Love Yourself Enough to Be Responsible for Your Own Happiness

The real problem for so many people who suffer from addictive behaviors is that we refuse, or simply don’t know how, to love ourselves. Many of us know that self-love is the cure and we know that self-love leads to good self-care. Yet time and again we continually fall into the trap of self-loathing.

Self-loathing is our default setting. We naturally go there. It’s as comfortable as a warm wooly blanket on a winter night. And it’s as self destructive as wrapping ourselves in that blanket when we know we are severely allergic to wool. Yet, no matter how much it hurts, we still choose to wallow in it.

Over and again, I have encouraged many people to be responsible for their own happiness. I’ve encouraged them to “take the actions required for” their happiness. Actions such as monitoring their thoughts, disengaging from negative thoughts and replacing them with kind thoughts about themselves. I’ve reminded people that feelings are necessary to process life, to accept all of their feelings, to stop fighting them, to learn from them, and to remember all feelings are fleeting; no feeling lasts forever. So why give it tremendous power? 

I’ve also instructed people to immediately reach out to their Higher Power when they start to feel overwhelmed. And, once they have worked hard on helping themselves, if they need more help, I’ve encouraged them to reach out to someone else. Rarely do people follow this course of self-help. Instead, once they start feeling panicked, they immediately reach out for someone else to fix them. They completely bypass helping themselves first.

As a result, they make another person into their Prozac by making that person responsible for rescuing them because they refuse to love themselves enough to help themselves FIRST. In the past, I’ve been bad about enabling these people because I’ve felt sorry for them. But no more. 

I will no longer offer help to anyone who isn’t first willing to help him or herself. Helping one’s self does not mean calling someone else to fix you. Helping one’s self means we first do all in our power to help ourselves: We confront our negative thoughts; we process all of our feelings, good and bad, knowing no feeling lasts forever and so we are more powerful than any feeling; and we call on our Higher Power to assist us. 

In doing so, we practice good self-love through self-care and we make an effort to be responsible for our own lives and happiness.