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    Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (For readers of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice)
    Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (For readers of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice)
    Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (For readers of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice)
    Ebook247 pages4 hours

    Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (For readers of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice)

    By Lori Deschene

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    About this ebook

    Learn to Love Yourself

    From Stress to Happiness. Many of us know intellectually that we need to be good to ourselves if we want to be happy. But it feels so hard. We are simultaneously the harsh judge and the lost, scared child who wants to stop feeling judged. It becomes a vicious cycle. It only stops when we step outside ourselves and observe how we got ourselves stuck. Only then can we learn to practice gratitude and positive thinking.

    Joy and Peace. Lori Deschene, creator of TinyBuddha.com and the self-help journals Tiny Buddha's Worry Journal and Tiny Buddha's Gratitude Journal, shares 40 unique perspectives and insights to help you stop judging yourself so harshly. Featuring stories selected from hundreds of TinyBuddha.com contributors, Tiny Buddha’s Guide to Loving Yourself provides an honest look at what it means to overcome critical, self-judging thoughts to create a peaceful, empowered life.

    More than a Self-Help Book. Tiny Buddha’s Guide to Loving Yourself is a collection of vulnerable reflections and epiphanies from people who are learning to love themselves, just like you. In this book, you will find:

    • Four authentic, vulnerable stories in each chapter
    • Insightful observations about our shared struggles and how to overcome them
    • Action-oriented suggestions based on the wisdom in the stories

    Readers of inspirational books and spiritual books like The Book of Joy or other books by Lori Deschene such as Tiny Buddha's Worry Journal  or Tiny Buddha's Gratitude Journal will love Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherConari Press
    Release dateOct 8, 2013
    ISBN9781609259129
    Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (For readers of Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice)
    Author

    Lori Deschene

    Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha, a self-help site that draws inspiration from thousands of contributors who share their stories and life lessons on the blog. She’s also the author of Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal, Tiny Buddha’s Worry Journal, the upcoming Tiny Buddha’s Inner Strength Journal, and more. She started the site after a decade struggling with depression, bulimia, and self-loathing because she wanted to recycle her pain into something useful for others, turn her former shame into pride, and enable others to do the same.  Lori identifies as many things—an introvert, a highly sensitive person, a dreamer, and a work-in-progress, to name a few. She loves traveling with her boyfriend, reading true crime books in the tub, playing with her sons, and planning all the adventures she dreams of one day sharing with them.

    Read more from Lori Deschene

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      Book preview

      Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself - Lori Deschene

      CHAPTER 1

      When You're Stuck in Your Childhood: Moving Beyond What You Learned

      SO MUCH OF HOW WE FEEL ABOUT OURSELVES PERTAINS TO our experiences as children. If you didn't grow up with love and support, odds are you've struggled to offer those things to yourself and others around you. If the people who were supposed to care for you neglected your emotional or physical needs, you probably concluded that your needs weren't important—and that you somehow deserved to be ignored.

      Ironically, if you grew up in an abusive environment, you may have felt overwhelming anger toward people who hurt you, only to grow up and adopt their voice in your head. That's the paradox of mistreatment: you may feel outraged when you recognize you've been wronged, and yet pick up where your abusers left off. We often treat ourselves the only way we know how—the way we learned through example from our parents and/or peers.

      For those who didn't experience abuse growing up, you likely still formed conclusions about yourself based on your relationship with your parents. Many of us learned at a young age that love, acceptance, and approval were conditional on certain behaviors and achievements. But we didn't conclude that our behaviors weren't good enough; we internalized it to mean that we weren't—that there was something innately wrong with us. According to psychotherapist and researcher Alice J. Brown, author of Core Beliefs Psychotherapy, because we're egocentric as children, we assume that when our parents aren't there for us, we're somehow to blame.

      As adults, we may understand that we did not deserve to feel bad and that we shouldn't torture ourselves for things other people have done. But sometimes despite knowing these things, we don't fully believe them. We don't grasp that we've always been beautiful, even if we've never been perfect, and that we've never deserved to feel scared, alone, or ashamed—not when we were kids, and not now.

      It's helpful to understand how our childhood experiences shaped us, but it's not about placing blame or playing the victim. It's about recognizing that we all learned to question ourselves, on some level, growing up—even those of us who had the most attentive parents, since various factors contribute to our beliefs about ourselves. And we can all learn to love, support, and nurture ourselves now, regardless of how we've struggled. We can all challenge our thoughts and beliefs to cultivate positive feelings about ourselves—flaws and all.

      How do we let go of the stories that we've been clinging to for years? How can we begin to move beyond trauma and pain? How can we release our shame and start recognizing our worth and beauty? Countless Tiny Buddha contributors have addressed these questions on the site, sharing their experiences and insights. Some of those include . . .

      OPENING YOURSELF UP TO LOVE WHEN YOU DIDN'T GROW UP WITH IT

      by Marie

      You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

      —BUDDHA

      I'VE ALWAYS CRAVED LOVE AND ATTENTION. THIS IS NOT TO SAY that I accepted love willingly—quite the opposite, in fact. If someone decided to like or even love me they would have to pass through a path of obstacles, being pushed, pulled, and tested at every corner. Only then, upon arrival at the finish line, would they gain my acceptance.

      As you can imagine, this eliminated a number of potential friends and partners, and I often found myself lonely and disappointed. The root of my inability to accept love easily stems from my childhood. My mother was unable to connect with me. She got pregnant during the height of her modeling career. After she gave birth, her career dried up. She resented the attention that a baby attracted, and, in addition to this, she was highly addicted to narcotics.

      Growing up with my mother telling me that she felt no love and was ashamed of me made me desperate to be the perfect daughter. I would go to any length to prove myself worthy, even taking drugs with her as a way of connecting. When I was fifteen years old, she upped and left with no good-bye, leaving me with my stepdad and an overwhelming sense of failure. If my own mother could not love me, how and why would anyone else?

      After my mother left, I disguised my pain through drugs and control. Drugs provided an instant, closely bonded social network. I tried to take control through self-harm. My life continued like this for ten years. I hated myself, and I was terrified of letting anyone in. Throughout these years, I did several stints in rehabilitation centers, where nurses and psychiatrists worked hard on me. I would almost give in and build connections with these people, but when the time came to leave these institutions I would find myself alone all over again.

      I was desperate for a loving relationship and a career. My battles were hindering me from achieving either. Luckily, I had a fantastic education under my belt, through a childhood spent at top boarding schools. It was just a matter of escaping this vicious cycle that I had spent the majority of my life spinning around in. I had stopped the drugs, but I was addicted to self-pity. Therapy had taught me that I needed to let go and learn to trust. This sounds quite easy now, but back then the very idea was not only terrifying but also impossible.

      I always dreaded birthdays and holidays. On my twenty-fifth birthday I woke up with an annual feeling of dread. I went to the store to buy some cigarettes, and the lady at the counter asked me for some identification. I handed it over and she said to me It's your birthday today. You look so young. Your mother should be very proud of you.

      It was such a simple compliment, but for some reason it struck a chord. After all my years of therapy, these words from a stranger hit home. I can't really explain it, but I felt a whole hoard of emotions release: anger, regret, understanding, and, finally, relief. I felt that, yes, my mother should be proud of me, and I felt sorry for her that she was unable to feel that way.

      I wanted to have a chance at life, to meet someone and have my own children who I could love and be proud of. I realized then that this would only happen if I stopped treating myself the same way my mother did. Considering how long and hard it was to reach this point, turning my life around was surprisingly easy. The hardest point was the

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