To Improve Your Relationships, Learn to Like Yourself

by Royane Real

Can you really say that you like yourself? Or that you love yourself?

For many of us, this is a hard thing to do. We are so critical of ourselves.

When we don't have good self esteem, many areas of our life will suffer. We will find it hard to make good relationships and friendships. We will feel devastated if we think someone else doesn't like us. A lack of self esteem can send us on a downward spiral of loneliness and depression.

Feeling that nobody likes us or loves us is one of the most agonizing and devastating feelings in the world. Feeling as if you are unliked and unloved is tremendously depressing, because human beings are hard wired to be social creatures. We need to feel like a part of a group, or a part of humanity, even though we also want to be appreciated as unique human beings.

If you have been feeling unliked by everybody else, the first thing you need to do is to ask yourself if it’s really true. Is it absolutely true that nobody likes you, and that nobody loves you? Or is it just a few people you’re worried about? Are you making your situation much worse than it is because you are putting yourself down, or imagining that others are hostile towards you?

Sometimes we get really down on ourselves, and we start to exaggerate all the bad things that are going on in our lives. For example, if someone snubs us or hurts us, we might expand the event to make it much more negative and extreme than what really happened.

Instead of saying to ourselves, “Well it looks like Judy was in too much of a hurry to talk to me today.” We say instead, “Judy didn’t want to talk to me. She probably hates me or thinks I’m stupid. Maybe she doesn’t think I’m cool enough for her. I’ll bet everybody is laughing at me behind my back, even though they pretend to be nice to my face. I probably don’t have any real friends, but maybe it’s because I’m sort of strange. In some ways, I’m not really normal. No wonder nobody likes me. Everything is terrible.”

Once you start to say negative things to yourself, you will also start to imagine a lot of negative thoughts coming from other people, even though you don’t have any real evidence. The negative thoughts you feed yourself will hurt you even worse than the negative things other people may say about you.

Once you start a chain of negative put downs of yourself, you will set off a cycle of depression and lack of confidence. Your self esteem will plummet. That is a shame, because it’s your own sense of self esteem and self support you really need to have, especially when it seems that other people may be saying negative things about you.

Let’s face it, it does take confidence to interact with other people. If you don’t have confidence in yourself, you won’t get the courage to mix with others. If you run into people who are bullies and intimidators, you won’t know how to value yourself.

The real reason we feel threatened when other people seem as if we don’t like us is because it can trigger our inner fears that we really aren’t good enough.
If you experience a situation where you feel that nobody likes you, it can be a signal that you need to like yourself.