Self-Love Is the Strongest Foundation for Relationships
Photo by Sinitta Leunen on Unsplash
Psychologist Maureen Hosier has broken down why people are how they are in relationships, discovering what the strongest foundation for relationships is.
“You can’t truly love others without loving yourself first.”
This has been a platitude constantly circling society to remind people about the strongest foundation for relationships. But what does this statement truly entail? Well, it’s easy to understand.
Love can’t be given unless it’s firstly abundant within oneself.
Think of love as a trick-or-treat candy. Nobody can give and make a child happy unless they stock up on their goods before the event starts. Such is also the same ideology as love. Unless people plant it within themselves first, no fruit can be given for others to enjoy and experience.
Love From a New Perspective
Author and clinical psychologist Maureen Hosier redefines every healthy relationship’s language in her self-help book You’ll Do Anything for Him/Her. Its nature as a guidebook focusing on personal problems reiterates self-love as the strongest foundation for relationships. She answers how and why people must work on themselves first in order to work with and fit others.
Taking a different route to relationship interventions, You’ll Do Anything for Him isn’t about what women or men can do with their partners to salvage their relationships. It doesn’t list sentimental processes to reconstruct connections. Instead, Maureen takes a step back and away from the relationship towards what people can do within themselves that will reflect their relationships.
Maureen Hosier focuses on what partners must heal within themselves for their partners.
Treating relationships doesn’t always revolve around playing house to fix their intimacy. Often, what pushes relationships to failure isn’t the lack of compatibility or intimacy. These can be present, but partners will still find themselves failing. Instead, what’s missing is emotional maturity that, perhaps, what’s pulling down a chance at a healthy relationship is nothing else but oneself.
Admittedly, self-love as the strongest foundation for relationships isn’t a new concept for everyone. However, regardless of how familiar everyone is with this idea, it can still be challenging to understand how they must love themselves in preparation for a healthy relationship.
Loving oneself is a broad notion.
There are plenty of ways to do this. But what precisely do people need to nurture within themselves to love their partners honestly and in ways they deserve?
Building This Strongest Foundation for Relationships
“How people are as partners is where they’ve been left emotionally.”
This sentiment is one of the focal discussion points Maureen Hosier has raised. When exposed to emotionally immature parents, people go into the world emotionally immature. This influences their ability to build strong and healthy relationships. Hence, people must introspect and heal their emotionally bruised inner children before entering relationships.
Commonly, people seek this healing in others.
They look for partners who can give them the love they missed as children. There is nothing entirely wrong with this, but a toxic dependency develops in asking others for this affection without working on it themselves. For self-love to act as the strongest foundation for relationships, people must use it to shower themselves with this love. Knowing that their situations resulted from the conditions they grew up in is the first step in examining whether there’s a toxic cycle to cut out. Acknowledging that these conditions aren’t theirs to bear is fundamental in growing out of this emotional turmoil.
By Loving Oneself, One Doesn’t Give the Other Hate
Maureen Hosier has recently joined Jill Nicolini for an episode on the PBN podcast network, where she talked about her focus of interest. The psychologist introduced a unique perspective that will drastically change how people view and treat their relationships.
One of the first things Maureen emphasized during the discussion was the impact of words. She says that how people express dissatisfaction about the relationship says more about them than their partners. Couples in session tend to blame their partners, pointing fingers when discussing who’s at fault. Taking the blaming stance isn’t only a dead giveaway of broken relationships, but it also reflects how emotionally immature people are.
Having this “You hurt me” mentality isn’t wrong…
If you are three years old.
In childhood, blaming is normal as it helps protect the self. But as people grow older, they must learn to defend themselves differently. Blaming isn’t one of those.
Prioritizing the self may be the most crucial factor in self-love, but putting oneself first doesn’t always mean throwing the other under the bus. For self-love to work as the strongest foundation for relationships, people must know how to heal and protect themselves without hurting others. Blaming may protect oneself from the pain and the guilt, but it also pushes others away. Instead of throwing fault, people must turn that pointing finger toward themselves and introspect.
How much of the problem is theirs to take? Acknowledge that not everything is the other’s fault and that, in some way, they have also contributed to the problem.
