Trueform Therapy

Tag: love

  • The Five Thousand Roses: What We Get Wrong About Loving Ourselves

    There’s a question I ask in the therapy room that most people can’t answer straight away. I ask people what loving themselves would actually mean, what it would look like on an ordinary Tuesday. And usually I get a puzzled look.

    Sometimes a nervous laugh. Sometimes a long silence. And then something like: “I don’t think I do. I can’t look in the mirror and think I’m amazing.”

    I’ve come to realise that this answer isn’t really about whether someone loves themselves. It’s about what they’ve been told self-love is supposed to feel like.

    What We Were Sold

    We’ve inherited a very particular idea of love. It comes to us through films, songs, novels, and the endless stream of social media posts about “self-love” — and almost all of it treats love as a feeling. Something that washes over you. You fall into it. You’re swept away by it. You know it’s real because of the warmth, the rush, the glow…

    So when we turn that idea inwards, we end up expecting to fall for ourselves the way people fall for each other in films. Self-love becomes standing in front of the mirror and admiring what you see. Feeling beautiful, clever, enough. And because everyone online seems to have access to this feeling, the people who don’t conclude that something must be missing in them.

    I see what this does to people. They wait for a feeling that doesn’t come, and the waiting itself becomes evidence against them. Everyone else can do this. Why can’t I?

    But I think the picture itself is back to front. The feeling isn’t where self-love starts. Usually, it’s where it ends up.

    The Mirror That Argues Back

    There’s a study I keep coming back to. In 2009, the psychologist Joanne Wood and her colleagues asked people to repeat the phrase “I’m a lovable person” and then measured how they felt. For people who already felt fairly good about themselves, it helped a little. For people with low self-esteem, it made them feel worse.

    When I first read this, it made immediate sense. When you say something to yourself that clashes too sharply with what you already believe, your mind doesn’t simply accept it. It argues back. “You’re lovable” summons up every piece of evidence for “no, I’m not”, and the gap between the words and the inner experience grows wider.

    It was a small study, and I don’t want to build too much on it. But it matches what I see every week. Trying to feel self-love on demand, when it isn’t there, often leaves people feeling more of a failure than when they started.

    Kristin Neff, who has spent decades researching self-compassion, offers a useful way of understanding why. She distinguishes between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem is a judgement — how favourably do I rate myself? — and it rises and falls with how things are going and how we compare with others. Self-compassion isn’t a rating at all. It’s a way of treating yourself, especially when things go badly. In her research with Roos Vonk, self-compassion was linked to steadier, less conditional feelings of self-worth over time than self-esteem.

    The mirror version of self-love is really self-esteem in disguise. It asks you to approve of what you see. No wonder it’s so fragile.

    Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

    Love as Something You Do

    Long before any of this research existed, Erich Fromm was saying something similar. In The Art of Loving, written in 1956, he argued that we had misunderstood love by treating it as something that happens to us. For Fromm, love was an activity — something we practise, something we get better at. He described it as “standing in” rather than “falling for”.

    He named what that practice involves: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. And he was clear that this applies to how we treat ourselves. Self-love, for him, had nothing to do with vanity. People who seem selfish, he argued, usually don’t love themselves too much, but too little.

    The American writer and cultural critic bell hooks picked up the same thread decades later in All About Love, writing about love as a verb rather than a feeling — something shown through how we act, consistently, over time.

    When I hold this alongside what my clients tell me, the question changes shape. “Do I love myself?” stops being a question about a feeling you either have or don’t. It becomes a question about practice. How am I treating myself, day by day?

    Five Thousand Roses

    I keep returning to The Little Prince, and to one moment in it that I think is often overlooked.

    The prince has spent a great deal of time on his tiny planet caring for a single rose. He has watered her, sheltered her from the wind, put up with her vanity and her moods. She has told him she is the only one of her kind in the whole universe.

    Then, on Earth, he walks into a garden full of roses. Five thousand of them, every one exactly like his. And he is heartbroken. His rose, it turns out, is ordinary.

    It’s the fox who helps him understand. His rose isn’t special because she’s the most beautiful, or because she’s unique. She matters because of the time he has spent on her, the care he has given her. The love is in the tending.

    This, I think, is exactly where the mirror version of self-love goes wrong. It assumes you need to find yourself exceptional in order to love yourself — that you need to be the best rose in the garden. But the prince didn’t love his rose because she outshone the others. He loved her because she was his to care for.

    And it works the other way round, too. If loving the rose means taking care of her, then taking care of yourself is loving yourself. Not a step towards it. Not a preparation for the real thing. The thing itself.

    You don’t have to admire yourself to love yourself. You just have to be the one you tend.

    Photo by omerovic cetinkaya on Pexels.com

    Does the Feeling Ever Come?

    People often ask me this, and it’s a fair question. Is the warm feeling a myth?

    I don’t think so. But in my experience it tends to arrive after the care, not before it. When people begin treating themselves with consistent, practical kindness, the warmer feelings often follow — slowly, sometimes to their own surprise.

    I want to be honest about what the research can and can’t tell us here. Most studies on self-compassion run in the other direction: they show that people who are kinder to themselves are more likely to look after their health. A 2015 review led by Fuschia Sirois found that self-compassion was linked to healthier habits around sleep, food, exercise and stress, though the link was modest.

    The idea that doing can come before feeling has stronger support from a neighbouring field. Behavioural activation is a therapy for depression built on exactly this principle: rather than waiting to feel better before re-engaging with life, you begin with action, and mood often follows. In a large UK trial published in The Lancet in 2016, behavioural activation turned out to be just as effective as cognitive behavioural therapy.

    That isn’t research on self-love, and I’d hold it as a strong hint rather than proof. But it fits what I see. The feeling is often the result of the care. It isn’t the entry ticket.

    When Kindness Feels Dangerous

    There’s a part of this that rarely gets talked about, and it’s the part I think matters most.

    For some people, being kind to themselves isn’t just difficult to feel. It’s uncomfortable. Even threatening. Paul Gilbert, who developed compassion-focused therapy, noticed this in his clinical work and went on to research it. He found that some people — particularly those who are very self-critical — can actually fear self-compassion, and that this fear goes hand in hand with insecure attachment, depression, anxiety and stress.

    When I think about this through the lens of early experience, it starts to make sense. We learn how to treat ourselves from how we were treated. If care was patchy, conditional, or simply absent when we were small, we may never have seen what steady, ordinary care looks like up close. It’s hard to give yourself something you were never shown.

    Sometimes part of this work is grief. Grief for the care that should have been there and wasn’t.

    And this is exactly why thinking of love as action can be a gentler way in. You don’t need to feel tender towards yourself to drink a glass of water. To go to bed a little earlier. To book the appointment you’ve been putting off. The actions can come first, long before the feelings feel safe.

    Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

    Tending, Not Fixing

    There’s one more thing I want to say, because I’ve seen how easily this idea can be turned against people.

    The same action can come from love or from punishment. Going to the gym because you value your body is not the same as going because you can’t stand it. Eating well because you want to feel nourished is not the same as controlling food because you don’t feel you deserve to take up space. A strict routine can be a form of care — or a way of policing yourself.

    This is where Fromm’s idea of respect becomes important. Care without respect slides into control. Tending a plant means working with what it actually needs. It doesn’t mean forcing it to grow into something else.

    So the question I’d invite you to ask isn’t just am I looking after myself? It’s am I tending myself, or trying to fix myself?

    And consistency doesn’t mean perfection. Many people find routines genuinely hard — because of energy, health, circumstance, or simply the way their mind works. For them, “show up for yourself every day” can quickly become one more standard to fail. But a gardener doesn’t stop loving a plant because they forgot to water it one week. Tending is about coming back. Again and again. Not about never missing a day.

    Just the One You Tend

    If you’ve spent years feeling that self-love is something everyone else seems to have and you somehow don’t, I’d like to offer you a different way of looking at it.

    You don’t have to be the best rose in the garden. You don’t have to look in the mirror and feel amazing. You don’t have to wait for a feeling before you’re allowed to start.

    Love — including love for yourself — is built from small, repeated acts of care. A glass of water. An early night. Saying no when you mean no. Asking for help. Coming back to yourself after you’ve drifted away.

    The feelings may come, in their own time. And if they don’t come easily, that isn’t a sign you’ve failed. It may simply mean you’re learning something you were never taught.

    And if it feels too hard to do alone, therapy can be a place to practise it, slowly, at your own pace.

    If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further

    If the idea of love as something you practise rather than something you feel speaks to you, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956) is the place to start. It’s short, surprisingly readable for a book written seventy years ago, and still one of the clearest things written on the subject.

    For a warmer, more personal take on the same idea, bell hooks’ All About Love (2000) explores what it means to treat love as an action, in families, friendships and in how we treat ourselves. It’s honest about where many of us first learned our ideas of love, and what those lessons cost.

    If you’d like to understand the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion, Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011) brings together her research in an accessible way, with practical exercises alongside it.

    If kindness towards yourself feels uncomfortable or even threatening, Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind (2009) is worth reading. Gilbert writes about why compassion can be so hard for people who are very self-critical, and he doesn’t pretend it’s simple.

    And if you haven’t read The Little Prince since childhood, or at all, it’s worth going back to. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote it in 1943 as a children’s book, but it reads very differently as an adult.

    For those who want to look at the research directly:

  • How Belonging Shapes Our Thoughts

    I’ve been thinking lately about how difficult it can be to know which of our thoughts are actually ours.

    Not in the obvious sense. Of course I have my own opinions. I know what I like, what I believe, what I agree with and what I don’t.

    At least, I think I do.

    Every now and then I come across an idea that makes me stop and wonder: Did I arrive at this myself, or have I simply heard it often enough that it now feels like mine?

    A slightly unsettling thought when you consider how many opinions you have accumulated over the years.

    I suspect most of us do this more than we realise.

    Photo by Askar Abayev on Pexels.com

    We grow up around other people’s ideas long before we have the ability to question them. We learn what our families think, what our friends think, what people like us are supposed to think. Some of these things are said explicitly. Others are just implied. We pick them up from the atmosphere around us.

    And perhaps we learn something else at the same time: which thoughts make us feel closer to people, and which ones might create distance.

    I notice this most when I disagree with someone I care about.

    There is something very different about thinking, I don’t agree with this, when the other person is a stranger, compared with when it is someone whose opinion matters to you.

    With a stranger, it can simply be a disagreement.

    With someone close to us, it can feel so much more personal.Sometimes we don’t even notice that we have started editing ourselves. We soften an opinion. We leave something unsaid. We decide that perhaps it isn’t worth getting into. Or we do that very adult thing where we say, “Interesting,” while internally having written a seventeen-page rebuttal.

    None of this necessarily feels dishonest. Sometimes it is simply part of being considerate. But I wonder where the line is. At what point does being adaptable become losing track of what you actually think? And perhaps even more difficult: how would we know?

    I wonder how much belonging influences our thinking

    We tend to think of belonging as an emotional need and independent thinking as an intellectual one, as though they belong to separate parts of us.

    But I’m not sure they are that separate.

    If belonging matters to us—and of course it does—then it makes sense that the possibility of losing it might influence what we are willing to question.

    Imagine discovering that you no longer agree with something your family has always believed.

    Or that your friends have become very certain about an issue you feel much less certain about.

    Or that you have changed your mind about something that once felt central to who you were.

    The difficult part may not be the new idea itself.

    It might be what the new idea means for your relationships.

    There is a particular discomfort in realising that your thinking has moved somewhere the people around you haven’t.

    You can still love them. You can still feel close to them. But suddenly there is something you cannot quite share in the same way.

    And I wonder if this is one reason certainty can feel so appealing. Being certain can be socially comforting. You know where you stand. You know who agrees with you. You don’t have to sit in the awkward space of I’m not sure yet.

    Photo by Anderson Santos on Pexels.com

    Sometimes I think we underestimate how uncomfortable that space is. There is a huge amount of pressure to have an opinion. On politics. Parenting. Relationships. Therapy. Food. Sleep. Screens. Whether people should have screens. Whether people who have screens are ruining society.

    Apparently, we are all expected to have a position. And preferably one that fits neatly into a sentence.

    The strange thing about changing your mind

    We often praise people for thinking for themselves, but I wonder if we sometimes make independent thinking sound much simpler than it is.

    It is easy to imagine the independent thinker as someone who stands apart from everyone else and follows their own judgement. But what if I disagree with everyone around me simply because I don’t want to be like them? That doesn’t feel particularly independent. I’m still organising my thinking around the group. I’ve just chosen the opposite position.

    So perhaps thinking independently isn’t really about agreeing or disagreeing. Maybe it has more to do with being able to pause long enough to ask yourself what you actually think.

    And that sounds simple until you try it. Because sometimes what we think is mixed up with what we fear.

    Or what we want other people to think of us.

    Or what we have always believed about ourselves.

    Or what would be easier for our relationships.

    Or what would make us feel like we belong.

    And sometimes, annoyingly, we don’t know which is which.

    What happens when we change?

    I’ve always found the idea of changing your mind slightly uncomfortable. Not because I think changing your mind is wrong. Quite the opposite. I hope I change my mind about things. I hope I learn.

    But there is something unsettling about looking back at an earlier version of yourself and realising that you no longer agree with them.

    What do we do with that?

    We often want to make the story neat afterwards. I used to think that because I didn’t know better. Now I understand. Lovely. Very satisfying. Almost suspiciously satisfying.

    Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

    Real change isn’t always that tidy. Sometimes the old version of us had a point. Sometimes the new version does too. Sometimes we simply see something differently because we have lived a little longer.

    And perhaps we don’t need to decide that one version was completely wrong in order to allow another version to exist. Maybe changing your mind doesn’t always mean that your former self was foolish. Maybe it just means you have changed.

    Perhaps belonging needs a little more room

    This makes me wonder whether we have been thinking about belonging in the wrong way.

    Perhaps belonging isn’t necessarily about finding people who think like us. Maybe it is about finding relationships in which we are allowed to think differently and still remain connected. There is something quite reassuring about being around people who agree with you.

    But there is something else, perhaps more valuable, about being able to say:

    I don’t see it that way.

    Or:

    I’m not sure.

    Or even:

    I used to think that, but I don’t anymore.

    And knowing that the relationship can withstand it.

    That last part might be harder than it sounds. I don’t think we can ever completely separate ourselves from the people around us. And I’m not sure we should want to. Other people influence us in ways that can be wonderful. They introduce us to ideas we would never have encountered on our own. They challenge us. They change us.

    Some of our best thinking probably happens because someone else put an idea in front of us that we would never have found by ourselves.

    So maybe the point isn’t to become completely independent of other people’s thinking. Maybe it is simply to become curious about the influence they have on us. To notice when we are agreeing because something feels true, and when we might be agreeing because it feels safer. To notice when we are disagreeing because we have thought something through, and when we might simply be trying to prove that we are our own person. And perhaps to become a little more comfortable with not knowing.

    Because I suspect there is a strange relationship between belonging and independent thinking. We may need other people in order to become ourselves. And we may sometimes need enough security in those relationships to risk becoming someone slightly different from who we were yesterday.

    Maybe belonging isn’t about never having to change.

    Maybe it’s about knowing you don’t have to stay the same just to keep your place.

    Interested in working together?
    Find out more about therapy and my approach at Trueform Therapy

  • How Language Shapes Who You Are

    You move to a new country, learn a new language, and suddenly you’re the shy one at parties. Back home, you could talk the ears off a donkey. Here, you’re nodding politely while someone explains the bus timetable for the third time. Or maybe it’s the other way round. You were always quiet in your mother tongue, but now in another language, you’ve developed a sudden flair for dramatic storytelling and ordering coffee with flair. A lot of people who speak more than one language say they feel like different people depending on which language they’re using. But is that just in our heads, or does language really reshape our personalities?

    What the research says (yes, actual science)

    It turns out it’s not just in your head. Studies have shown that people really do behave differently depending on the language they’re speaking. In one experiment, bilingual participants described themselves differently in English than in their native language. They were more assertive, individualistic and achievement-focused in English and more community-minded and humble in their first language. Same person, same day, different vibes. Psychologists think this might be because each language activates different cultural frameworks, like switching between mental apps. You load up English and suddenly you’re talking about your personal goals. Switch to Spanish, and now it’s all about the family WhatsApp group.

    What this means when you move countries

    So, you’ve packed your bags, moved to a new country, and suddenly you’re a slightly different person. Not in a dramatic soap opera way (no evil twin involved), but maybe you’re quieter than you used to be. Or more polite. Or more apologetic, especially if you’ve moved to Britain and have absorbed the national pastime of saying “sorry” to lampposts.

    This shift isn’t just about language skills. It’s about context. The version of you that existed in your home country had a history, inside jokes, and unspoken rules. You knew how to order your coffee and complain about the weather properly. Now, you’re in a different culture, with different expectations, and sometimes you’re just trying to figure out if “How are you?” is a real question or not.

    All of this can quietly shake your sense of identity. It’s easy to start wondering: if I can’t express myself in the way I used to, am I still me?

    Why it matters in therapy

    When people come to therapy, they often bring the version of themselves they know how to explain. But what happens if that version is shaped by a second language? Or if the really raw stuff, the stuff that shaped you, only lives in your mother tongue?

    Therapy in a second language can feel like trying to cry underwater. The emotion is there, but it doesn’t always come out right. Maybe you can’t find the word for a feeling. Maybe you do, but it doesn’t hit the same. Maybe your therapist is kind and warm, but they don’t laugh at your jokes because humour doesn’t travel well.

    On top of that, cultural norms around emotions can be wildly different. In some cultures, naming your feelings is normal. In others, it’s like saying Voldemort out loud. So when therapy invites you to “explore your inner world”, you might find you need a translator. Not just for the words, but for the whole emotional landscape.

    This is not a reason to avoid therapy. It’s a reason to find one that gets this. Because feeling like yourself, all of your selves, matters. Even the version of you that mispronounces “anxiety” or accidentally says something rude when trying to be deep.

    Reclaiming all your selves

    Here’s the beautiful part: living between languages doesn’t make you fragmented. It makes you layered.

    You don’t have to choose between the version of you who laughs too loud in your native language and the quieter, more careful one who speaks English. They’re both real. Both you. And neither of them is a failure just because the right words don’t always come quickly.

    Therapy can be a space to explore all your selves. Not to fix them, but to understand them. To notice who shows up in different contexts. To grieve the parts that feel left behind. And maybe, to gently reintegrate the voices that haven’t had space in a while.

    Whether you’re fluent or fumbling, accented or code-switching, your story matters. And it deserves to be told in whatever language feels most like home.