All We've Ever Wanted Is to Be Loved and Accepted for Who We Are

“All you really want is to be loved and accepted for who you are.”

Stephen C. Paul, Illuminations

We all have basic inherent human needs and it’s essential that we honor them. Human growth requires more than bread and water, more than exercise and sleep, more than warm clothing and a comfortable chair. It requires more than sexual ecstasy and intellectual enlightenment. It even requires more than a spiritual connection to a Higher Power. The most basic human need, the one that must be fulfilled for healthy human growth, is the need to be loved and accepted for who we are.

There are too many of us in this world who have never known the essential bliss of being loved and accepted for who we are. We’ve known the desire since we were old enough to reach out and hug our parents. We’ve longed to hear the words “I love you just as you are,” and we’ve longed to feel the warmth of such unconditional acceptance through the embrace of another. But it’s rarely-- if ever-- happened. As children we primarily learn from our parents, and because we are dependent upon learning the wonders of life from them, we tend to mirror what we see in our parents. If our parents weren’t able to mirror self-love and acceptance, we weren’t able to learn it from them. And if they didn’t feel love and accepted for who they are, they weren’t prepared to offer us love and acceptance for simply being who we are. They came up empty and so did we.

Coming up empty on the emotional inside tends to cause us to look outside for emotional support. In other words, if our parents weren’t able to mirror self-love and acceptance to us, we weren’t able to develop a healthy self-love and acceptance of ourselves. Our emotional emptiness caused us to look to others for the approval we needed. In taking this path, we placed ourselves at the mercy of the outside world. We allowed others to decide if we were OK or not. This caused us tremendous emotional pain, and it sometimes forced us to sell our souls for the sake of someone else’s approval. We sometimes became chameleons. Worst yet, the approval we most often received was for being who the other person wanted us to be, not for being who we really are. So we continued to run on emotional empty-- year after year after year; continually looking to the wrong people to fill us up.

Only we can fill our emotional tank. It’s time to look inside ourselves again. Love and acceptance begin with “me.“ If we want to be loved and accepted for who we are, we have to be the first to say “YES!” to ourselves. We have to be the first to hug ourselves into the warmth of feeling loved and acceptable just the way we are. Once we decide it’s good to be genuinely who we are, we will begin to experience true love and acceptance from others. They will mirror it to us through their eyes and we will feel it in the warmth of their touch. And we may even hear it in words that emanate from their hearts.

Begin today by offering yourself unconditional love and acceptance. Fulfill your own most basic human need to the fullest. Feel yourself glow from within and feel the warmth of God’s smile upon you. Invite others to share this new-found love with you, and allow your soul to shine!