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Ep. 3 Self Love In Action
1k Plays6 months ago
In this episode, we dive into the often elusive concept of self-love. Many people struggle to define it, feel it, and maintain it. I share insights on what it truly means to love all parts of oneself, contrasted with the signs of lacking self-love.
We explore the differences between internal and external validation and why some of us keep attracting narcissists. I'll guide you through acknowledging authentic feelings and share my personal journey to finding self-love and living an authentic life. Discover the essence of unconditional self-love, which involves loving the truth of your feelings—even the difficult ones like reactivity or anxiety.
Tune in to learn how to give yourself permission to love yourself no matter what, and take actionable steps towards embracing your true self.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Misunderstood' Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, beautiful souls. I'm so grateful that you're tuning in. Welcome to my podcast, Misunderstood, guiding highly sensitive people through an emotional dark age. I'm your host, Candice Van Dal, and I'm honored to embark on this transformative journey with you. Have you ever felt like you didn't quite fit into the world around you or even your own family? Like your sensitivity was a burden rather than a gift. If so, you're not alone. And here's the
Sensitivity as a Superpower
00:00:27
Speaker
truth. Your sensitivity is not a flaw. It's a superpower. It's what allows you to feel deeply, to connect with others on a profound level, and to access a higher realm of consciousness. And on this podcast, we're going to explore how to harness that power and use it to create a life of purpose, passion, and true confidence.
00:00:45
Speaker
Here, in this sacred space, we honor your sensitivity as the gift it truly is.
Creating a Safe Space for Sensitivity
00:00:51
Speaker
Get ready to embark on the journey of unapologetic emotional honesty and next-level healing. Let's dive in together. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the misunderstood podcast. I'm your host, Candice Vandal. This week, I wanted to talk about self-love.
Exploring Self-Love: Listener Requests
00:01:07
Speaker
I've been doing a lot of reels on Instagram lately about these deep topics and snapshots. And I thought I'd go deeper into this one because it's one that people keep saying, talk more about it, talk more about it, talk more about it. So here we are.
00:01:22
Speaker
Before I start, I want to let you guys know that we are going to start having guests on this podcast. My first interview is this week, so be sure you check that out because you don't want to miss these incredible humans that I get to have a deep dive with. Many of them are old friends, longtime friends, new friends, acquaintances, people that you want to hear from that you'll be surprised by the kinds of things we share and That will be coming very,
Understanding Self-Love
00:01:48
Speaker
very soon. So today I want to dive into self-love because it's such a concept that people don't know what to do with. They don't know how to define it. They don't know how to feel it. They don't know how to keep it once they feel it.
00:02:04
Speaker
And this also has a lot to do with your higher power. This has a lot to do with how to feel a personal relationship with your higher power. So all of this goes together for me. And I'm going to try to explain it in the most cliff note version I can with still giving details so you can actually apply it to your own life. So this week I was talking about self-love with a client. She says, Candice, like, how do you do it though? Like, how do you put it into a daily practice? How do you know you're doing it right? And that's the first thing is you can't do it right or do it wrong. You can just do it and you know that you're doing it when you feel it. So remember that. So the example my client gave me was she was telling me about this really difficult situation she's going through.
00:02:54
Speaker
in a relationship, but it happens a lot to her where she has extreme anxiety around abandonment, extreme anxiety around loving someone and then being afraid of being abandoned by them. We all know what that's like, some of us more than others. And when you have this type of a scenario, You can't just trust yourself. You can't just say, she goes to me, what do I have to do? Just trust myself? I said, no. Why would you trust yourself in that situation? You have to get real about how you feel, so you can heal. That is my tagline for a reason because it works every single time. And in her reality, this is what it meant.
00:03:28
Speaker
It meant get real. Okay, you're not going to be okay in that situation. So why would you trust yourself to be okay in that situation? If you do, you're setting yourself up to fail. You're setting yourself up to have disappointment. You're setting yourself up to feel like a failure. You're setting yourself up again to tell yourself that inner story of I don't do it right. She goes, yeah, that's true. What do I do?
Challenges of Self-Love: Loving Imperfections
00:03:51
Speaker
I said the self loving action is to say, I know I'm not gonna be okay with that and that's okay. I love myself through these things I have triggers with, these things I have trouble with. That is what it means to get real about how you feel so you can heal because once you're real about it, the healing modality is loving the part that's healing, not loving the part that needs to be healed that isn't. Do you see how that prolongs
00:04:21
Speaker
this lack of self-love. Anytime we expect ourselves to do something that we realistically cannot do, we're prolonging that desire to be loved in something we don't do correctly yet or wisely yet. So we're setting ourselves up to have this idealized version of ourselves that we love again. Yeah, your idealized version, client, is that you can be okay in that situation. And the real version is that you're not. Self-love is about loving the parts of ourselves that have been deemed unlovable by others and then we adopted that and don't love ourselves.
00:04:57
Speaker
So what you have to do is to love the part of you that wasn't loved before. Love the part of you that maybe you don't have a permission slip yet to love. Giving yourself that permission slip means I'm okay with not being okay. I'm okay with things not being okay. See, we all have this ingrained idea that when everything's perfect, I'll find the love of my life. When everything's perfect, I'll have the perfect career. When everything's perfect, when I'm perfect, when I was younger, do you guys know how much time I spent trying to perfect myself so that my life would be a reflection of that? Take that in. We all think our life is a reflection of ourselves somehow.
00:05:39
Speaker
This is what I mean. Oh, if there is a train wreck in my life, it must be reflecting that there's something I did wrong to create that. No, how you relate to the issue is the issue and how you relate to yourself in the issue is the bigger issue. So example, there's a train wreck happening in your life. There's a breakup. You lost your job. You lost your house. Someone got in an accident. And you try to make sense of it by relating it back to what you could do better, what you did wrong to create that.
00:06:11
Speaker
When you have a very strong anchored sense of self-worth and confidence, you start to realize that shit happens. And that doesn't mean that that is about you. What it means is shit happen.
Self-Worth and Confidence
00:06:24
Speaker
And how you relate to the issue if you're confident and full of self-worth is, that happened, how can I use my abilities to bring grace and ease to this situation so that I can be in my self-loving and give myself the care I need and have an infrastructure of support during this difficult time. What we do is we take away all of that love and support by making it our fault that should happen. You know what I'm talking about. So you can really test your level of self-love and your level of self-worth, which are totally intertwined, by seeing how you relate to things that are going on.
00:07:00
Speaker
A lot of times people will come to me and be like, well, I keep attracting narcissists. I keep attracting this. What's wrong with me? I say, it's not what's wrong with you. It's the discernment that you haven't yet used. It's the boundaries that you don't yet have. You may always attract these types because you're an attractive person or whatever it is. And when you have the boundaries and discernment to know what you're doing, And to say, no, I'm going to try again. Or, hey, this person has some red flags and signs, and I'm going to not do that. See what you're doing is you're just accepting what comes to you. Why don't you just have a filter and discernment of, you know, I deserve better. Well, these types keep coming to me and maybe I need to tell the universe louder. That's a no for me.
00:07:44
Speaker
See, we start to co-create our reality when we know our capabilities and our worth around internal understanding, not external validation of this internal understanding. When we have this external view of things, we think everything that happens outside of us is an extension of us. When we have that internal feeling of I know I'm worthy. I know I can choose again. I know I'm lovable, even if I don't feel lovable. I love the part of me that doesn't feel lovable. When you start to have this inner dialogue and you really start to live from inside out, you can also stop living from outside in. Think about in your life right now, how many things you let affect your mood.
00:08:31
Speaker
How many random events that you take personally? How many personal events that you take too personally over responsibility? That balance is key, but that balance becomes clear and easy when you've got yourself. So the key to self-love is I've got myself even when I don't got it together.
Integrating Loneliness and Self-Celebration
00:08:50
Speaker
I want to give you another example that happened in a session earlier today because it was really powerful. And this client who's done a lot of work with me over the last two years has gotten to such an amazing level of finally feeling safe in her shine, claiming her shine, celebrating herself. And she said to me, Candace, this is all amazing, but
00:09:12
Speaker
There's something there that still makes me not feel so good. I feel like I have this big life and I want to promote that on Instagram, but the truth is I feel lonely a lot of the time. And I said, yeah, yeah so the thing you're not doing yet is integrating the truth. The truth is I have this beautiful big life that I created for myself. And guys, some days I feel fricking lonely. I said, when you deny that aspect of your authentic feeling, You're denying your whole purpose and your whole reality because your purpose to love yourself and to express that in the world in whatever way you want through service is hindered when you're not actually fully owning all parts of yourself. So this is the exercise but exercise I gave her. I said, what is the problem?
00:10:00
Speaker
When I read into your energy, I see that there's this slight hidden shame. It's like a shame that's still lingering in your shadow. And she's like, yeah, chills. Exactly. What do I do? I said, great. I want you to sit here right now. And I want you to pretend the thing you have shame about is totally true. she's like well i just feel unlovable i said great let's pretend right now that you might not actually be lovable are there things about you that are unlovable have people told you that about you all these narcissistic partners that you consistently date are there just to remind you of something that might not be good about you because you aren't totally sure that there's something totally good about you.
00:10:42
Speaker
So as soon as you're really sure that you're still lovable with all these aspects of self, you're not going to need to attract that partner to mirror that anymore because it won't be an accurate reflection. Really take that in. We attract people who are mirrors to a part of ourselves that may be in the shadow. And when you can sit there and say, gosh, maybe I really am unlovable. Let me look, let's see. So it could be this, it could be that, it could be this, it could be that, it could be something I'm unaware of. Great, let someone inform you of that. Don't just make it up and then hold that vibration. I want you to sit there.
00:11:18
Speaker
One of the reasons I made this podcast called Misunderstood is because I was so deeply misunderstood as a child, as a highly sensitive being, as a neurodivergent child who thought differently and was super creative but didn't have the words for a lot of my insights.
Candice's Personal Journey
00:11:33
Speaker
I was misunderstood. And so I remember thinking, maybe there is just something wrong with me. And I sat there for a long time and I was like, well, it could be this, it could be that, but honestly, I don't think that's wrong. I just think it's different. I think it's cool. And I got to the point in my life where I was like, I don't believe that story that I deserve to be misunderstood. I understand myself. If I understand myself, I can show others how to understand me and probably themselves too. And it became one of my most prized gifts, I would say, that I love in this life is I can deeply understand people and their pain.
00:12:08
Speaker
because I deeply understand mine. I also deeply understand joy. As deep we go is in the dark side is as light as we can get in the high side. And so what we have to realize is when I sat there and have my client do it today too, when you sit there and you realize, okay, none of this seems that bad to me.
Embracing Self-Compassion and Growth
00:12:27
Speaker
You stop being afraid of what could be discovered about you. You stop worrying about it because you're pretty clear that there isn't something you don't already know about. You may not like aspects of yourself that you want to work on and change, but you don't have to not love them. You can say, hey, I love myself and I'm trying to work on this reactivity or I'm trying to work on this and have a beautiful relation to it. How you relate to the issue is the issue. So guys,
00:12:53
Speaker
Loving yourself is the action of loving the truth of how you're feeling. You don't have to love all of it. You don't have to love the fact that you're reactive. You don't have to love the fact that you're having severe anxiety about abandonment, but you have to love the person who's having those feelings.
00:13:10
Speaker
It's a deep dive and I will be talking a lot more about this. I will be talking about it with my amazing guests that I will be interviewing later this week that you will meet very soon. It's going to be this new awakening for you when you start to say, I don't like all these things I'm doing, but I understand it. And I love the one who's doing it because there is a reason you have coping mechanisms. There's a reason you have abandonment wounds. There is a reason you don't feel loved. You have been waiting for someone outside of you to give you that permission slip. And what I hope to give you today in this episode is your ability to give yourself the permission slip to love yourself no matter what.
00:13:52
Speaker
I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will be back with more next Wednesday. Please go and make sure to check out my Instagram. All those reels daily will probably give you an even deeper dive into these topics. I love you guys and I will see you soon.