The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First

By Senee Seale

Are you looking for a way to strengthen the relationships you have in your life? Would you like to learn how to love yourself more and increase your self-confidence? Loving yourself is the most important key to happiness in life and relationships. This book will help you break out of the programming that tells you that other people's love and acceptance is more important than your own. Changing your thinking about self-love will give you freedom and the fortitude to no longer allow others to control you by making you preform to their desired wishes through the threats of taking their love away. When your source of love comes from within, you are no longer needy for the love of others, and you can have more accurate judgment on whom you allow into your life. Author Senée Seale will guide you through this process so that you can not only love yourself in a healthy way, but so that you can also more adequately love others. Putting self-love into action is a game changer and will transform your life and relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Becoming Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393606420

Senee Seale

Senée Seale is the face and voice of The Princess Guide. She spent her first career as a print journalist and then earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from The University of Texas at Dallas where she worked as a research assistant in the Couples’ Daily Lives Laboratory studying relationships. She has also studied Substance Abuse Counseling, and has graduate level training in Marriage & Family Therapy and Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Senée is a Qualified Mental Health Professional, behavioral clinician, life guide, Certified Christian Counselor, singer, writer and public speaker. She is passionate about helping people become all they were created to be through creating positive changes in their lives and relationships.

Book preview

The Princess Guide to loving yourself first

Senée Seale

The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First

Copyright © 2020 by Senée Seale.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

For information contact:

Becoming Publishing

BecomingPublishing.com

ThePrincessGuide.com

[e-mail]

Book and cover design by Seneé Seale.

First Edition: June 2020

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Contents

Introduction           5

1. What is self-love?        11

2. Insight into yourself           27

3. Looking for love in all the wrong places       39

4. Do you know who you are?           47

5. You are not worthless            53

6. Grieving: A path to self-love           65

7. Self-love & how to do it         75

8. How to get and keep confidence       93

9. Find your happy place and live there       105

10. Setting & enforcing boundaries        117

11. Have faith, keep your crown, and move forward       123

About the author         139

Acknowledgments         141

Introduction

W

hen I write books (or blog posts, for that matter), I don’t go looking up keywords first to see what will sell. I know there’s a market for these books because I talk to strangers on the street, in restaurants, and stores. I listen to the stories they tell the people with them and those they are talking to on their phones. I look at what people are saying in their social media posts, I carefully monitor what people are reading on my blog, and I know from my own experiences and those of my friends that these issues are problems that need to be solved.

As I was writing this book, I had an internal crisis and had to stop writing. I found myself asking, What exactly is love? Has anyone in my life ever really loved me truthfully, unconditionally? (I’ll answer those questions in this book. Just keep reading,) During this same time, I had an encounter with someone from my past. This person was spewing negativity at me because of something I had written. It isn’t the first time this has happened, but my reaction was much different this time. Had this encounter taken place a year or two earlier, I would have gone into pleasing mode and tried to explain and justify myself. This time, however, I first found myself angry. Then, I realized that this person had not changed or done any internal work to change. I didn’t respond at all because this person was not treating me with love, compassion, or even common decency. I realized right away that I wasn’t being approached properly, and I needed to stay on my throne with my crown on and not respond. I sent this person silent well wishes, but refused to be moved. In fact, it was just what I needed to spur me into action to finish this book, and it was an act of love that I showed to myself.

I’ll admit it—I’ve struggled with loving myself for the majority of my life. I watched Hallmark and Hollywood movies that told me the only way to find true love and happiness was if someone outside myself loved and approved of me. I believed it. I thought I had to be pleasing and perfect to receive unconditional love. However, no matter what I did or how correctly I performed, I never experienced that love (for very long, at least). I now know—after more than four decades on this planet—that this is false! True, lasting, real love comes, first and foremost, from within.

Loving yourself is—in my personal and professional opinion—the most important key to happiness in life and relationships. I know what it’s like to have people tell you through their words and actions that you have no worth and are not lovable. I also know what it’s like to break out of that programming and no longer allow others to control your thinking and life.

If you don’t know me or haven’t read any of my work, I’m a Qualified Mental Health Professional and print journalist. I worked as a research assistant in the Couples Daily Lives Laboratory at The University of Texas at Dallas studying relationship conflict and reconciliation while I was earning my Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology. I love data, but I also like finding facts from many different sources. I’m going to present scientific research, expert commentary, Biblical scripture, and my own experiences in this book. Just keep an open mind, and if you don’t agree, then take what resonates with you, use it to improve yourself, and discard the rest.

Let me say this upfront: There is nothing wrong with wanting to be loved. I believe we were created to love and to be loved. The problem occurs when we give that power of love to another person outside of ourselves—when the love from another person is more important to us than how we feel about and love ourselves. If given to the wrong people, they can and will use it to control, dominate, and hurt us. I’ve seen it time and time again and experienced it personally.

The answer to this problem is to love yourself first. That way, no one can take love away from you when the main source of it comes from within yourself. A few months after publishing The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart where I devoted a chapter to this topic, I read Christian Mickelsen’s book Abundance Unleashed where he seems to share my opinion.

The more attachments you have to being loved, the more neediness, the more you’re going to be searching for that love out in the world, and it’s always going to be elusive, he wrote. I’m not proud to say that I see myself in those words. When I look back over my life, I have realized that I was like a needy puppy begging at the feet of men and others outside of myself for love. I can now see that I went from a place of empowerment and loving myself first to a place of neediness where I could do nothing to please or get the love I deeply desired from another person. When we’re operating in a place of desperation, we are operating in lack and disempowerment—It isn’t a good look on anyone and typically repels people away from us instead of attracting them to us.

When you’ve had your heart broken—especially if it’s happened more than once or the situation was very traumatic—it’s easy to blame yourself and let the other person off the hook. While I don’t want you to plot revenge nor look for ways to get even, I do want you to give credit where credit is due and place responsibility where responsibility is due. If you are the person responsible for the demise of the relationship, then you need to own it, do something to make up for it, and change your actions.

If you’re anything like me, you wouldn’t go anywhere in the vicinity of a snake, even if it’s behind a glass wall. So, why do we end up letting them (in human form) into our precious lives and sacred beds? Because they come disguised as handsome men or beautiful women promising us everything we’ve ever dreamed about. By the time we realize they’re actually snakes, it’s too late—we’re already head-over-heels in love.

When someone leaves you, you’re put in a tough spot (be it through actual death or abandonment). It feels more like being stuck than anything else because the love you have for that person (if it’s genuine love) doesn’t go away just because he or she did. If you’re a person of faith you believe in the impossible no matter how crazy it may seem or feel. (It’s been drilled into me from graduate school studying psychotherapy that crazy isn’t a clinical term, but it can be a genuine feeling nonetheless.) You’re still left all alone—waiting for love to come back to you either from the person who left or someone new. I’m just going to say what you’re not supposed to say—What about you?

What do you do during the in-between time? I would dare to suggest that you take all that love, concern, and obsession you’ve freely given to another person and give it all back to yourself. We often forget that the ultimate source of love is within us, Mickelsen wrote. The more love you feel for yourself, the more other people will naturally love you and gravitate toward you. I have experienced this for myself. The times in my life when I was focused on my mission, doing the internal work on myself, and helping others, that’s when I attracted the most people into my life—when I was focused on my purpose and not looking for anyone outside myself to complete me. You and I are already complete. Anyone who comes into our lives are just a bonus.

Now, let me be very clear—I am in no way talking about nor condoning the self-love that researchers have found leads to inflated egos and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (We’ll talk about this more in-depth ... Keep reading.) What I am suggesting is that you learn to love and nurture yourself in a way that uplifts your emotional state and increases your confidence which, in turn, will increase your confidence in all areas of your life and project a positive frequency to the outside world.

As defined by the clinical term of Dependency—aka Co-dependency or Self Love Deficit Disorder—some people are afraid to be alone because that means they have to be responsible for their own financial, physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Counting on another person to provide for these things or even your own happiness is very dangerous. What another person gives to you, they can take away. If you give something to yourself, however, it’s yours as long as you exist.

A key to loving yourself is actually liking yourself. You can only like people if you spend time getting to know them. We can often be bombarded by our own thoughts and become so caught up in our own heads that we don’t even know that we are funny, charming, the life of the party, beautiful, etc. It helps when other people point these things out to us to get our attention, but even that isn’t necessary. Treating ourselves like we’re getting to know a new person is all it really takes.

Be alone. Eat alone. Take yourself on dates. You will learn about yourself. You will grow. You will figure out what inspires you. You will curate your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity. And when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it because you will be sure of yourself,