Blogs | Valentine’s Day, an Opportunity for Radical Self Love 

By Charlotte Musgrove

Valentines Day is such a mixed bag. The paraphernalia is put on the shelves straight after Christmas and becomes a strange shrines in our supermarkets full of red roses, teddy bears and awkward cards with sentiments that don’t match our feelings.

Some may relish it as an opportunity to share their love, admiration, gratitude for their loved one. Others may find it a triggering or shame inducing day if they are single, struggling to find a romantic other, have had difficult or painful experiences of romantic relationships or are maybe trying to leave a relationship that is no longer serving them or experienced some sort of abuse in a relationship.

In my reflective curiosity I googled the origin of Valentine’s day. There are links to the ancient Roman festival, Lupercalia, a mid-February festival that promoted purification, good health, and fertility, that appears to be full of animal sacrifice, orgies and the beating of women with animal skins….strange how brutal Pagan festivals are sanitised by Christianity over the decades!

So with this in mind, maybe there is something in honouring Ancient Rome-not the blood thirsty beating and animal sacrifices, but maybe the energy of purification, good health and fertility. With the start of a New Year and Spring a time of new beginnings and vitality just around the corner, is February a fantastic opportunity to deeply work with purifying our energy-personally and relationally, putting ourselves in good health for the active parts of the year, making ourselves ‘fertile’-to plant and embed new ways of being within ourselves to reap the rewards as the year progresses? Not just an evening devouring chocolate truffles and trying new sex positions in a kinky outfit.

What I am suggesting here is to self love. Hard. To push depth fully into the gentle self-love and step into radical self-love, a tenacious love that is active, revolutionary, wild, that actively challenges societal norms, that doesn’t shrink when it gazes on its flaws, instead it throws its head up-hair in the wind and proclaims its worth against systems of oppression that may try to damage, knock, confuse, mislead ones-self.

What steps can we then take towards this radical self love?

Stages of Self Love:

1. Self Hatred
Self hatred is such an insidious place to be. It creeps through your door when you are so sure you’ve shut it. It lays heavily on your chest, a malevolent force with no distinctive shape-so it becomes impossible to identify and deal with it…

Self hatred could come from various places;
*criticism/rejection/disgust/anger shown at us or part of us at formative points of our life
*societally a belief that part of us is wrong/shameful/loathsome/doesn’t belong in someway
Self hatred is dangerous as it can be the source where limiting and damaging beliefs about ourselves can be forged and can take a lifetime to dismantle.

Looking with self awareness objectively, or with a therapist that can challenge your social/familial/relational norms/beliefs can bring clarity to some of the reasoning why we hold onto self hate.

2. Letting go of self criticism and comparison with others
Every human being has experienced an element of a self critical internal voice-this voice may have used comparison to others as a way of feeding the voice, retaining its power and keeping us locked in a cycle of anxiety, shame and despondency.

The soothing tonic to this is empathy, compassion, stepping away from comparison and embracing one’s individuality. Nurturing the ‘Compassionate Mother’ within through fostering another voice to challenge the harshness of the inner critic.

3. Developing self-refection and awareness
Is the foundation of the work in therapy.
When we are aware, we know our thoughts, we know our body sensations, we know the scripts we’ve read and written, we know how we react and respond, we know when we feel safe and when we feel threatened, we know our past, we know our present, we know our longings and desires and we can forge a way where we prize and advocate for our agency. Where we begin to put in place boundaries to radicalise our love of self.

4. Accepting your weaknesses and discovering your strengths
‘Show no weakness!’ Hasn’t that been a virtuous quality for far too long now? In accepting fully and truly our weaknesses, our struggles-we fully accept and treat with loving kindness our and others humanity, rather than disowning and shaming the very parts of us that need to belong and be held by us.
Pairing this with celebrating our strengths and fostering healthy pride of our achievements and personal values, fosters emotional health.

5. Getting to know your true self
Spending time with ourselves-listening to the whisper of who we are outside of the noises that life throws at us; how we are perceived by our family, our workplace, by our partner, our children, our friends, society. To be in touch with the very essence and life force that runs through our body and being-to me this is a spiritual connection with ourselves and interconnectivity with the world we inhabit.
Discovering this is grounding and a beautiful lifelong relationship that is constantly flowing and changing like the seasons, like the tide, like the planet we live on.

6. Accepting yourself as you are
Warts and all as the saying goes!
That we fully see and accept ourselves where we are, in this present moment.

7. Self-support and self-care
To listen to your needs-to take action and to advocate for them. To create a safe container for yourself through healthy boundaries and giving yourself what your physical/emotional/mental/spiritual body needs

8. Unconditional self love
We love and honour ourselves no matter what. There are no conditions or expectations on the love we give to ourselves.

With this in mind, maybe we can start a new tradition. Leave the trite cards, truffles and care bears on the shelf (or give them their one hour of fame) and lets instead look at some deep, long lasting self love that can influence the very way we see our life and ourselves.

Let’s begin a lifelong and beautiful relationship with ourselves, every part, the ones in the light and in the shade, so we don’t have to any longer, hide parts of who we are.