Until You Love Yourself, You Will Never Be Loving Anyone

“You knew all along

What I never wanted to say

Until I learned to love myself

I was never ever lovin' anybody else

Happiness lies in your own hand

It took me much too long To understand

how it could be

Until you shared your secret with me.”

Madonna, Secret

Until you learn to love yourself, you will never love anyone else is a “secret” that every codependent must learn, and the sooner the better. I know it seems like a vulgar idea. The very thought of loving myself seemed hopelessly twisted to me early-on in my recovery. But it is totally essential.

I wasted much of my life hating me. My self-hatred kept me running from myself and into the arms of anyone who would have miserable, worthless me. It took me on an endless bad trip into the lives of countless toxic people, who also hated themselves. And that bad trip didn’t end until I realized it was impossible for two people who hate themselves to build any type of redeeming relationship. Toxic person plus toxic person does not add up to a healthy relationship: It’s completely impossible.

There was no way that I could love the other person into loving themselves; and there was no way that the other person could love me into loving myself. It’s impossible for two broken people to fix each other, but it’s very possible for any toxic person to fix him or herself.

And that’s the secret: Fixing yourself is as simple and as difficult as learning to love yourself. No one can do it for you and you cannot do it for someone else. I used to believe I could love someone into loving themselves. After all, I could see the beauty in the person that they could not see in themselves. And I knew that if I just loved them so much, gave them all of my attention, bent over backwards to be their everything, then they would come to see how lovable they really were. But it never happened.

Today, I can look back and understand why it never happened. For one thing, there were plenty of people who tried to love me into loving myself and it never worked either. It made no difference how wonderful someone told me I was, or how much they told me they loved me, or how many times they told me “I love you,” or “You are so perfect.” I heard those words, but I never believed them. It was impossible for me to believe these words because my life was built on the belief that I was not lovable. And nothing could shake that God-forsaken belief until I chose to change it.

So I did. I changed the belief that I am not lovable and replaced it with the belief that I am lovable. The more I came to believe in my lovability and worth, the more I came out of my shell, the more I discovered the real me, and the more I liked what I discovered about me. Self-discovery has made me more assertive, more confident, more willing to take risks, more willing to be vulnerable and much more willing to share my true self with the world around me.

Self-love has also made it easier for me to love other people for themselves. Now, I can see people I love as the real persons that they are instead of seeing them as being like sponges that were made to absorb me and save me from myself. Now that I love me better, I have something to offer, something to truly give to a relationship; instead of simply being the “taker,” with nothing to really offer to any relationship. Now I am able to give to the relationship, and I am able to receive from the relationship what is freely given to me.

Today is the day to face this fact: Until you have some foundational level of self-love, you will never be able to truly love someone else, and you will never allow someone else to truly love you. Take an honest look at yourself. Any truly honest look will reveal to you that you are indeed lovable. Then make the choice to replace your “I am unlovable” beliefs with new “I am lovable” beliefs. The sooner you make this choice the quicker you will be on the right path toward honest-to-God love and the sooner you will find yourself being reasonably happy in your life.