How to Find Love
You won’t find love in a bar. You may have been looking in all the likely places and still can’t find someone to love you. This is because you must love yourself first. This isn’t just a cliche. Unless you are loving, gentle and forgiving of yourself, you can not be this for anyone else, nor can you find someone loving to love you back. Someone who has good self-esteem, who values themself, expects respect and gives it back, someone who is neither self-judgmental or judmental of others is not going to want you unless you are their equal.
If you feel you have a large empty hole inside and are looking for someone to love you in order to fill that emptiness, you won’t find them. You will find someone else with a big hole looking for you to fill theirs up. You can only attract into your life someone who mirrors you. Would you choose yourself as a partner? If you can’t wholeheartedly say “Yes!”, this means you have work to do on yourself first. You must become the “right” person first in order to find the “right” person for you. The work you need to do is self-reflection. Nothing on the outside will make up for what lies beneath. If you are not happy with yourself, your unhappiness will be reflected in any relationships you have. You must decide to look deeply into yourself with truthfulness and be willing to accept responsibility for everything in your life in order to become the kind of person you would like to be in a relationship with.
This does not mean you engage in exercise in self-critism and hate. This does not mean you are to be critical or judgmental of yourself. It means you need to truthfully acknowledge and accept the aspects of yourself you have been hiding from. You would like yourself better if you didn’t think there were awful parts of you that you must keep hidden, even from yourself. If you really looked within, you would find you have strengths and weak areas, just like everybody else. When you accept both the things you are proud of and the things you would prefer not to own, you will begin to accept yourself, which is the first step toward self-love.
Be gentle with yourself. You are more loveable than you realize, but it will take you realizing this before anyone else can see it in you.
Lorraine E. Castro, LMFT 