the best way for you to function as an adult, but they actively block your ability to love yourself because it's their modus operandi to always throw yourself under the bus in order to value, protect, or please others. Self-love just cannot exist at the same time. You cannot be self-critical and self-loving at the same time. These two are completely different energies. You can't have self-worth when you create strict conditions in order for you to be worthiness, when your worthiness is condition-based like with the inner perfectionist. You can't love yourself and abandon yourself at the same time, and you certainly can't show up for yourself when you are neglecting your needs in favor of others. There are also two parts within you that action on really poor decisions when you're in a romantic relationship. Despite knowing cognitively that your relationship is unhealthy or toxic, there is another stronger part of you that can't leave, and the thought of leaving sends you into a tailspin. You might break up, get back together, break up, and there's this pattern because you've got these two competing parts running within you at the same time, and they are both at opposite ends of the spectrum. One end where you know in your mind that this isn't right, you know this is not healthy, but then there's this other part where you just keep self-abandoning to maintain the connection because you're also wired to prioritize attachment over authenticity. So when your inner protectors are active in this way, you'll always have this inner polarity that is creating friction within you, and it's these same parts that sabotage your life. They stop you from being disciplined. They stop you doing the things you need to do. The things you know you should do, like healthy eating or self-care, because these protector parts are always seeking familiarity. You know the saying, the better the devil you know than the devil you don't, and specifically the really familiar patterns and behaviors you learned as a child in response to your upbringing, which was chaotic and out of control. You might have had emotionally unavailable caregivers, like I said, and experienced neglect or abandonment or other trauma, and that's why these parts are always going to come up and pull you away from what you truly know, because that is what feels familiar and safe to you, and that's what you created unconsciously as a child. So if you struggle with self-love, you have internalized negative messages from these childhood experiences, and that is what's frozen inside you as unresolved trauma. That's getting in the way of you fully showing up and loving yourself. Now you know this is happening for sure within you if you have any of these patterns, because it's patterns in our life that show us protectors are getting in the way. For example, you're always attracting or having unhealthy or toxic relationships, right? That is something that is always present in your life, and you realize that this is an issue where you are the common denominator, or you're highly critical of yourself. You've got a really strong inner critic running, and you're just never good enough, right? Or you're always comparing yourself to others, right? There's always that grass is greener somewhere else, or you have no boundaries because you fear rejection, or you have that people pleaser within you, and you need external validation because your self-worth is conditional. It's based on the approval of others, or you hold onto past mistakes and don't fully metabolize them because you never learned how to grow through self-forgiveness. So you have this internal ecosystem of parts within you that are coming out as patterns that are effectively at war with each other, and this is what's creating impossible conditions for you to truly love yourself, which actually gives us an inroad into learning how to love ourselves fully. But you know, how many affirmations and positive thoughts and mantras have you tried that have actually worked? You know when you try that, you don't entirely believe it, because it's like trying to gaslight yourself, right? These little protective parts are smart. They don't believe that BS, right? They just pick up on it and laugh them off. And because the origin of these parts are nonverbal, which means the origin of your trauma in your body is so young that you weren't able to speak. It all happened before you even had those skills. You were actually first learning to internalize and blame the situation on yourself before you could talk, which is then when your protectors were first coming up. And this is why you can't talk, think or read your way into self-love. It just doesn't work on those young, pre-verbal traumatized parts within you. But knowing they exist is key to turning your self-love ship around. Once you can access and heal the trauma that is being held by these inner protectors, your nonverbal parts that are holding onto them in your body, they'll let go of the role that they're playing to keep you safe. And you will finally be able to build trust and self-love within you because they will just trust that you're handling things well now over time. That is how you build up this internal allegiance between all parts of who you are. And you end up building allies within you, right? Parts that are on board, that trust you. And this is what wholeness is. This is what self-love is. So let's talk about how to actually do that because it's just a pie in the sky at the moment. How do we access and heal this nonverbal trauma that's getting in the way of self-love so that they can let go of the role they're playing and we can access and become whole within ourselves? The best tool that I can teach you to do this is a tool called RAIN. And this is originally a Tara Brach tool that I've developed into a somatic inner healing tool that allows you to directly access and release the frozen energy and emotions that your parts are holding onto. So that you can work together in harmony with self-compassion and self-discipline, right? That 50-50. So the first step in RAIN is to recognize. Firstly, you need to recognize which part is coming up for you when it does. Are you noticing you're very critical of yourself or you're controlling something or you're trying to make something perfect or you're pleasing someone else or you're self-abandoning? This part is going to show up in you as thoughts, but so much more than that because it actually lives in the body. So it's going to show up as impulses, behaviors, feelings and energy. You might even experience a sharp pain in association with a behavior of self-abandonment and people pleasing. And that tells you that there is a part that's operating at that time. You might notice that every time you spend time with someone that requires you to please more, you feel really tired. And so your energy is really low. And that's an indication that you've been putting out so much energy that you don't even realize it. But that part has actually been in control when you've been in conversation with that person, trying to keep you safe, but expending a lot of your energy. You might notice that when you go out and date a certain type of person, you have this behavior where you override your discernment and go ahead and sleep with them or fall in love with them too quickly. Now, this is a sign that there's a part within you that's deeply connecting with this person based on that familiarity from childhood that runs in you, that protective part. So this part may be trying to heal a wound within you by jumping into the relationship quickly with someone that is then going to trigger you terribly. So when you notice any of these thoughts or any of these sensations in the body, like feelings or energy, before you do the thing that you would normally do unconsciously and go ahead and let that part take over, I want you to take a moment and just sit with this part of your body. I want you to allow this part to be. And this really looks like holding space for everything it needs to say in this moment, say all the things about what's going on. If it's your inner critic, really let it speak and don't be judgmental. Don't self-identify with it either, but just understand that this is a separate part within you that needs to be heard and seen and known and understood before it can release its role. Rather than what we're used to doing, which is when we're self-critical or when something comes up, we tend to blend with it. We identify with it. We don't even realize that it's a separate part within us. We just act from that place. Or we try and push the emotional feeling or thought down and just try and ignore it. But that just actually makes it louder within us. We actually just need to give this part space within us to come to the table, to allow it to speak, to sit and have a cup of tea within us and just be for a moment without being fought with and even go so far as to be welcoming to this part. This might be tough for you to hear, but if you were to speak to your inner critic and say, thank you for being here, thank you for being a part of me. I know that you're trying to keep me safe. I appreciate you. Thank you. As you do this allowing process, what is going to happen is that there will be somatic sensations come up in your body. You might feel tightness in your throat or a heavy weight in your chest or a lump in your gut or just this dull, heavy feeling or tension in your shoulders or your head or even a more acute physical sensation like a sharpness or pain or a chronic illness might flare up. You're going to investigate this physical sensation, whatever is coming up for you. Now, investigating is all about connecting to that physical sensation in the body and placing your attention on it and finding out what that energy in your body needs to express or request. So you could place a hand on wherever you're feeling this energy and ask, what do you need from me? What do you need to tell me right now? What do you need to feel safe? What do you need to feel loved? That energy that's frozen in your body will have information that will come through as a request or as a little spark of intuition. And if you've ever done any inner child work before, you may recognize that it seems to be coming from a similar place, a quiet little voice inside of you that's very young. It's not complex. It is asking for very simple things in a very simple way. And it's often just needing safety or love or a hug. It's asking to be heard or accepted or just listened to. Listening to this young part is similar to that feeling of when you're looking at a star in the night sky that's like very dim. So when you look at it, you can hardly see it. But if you just turn your eyes somewhere, you can kind of see it in the peripheral of your gaze. It's brighter and much easier to see from the peripheral. So pay attention to your peripheral inner senses in your body, not the part of you that speaks very loudly front and center, but the quieter parts on the edge of you, not just in your body, but just in your awareness of yourself. And then the final step is to nurture. And this is where you're going to give love to this part. You in your mind's eye, and this will sound woo woo, but in your mind's eye, picture yourself with this part as it's a very young part within you, a little child, giving it what it requested in the allow and investigate stage. So whether it asks for a hug or space or whether it's a conversation where you just listen even more deeply to find out why it's doing what it's done. Nurturing is all about loving on this part and giving it the love that it needs that it never got. Because think about it, this part of you is frozen as trauma in your body because you weren't getting love and deserving and understanding you needed when you're a child. But you can give that now to that part as an adult. This is called reparenting. Give that to this part within you so that it finally feels it can trust you and you form this really beautiful bond with this part of you. And the deeper you can do this, the more you'll be able to close this loop of self-love. Now, a caveat to this, and this is the barrier I see my clients have when it comes to practicing RAIN, two things. Firstly, it can be very hard to connect to these parts within you in your body. If you've always operated from the neck up, which means you're overthinking and overanalyzing and intellectualizing your healing journey. And I find this particularly with therapists that I work with who need to do this work. They're so used to thinking and analyzing their way out of their client's trauma, and so they work with it in the same way with themselves from the top down. But if you're very heady in this way, this is actually self-sabotage because it can feel like you're doing work when you're reading or talking or thinking about your past, but you're not actually accessing the site of the original trauma. And the reason it's self-sabotage is because it's far safer to do healing work in a controlled way that's not actually addressing the core of the trauma because you think it's going to be less scary and uncomfortable and new. And even if it takes years to make even the smallest improvement, you might just think you're too traumatized or you can't be healed. But it's actually because you're sabotaging yourself by staying in your head, whereas RAIN and the principles that I showed you work quickly and simply on all trauma. But they can feel a little scary and edgy and uncomfortable in you if you've never connected to your body before. So the solution for this is to be patient and practice the principles of RAIN and just simply notice and observe the body when you have a part that is coming up or when you know there are thought patterns happening, like your inner critic is too loud or your people pleaser is loud. Just stop and connect to what the body's experience is in that moment and connect to that energy in your body as if it was a young child. This is just like learning a new language or learning how to ride a bike. You are literally learning the language of your body. And once you get used to picking up on when you're back in your head and when you've reverted back to that kind of thinking version of you, you can then just drop back into your body because your body knows this process so well. It actually knows how to go through and clear trauma once you get out of its way. So learning RAIN as a tool is extremely effective and will allow you to heal quickly and you'll spend more time in your body in an embodied state working with your somatic trauma and less time distracting yourself by getting in your head around it. And the more you practice it in a safe way, the more the body will feel safe and your nervous system will feel safe to do it. Now, the second barrier to doing RAIN I see that happens in my clients is that they struggle with the nurturing step, which is where you give yourself love. And again, this ties into the whole theme of today's video, which is how much we block receiving love, right? All of those protector roles that I went through before, the inner critic, the people pleaser, caregiver, imperfectionist, they're all roles that have formed in the absence of love. And so when those roles are operating, when those protectors are operating, you are blocking love. So your muscle to receive love is extremely weak at the moment. So when you get to the nurturing part and you're working with this part within you and you're trying to love on it, there is no doubt going to be more energy that's self protecting that is going to stop you from receiving that energy and receiving that love. And so this leads me to my next point, is that when we work with our inner protectors, there's not just one part within there. There are several, there are many. And so when you notice that you're still blocking receiving love, when you're trying to nurture yourself and your internal world just feels really crowded and you can't identify one single part, you just ask all of your parts inside to take a step back, just one foot back to give you a bit of space to work with whoever won't step back, right? They will do that. This sounds strange, but they will. And even if you can't name them, all those labels that I gave you before, you don't really need them, right? This process just works with our feeling sense, not our cognitive senses. It might feel strange. You might wonder why on earth you're doing it whilst you're doing it, but asking for this kind of internal space from all these little versions of your personality inside of you, they will eventually do that. And they will allow you just to connect with the part that you need to connect to and give it love. Now, all of these steps of RAIN happen with my clients non-verbally. So if you want more help in learning how to do these steps, I really encourage you to consider booking a call with me so that we can chat together and see if we're a fit to work together. The link is in my description below. In the meantime, here are some next step videos for you to watch so you can move one step closer to having beautiful self-love within you and having the relationship with yourself that you deserve. And for now, I'll see you in the next video.