Self-reflection invites self-awareness, and self-awareness enables you to better regulate your emotions.
From this, we can get a deeper understanding of why we feel the way we feel and make positive steps towards change and growth.
Better emotional regulation equates to less anxiety.
Less anxiety means a more peaceful, contented, and stress-free life.
Feeling unloved is often subjective and means different things to different people.
Part of the process of figuring out why you feel unloved is figuring out what it means to you personally.
This involves discovering what your own unique love language is, for example, what words, behaviours and gestures make you or would make you feel loved.
Understanding your love language, however, means understanding your own emotional blueprint for what love looks and feels like.
For many people the default setting here is I am only loved if someone else is loving me.
This belief can spiral you into different ways of trying to achieve that feeling. For many of us, it will direct us into searching for that surge of internal feel good about yourself feeling from love from another person.
We might fantasise about finally being seen, approved of, embraced, teamed up with, validated, understood… like never before, finally becoming whole in a loving union with another. We crave to finally feel complete.
This is why many relationships are most fulfilling right at the beginning. It feels amazing to be recognised. It all goes great “until they get to know the real you” later on, right…?
The depressed you, the sad you, the you that needs a little more than it had them believe right at the beginning…
Suddenly, not only you, but also the other person is faced with carrying that unresolved heaviness and if you were led to that relationship with a belief that a relationship can “heal” that part of you, it is easy to start blaming the other person for not making you feel enough for them, when it was never their responsibility in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong – the right relationship helps you to feel all the above feelings. But rather than providing them, it complements and reflects your own self-love and inner stability; much like sunshine is reflected in a stream of a river… The river does not provide the sunshine. The sun does that. You are the sun.
