To my beautiful friends on this self-love journey...
When it comes to self love and acts of self care, many of us will encounter resistance—an internal tug-of-war that holds us back. This resistance can feel confusing and frustrating, especially when we know how deeply we crave self-love. So why do we resist loving ourselves?
Let’s explore just some examples of why we might deny, reject, or disown parts of who we are.
Let’s go way back… to when we were young. When we depend completely on the love and approval of others—parents, caregivers, or people we admire. Their acceptance feels like a lifeline. When they disappoint or reject us, it can feel like a threat to our very survival. Our nervous systems may interpret the absence of their love as life threatening, triggering deep feelings of vulnerability and lack of safety. In situations like this, and without the tools to remedy, fragmentation can occur.
How Fragmentation Begins
When we face emotional pain or abandonment early on, we feel torn between our need for love and the reality that those we depend on may not always be there for us. To cope with this dissonance, we often begin to fragment—to split into parts that can navigate the pain and find a sense of control and safety.
Let’s look at a few examples of how this can happen:
Example 1: The Strong, Resilient Protector
Imagine a young girl whose parents split up, and her dad moves out. Her vulnerable self feels abandoned, scared, and rejected. Her nervous system is overwhelmed, interpreting this loss as a danger to her survival. But she can’t make her dad come back, so she finds another way to cope. To protect herself from the pain of feeling abandoned again, she learns to shut down those feelings of vulnerability. She decides she doesn’t need anyone. She becomes strong, independent, and resilient, believing that if she doesn’t need love or rely on anyone, she’ll never feel abandoned again. This side of her—the strong protector—helps her maintain control and feel safe. But in the process, her vulnerable side, the part that needs love and care, gets pushed away and forgotten.
Example 2: The People Pleaser
Now, imagine a child whose mother is emotionally detached or mentally ill. The child feels helpless and unloved, but they cling to the hope that maybe if they could just be perfect, they could make everything better. So, they begin to change themselves. They stop expressing their true feelings, never allowing themselves to be sad or angry. Instead, they always smile, bend over backwards to keep the peace, and devote themselves to making their mother happy. They believe that if they can just be the strong, cheerful, and pleasing person, they can keep the connection alive. But, in doing so, they suppress their true feelings, abandoning the parts of themselves that need to express sadness, anger, or their own needs. These hidden emotions don’t disappear—they stay locked away, creating inner conflict and resistance to self-love.
Example 3: The Cycle of Self-Blame and Self-Loathing
In abusive relationships, we often see a painful dynamic of self-blame and self-loathing. Imagine a person who is treated cruelly by their partner. Admitting that their partner is at fault—recognising that they are being mistreated—feels too painful because it not only marks the beginning of the end, and again a threat to connection (and subconsciously - survival) but it can make them feel powerless. They can’t understand or change their partner’s unkind, unloving and harmful behavior, and this lack of comprehension and control is terrifying. So instead, they turn the blame inward. They tell themselves that if only they were more loving, more giving, more perfect, their partner would treat them better. In this way, self-blame becomes a coping mechanism. It gives them a sense of safety and control: “If I can just change myself, then things will get better.” But this self-blame leads to a cycle of self-loathing. The more they berate themselves, the more disconnected they become from their authentic self. This disconnection from their true feelings and needs makes it even harder to access self-love, trapping them in a vicious circle of self-rejection and self-loathing.
In each of these examples, we see how fragmentation occurs. We push away our vulnerable, authentic selves to protect ourselves from pain. We create coping mechanisms that allow us to feel some semblance of control—whether by becoming strong and resilient, by pleasing others, or by blaming ourselves. Over time, these protective behaviors become deeply ingrained, reinforced by life experiences, and can almost form our personality or « identity ». We lose touch with the parts of us that long for love, acceptance, and healing.
Why Does This Lead to Resistance?
When we start a practice like writing love letters to ourselves, we may encounter resistance because, deep down, we know that these letters will bring us face to face with those abandoned, fragmented parts of ourselves. Writing a love letter to ourselves means acknowledging the parts of us we’ve pushed away—the parts that feel vulnerable, sad, and in need of love. It means recognising that our coping mechanisms, while protective, have also kept us small, scared, and disconnected from our true selves.
Our protective parts love us and want to keep us safe, but they do so by keeping us within familiar patterns—patterns that prioritise survival over self-love. They resist change because change feels risky, even though it holds the potential for deep healing.
But here’s the beautiful truth: the very resistance we feel is a sign that these parts of us—both the protective parts and the vulnerable parts—are ready to be acknowledged. They are calling out to us, asking to be seen, heard, and healed.
Embracing All Parts of Ourselves
To break this cycle, we must meet with compassion, both our protective parts and our vulnerable selves. We need to honour how our protective parts have kept us safe, even as we gently begin to reconnect with the vulnerable, authentic parts of us that long for love and acceptance.
It may feel scary to step into the unknown, to break out of the comfort zone of self-loathing and control. But as we begin to extend love to all parts of ourselves—our inner protector and our inner child—we can start to heal the fragmentation. We can reclaim the parts of us that we have disowned and come home to radical self-love.
I’m going to write another post where I will share a beautiful practice to help you meet and listen to these protective and vulnerable parts of yourself. For now, I encourage you to sit with your resistance. Acknowledge it, welcome it, and validate it.
Ask yourself if you are willing to look beyond it, to see what these parts of you truly need?
I hope this all makes sense. I have tried to put into words as best I can, my understanding of the resistance so many of us are facing. I am no expert. But I’m an eternal student, and I have been on my own self love journey for a number of years now; studying, practicing, healing, unraveling and reconnecting with all those beautiful lost parts of me, and learning to love and find compassion for the protective parts of me. And I want you to know that I understand your resistance because I feel it all the time and have felt it in relation to these love letters too. But if, just if, you could be willing to lean into that resistance, there is so much magic and transformation on the other side. A beautiful invitation to see where we are still holding ourselves back from being our truest fullest and most authentic selves - and where we can love ourselves all that bit more
All my love
Teri
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