Learn to love yourself really does work. You need to understand why. If you love yourself or at least are happy with the person that you are, you stop being so clingy, and you lose the need to be jealous. My best friend has a better car than me. She also has a better house and a more reliable husband, but she’s my best friend because none of this counts. It's her personality, stability, and her love of life that makes her my best friend. In fact, once upon a time, she admitted to feeling a little jealous of me, and that shocked me. I asked her why because from where I was standing, I didn’t have anything she couldn’t have. I was no one special, and I was pretty poor. What she said demonstrated something fundamental to relationships.
“You are so happy in yourself,” was her reply. When I examined this, I found that her life was quite complex even though it seemed to me that she had everything a person could ever want. She loved life, and she seemed very stable in her attitude toward everyone, and I loved her as a friend but what was missing and what could actually have made her jealous? She didn’t have time for herself. Her commitments in life left her very little time for herself. That’s what she was jealous of, but it wasn’t a real jealousy that bites into a relationship. It was a yen on her part to experience that freedom.
When we talked about it, it seemed that although she was happy in her life and didn’t seem to have any problems, she was depriving herself of time that she needed for herself. We talked about it for a long time, and we worked out that she needed to reschedule her life a little bit so that an hour here and an hour there allowed her all the time that she needed. Her problem was that although she liked who she was, she always put other people in front of her when it came to allocating time within her life. It wasn’t a huge jealousy on her part, but when she saw that it was she who was causing her problem, she was able to put it right.
If you don’t love yourself in a manner equal to others, you tend to put yourself last, and when you do that for any length of time, it can cause you a great deal of negativity, self-esteem issues and resentment that leads to jealousy.
Loving yourself doesn’t mean ignoring everyobody else’s needs. It just means knowing the importance of your own needs and fitting them into your life. These make you feel more fulfilled and happier about your life and less inclined to feel any kind of jealousy. If someone has something emotionally that you don’t have, then the only place you can find is inside yourself, and that’s what self-love is all about. It’s a case of knowing priorities that lead you to feeling fulfilled.
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