You’ve heard this before; ‘You can’t truly love anyone until you love yourself first’.  And when you hear it, it seems so obvious; common sense right?  And so you go about your life giving out all this love because you are sure you’ve left enough for yourself. But have you really?

I’m learning (the hard way) that you can give so much of yourself to people that your love turns into your poison.  And I know to my fellow people pleasers this is hard to hear.  After all we never want to be the one to say no to someone or God forbid hurt someone’s feelings.  But I’m discovering that not having boundaries and demands as to how you expect to be treated, is not only unfair to yourself, but is also unfair to the people who truly love you. 
See while some people end up disrespecting and misusing your love, the people who truly love you are left with no guidance on how you want to be loved.  So you end up giving away so much of your precious love and getting so little in return.  And the hard part is you have to take ownership of that.  As uncomfortable or painful as it is to admit, you get as much love as you allow.

So in my journey to get more love and give a more healthy love, I’ve make two decisions.  First, I’ve decided to let go of the people who just don’t deserve my love.  And yes that might sound harsh – everybody deserves love- but if we are honest with ourselves, we all know that there are people in our lives that really are just FAKE friends.  And let me tell you, it has been sooooo freeing and elating to stop putting effort into unhealthy friendships.  I’m finding myself with so much more time to give to the people who actually deserve it. 

Second, I’ve decided to have and better articulate my boundaries and expectations.  This one is a little bit more challenging because I’m just not the most expressive person but I’ve been doing it more and more and weirdly enough, people have been treating me the way I deserve.  Who would have thought it was that easy.  And it’s also been so eye opening because when you tell people how you deserve to be treated, it’s all of a sudden very easy to tell who your real friends are by who actually makes the effort to change their behavior.   

Now before I begin to sound like an expert on this, I’ll be the first to admit that I am a COMPLETE amateur. I have such a LONG way to go before I am even good at either of these things.  But recent situations have had me thinking about this topic and have given such a new meaning to the whole ‘love yourself first’ idea so I thought I’d share.

Anyway let me know your opinions on this.  If you are finding these things out for yourself or if you have a completely different perspective share below in the comment section.

Until next time,

My Loving But Selfish Heart