Want a Better Relationship with Yourself?
The Treat Yourself Series
Introduction
You want to know the biggest problem in mental health today? It’s the way we try to navigate our relationship with ourselves. Imagine for a second that you are trying to help someone else, and they tell you that they are really struggling to motivate themselves to work on their dream side hustle. In response, you say, “You just gotta do it!” Would you consider that good advice? No, of course not. It’s brain-dead, useless advice. And yet, it’s the kind of advice we give to ourselves all the time. Why? Because we treat ourselves fundamentally differently from how we treat other people.
Welcome to The Treat Yourself Series
During the month of September, I’ll be releasing an entire series of content focused on building a better relationship with yourself.
“Oh great, another self-help guru telling me that I need to be more compassionate with myself.” No. That doesn’t work because when you say, “It’s okay, you’re a good person. You deserve love,” deep down you know you’re lying to yourself. This wouldn’t even be a good thing to say to someone else. Which brings us to where I’d like to begin this series—your relationship with others.
Building Better Relationships
If you want a good relationship with yourself, you first have to understand how to have a good relationship with others because ultimately, they are actually the same process. When you are working through something with someone, whether it’s a conflict between the two of you or if you’re just talking to them about something that they are struggling with in their life, telling them “just do it” or “it’ll be okay” isn’t going to do much. What actually helps is making the person feel heard and understood and helping them to explore so they can gain new perspectives. Here’s how to do that:
Reflective Listening
As you listen to what the person is saying, let them know how you are understanding it. Remember that game telephone where you whisper a message to the person next to you and by the time it gets all the way around the circle it’s a completely different message? Reflective listening acts on the same principle. This idea that by you hearing what they say, processing it, saying it back to them, them hearing you say it, and processing it, it actually helps them to see it from a different perspective. For instance, let’s say that you’re talking to a friend and they say to you, “My boyfriend is just always criticizing my body!” To practice reflective listening you might say something like, “It sounds like your boyfriend really makes you feel bad about how you look.”
Open-Ended Questions
By asking people questions that make them stop and think about things that they’ve never stopped to think about before, it helps them gain new understanding and perspective on a situation. The reason we want open-ended questions and not yes-or-no questions is because yes-or-no questions don’t leave as much room for exploration. There are only two options—yes or no. To continue the example we used for reflective listening, you might ask a question like, “What do you think makes him comment on your body all the time?”
Validation
As you come to understand the person’s situation better, you can begin to validate their experience. Validation is a very simple two-step formula. Step 1: Tell the person that what they are feeling makes sense. Step 2: Tell them why it makes sense. If you don’t know why, ask questions. Nowadays you hear a lot of phrases like “That’s valid,” or “I understand,” or “I hear you,” and often they can feel kind of empty. The reason for this is because they are missing step 2. By neglecting step 2, you aren’t proving to the person that you actually understand. When you validate correctly, it feels like a warm blanket. Continuing our ongoing example, “It makes sense that you feel really self-conscious about your body because your boyfriend is constantly criticizing it.”
Homework
You hear this trite expression all the time: “You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” This is total BS. Loving yourself is way harder than loving others, and loving others can actually help you figure out how to love yourself. So, your homework after reading this is to start practicing these three skills in your relationships with other people. Next week we’ll dive more into how you can start applying some of these practices to yourself.
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