Value Your Relationship With Yourself

In this blog, we talk a lot about relationships with others, but what about the most important relationship? The person we see in the mirror every day is our companion for life. This post is going to be full of journal prompts. Begin with these questions below. Take a few minutes and answer honestly:

• Are you in a healthy relationship with yourself?
• How do you feel about your body?
• What about the way you speak to yourself internally?
• In what ways do upkeep your relationship with yourself?
• Is there room for improvement?

In my 30-Day Breakup Recovery Journal, a section is dedicated to you and reacquainting yourself with who you are and who you want to be. Getting over a breakup is hard because all of our beliefs and values come into question. My journal aims to pull out all of the little things you forgot about yourself as an individual.

By far, the most valuable relationship we will have in our lives is our relationship with ourselves. Imagine getting on a plane for the duration of your life and sitting next to a baby. Would you want your seatmate screaming and crying or composed and serene? That’s an easy answer. Of course not! We need to do what we can to keep our neighbor baby happy so that we can enjoy our flight.

How to value your relationship with yourself?

By employing boundaries, positive self-talk, affirmations and gratitude, as well as self-care.

Boundaries. Having healthy boundaries with others is a surefire way to protect your relationship with yourself. The author Gillian Flynn wrote about “the cool girl” in her novel Gone Girl. Never in my life have I related more to a description of how much a person can deny themselves in order to appear cool. The cool girl has no boundaries and is easily controlled by their partner by denying their needs and wants in a relationship and being “down for anything”. Having boundaries means not losing yourself in a relationship and continuing to value yourself.

Positive self-talk. An aspect of my personality that I had to wrestle wildly with in order to find happiness was my inner-critic. Karen, yes, that’s her name, would constantly bully or belittle me into thinking I did not deserve the good things in my life and tell me how worthless I was every day.

As a woman with borderline personality disorder, I have to use Dialectical Behavior Therapy as a means of combatting Karen. When my inner-critic is like, “Hey, everything about this is wrong and you suck,” I have to come up with an opposing thought and combat the negative immediately. For example, I say “I’m doing the best I can, and I rule.”

Affirmations and gratitude. Each Sunday, I post affirmations and recount what I am grateful for over the last week. Changing the focus from what we don’t have or what we have lost to appreciating all the things that we’ve accomplished and gained can really improve inner relationships. The beauty of searching for the little or big things that make me happy and has made letting go easier and led to a better place.

Self-care. Effective self-care is unique to each person. Some people indulge in a bubble bath or meditate, while others go running or simply spend time with their pets. Figuring out what sets my mind at ease has been a fun little game. One of my unique self-care tactics is putting ocean-waves on my speaker and journaling for thirty minutes about whatever comes across my mind. There’s no real aim or goal for the writing, it’s more like downloading information from brain to paper. Sometimes stories about mermaids or dreams about the future come out.

Planning & Goal-setting. What do you want to work toward in the future? A lot of times when I felt depressed, I felt like I didn’t have anything going for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but life also felt like it was flying by each day. There wasn’t really a reason to get out of bed each day until I started setting goals. In 2019, I decided to make a change. I made a plan for the things I wanted to accomplish in a week, a month, six months, and a year. I kept at it, and started accomplishing things, including starting and finishing my novel The Girl in the Mural in just a few months!

Although a lot of the plans and goals I made had to be modified as I went, I felt a sense of purpose. Adjustments are just a part of life, and our problems can just be considered metaphorical turbulence on our life’s plane ride. Having a purpose made each new day worthwhile.

Journal Prompts

This is a good opportunity for more journaling! Here are your prompts.

• What do I want to accomplish by the end of today?
• What do I want to accomplish in the next seven days?
• What do I want to accomplish in the next two weeks?
• What do I want to accomplish in the next month?

Along with the time constraints, it is also good to understand why you’d like to carry these goals to fruition. Answer these questions with each new goal.

• Is this a realistic time frame to accomplish my goal?
• Why is accomplishing this important to me?
• How will it make positive change in my life?
• How will I maintain the progress I make with each new goal?
• What alternatives do I have if I can’t accomplish my goal?
• How will I get support in reaching my goals?

There we are, my take on how to reach a healthy relationship with yourself. My neighbor-baby on my life’s plane ride is well-taken care of and is also enjoying the ride. We hit quite a few bumps, but taking the time for introspection and reflection has helped me so much. One thing that I will always have to work hard at is keeping my inner-critic at bay with opposing ideas.

How do you maintain your relationship with yourself? What aspect of your relationship do you think needs a little work?

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