How to Love Yourself | Part 1

In this special two-part series, I’m sharing a powerful course I developed on learning how to love yourself. If you’ve ever struggled with self-acceptance, carried feelings of shame, or felt like you had to keep achieving to prove your worth — this episode is for you. 

I'll share my personal journey from deep shame and self-loathing to learning how to love myself, and how you can start healing your relationship with yourself.

In this first part of the course we'll cover:

• What Self-Love is
• Why self-love is NOT selfish or narcissistic
• How trauma, shame, and perfectionism block self-love
• What happens when self-love is blocked.

What You’ll Learn:

• The truth about why self-love feels so hard
• How shame drives the need to achieve (and why it never works)
• Why perfectionism and people-pleasing are self-sabotaging
• How to start healing your relationship with yourself today

Resources:

• 👉 Download the 37-page workbook: DOWNLOAD
• Book a free strategy call with me: SCHEDULE HERE
• Follow me on IG: @jerryahenderson

Episode Highlights:
00:00 Welcome to the episode and why this course matters
01:52 Why self-love is something you can learn
03:12 My story: Childhood trauma, addiction, and learning to heal
06:44 What self-love is (and isn’t)
10:56 What blocks self-love
15:30 What happens when self-love is blocked

Next Steps:
✅ If this episode resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it.
✅ Subscribe and leave a review — it helps more people discover the podcast.
✅ Ready to go deeper? Download the workbook or book a strategy call today.

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I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

Setup Your FREE Strategy Call:
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Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org

🔗 Access the course "Learning How to Love Yourself" here:

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Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing

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Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jerryahenderson

Disclaimer

Transcript

Jerry Henderson: 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm your host, jerry Henderson, and, as always, I'm so grateful that you're here. Now, in today's episode, we're going to do something a little bit differently. I'm going to be sharing on this podcast a course that I developed around learning how to love yourself, and because this course has been so impactful for so many of the people who have listened to it, I wanted to use this platform of the podcast to get it out even more. Now there is a 37-page workbook that goes with the content of the course. So if you want access to that workbook, just simply see the show notes in this episode and you'll see a link there where you can download the full workbook. So, with all of that in mind, let's jump into part one of this two-part series around the course of learning how to love yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 0:53

Hello and welcome to this course on learning how to love yourself, and I titled it that way on purpose, because self-love is something that you can learn to do. So, way to go, I want to say thank you for being here and thank you for investing in yourself by learning how to love yourself. Now, before we move on, the first thing I want to ask you to do is to set your intention for what you want to get out of this course, because setting an intention is a powerful thing. It opens us up. It can keep you connected to your why behind why you decided that you wanted to take this course. So let's just take a moment, reconnect with that intention. What are you hoping to get out of it? Just take a moment and center yourself in that. Now the other thing I'm going to ask you to do is to hold on to that intention throughout this course. Keep coming back to it, because, once again, intentions are a very powerful thing.

Jerry Henderson: 1:52

Now, what are we going to be covering in this course? Well, first I want to share a little bit of my story and why I do the work that I do. We'll also then talk about what is self-love. We'll also talk about what self-love is not, and then we'll talk about what is self-love. We'll also talk about what self-love is not, and then we'll talk about what blocks self-love, and then what happens in our life when self-love is blocked. And then, finally, we're going to talk about learning how to love yourself, the practical things that you can do to start practicing self-love.

Jerry Henderson: 2:19

So a little bit about me. I'm a Master Certified Transformational Life Coach, which means I'm passionate about helping people transform their lives by transforming their relationship with themselves, and one of the key things that helps people transform their relationship with themselves is learning how to love themselves. I'm an author, I'm a speaker and I'm the host of the Permission to Love podcast. I hold an MBA in global management. I'm currently finishing my master's in psychology degree at Harvard University. So why do I do the work that I do? I do it because I'm so passionate about helping people heal their relationship with themselves and become the highest version of themselves, to go through a process of self-transformation, and the reason I'm so passionate about it is because of my story and what happened in my life as I learned to heal my relationship with myself.

Jerry Henderson: 3:12

You know, I grew up in a very abusive home and experienced a lot of childhood trauma. I also grew up in poverty on the US welfare system and moved around all over the place, wound up going to 17 different schools. And what happened to me as a result of experiencing all of those things is I developed a deep sense of shame. I carried the belief that there was something wrong with me, that I was a problem that needed to be fixed and I really struggled with that self-hatred, that self-loathing and everything that shame brings with it. And as a result of carrying all that shame, I went on to try to achieve my way out of the way that I felt about myself. I went on to pursue multiple degrees I still pursue degrees but from a very different place at this point. I then went on to philanthropy work and raised over a billion dollars for the global poor.

Jerry Henderson: 4:03

Now on the outside I looked like I had it all together, but on the inside I was falling apart, didn't like myself, carried so much shame, had such a harsh inner critic that was so relentless. That then led to me picking up alcohol as a way to cope with myself. I often tell people I drank in order to escape my own presence. Drank in order to escape my own presence. And then all of that workaholism, alcoholism, all of the messages and the stories drove me to a place of burnout and it drove me to an 18-month period where my life basically fell apart. During that 18-month period, I had a heart attack, open-heart surgery, started going through a second divorce and then also wound up in rehab two different times over that 18-month period.

Jerry Henderson: 4:50

Now, my last day in rehab, on that final day when I was graduating from the program, was a part of a ceremony that they did for those who were moving on, who were graduating, and what they did was they took a stone and this is the actual stone that was used as a part of my graduation ceremony and each person who was a part of my cohort or a part of the group that I was there with took the stone and they said something encouraging about me into the stone. And then they passed it around the room and then, finally, the stone made its way into my hands, and what I was supposed to do in that moment was to say something encouraging about myself into the stone. And in that moment, spontaneously, as I took the stone, I looked at it and I said these words I am worthy of my own love. I mean, I'd never said those words before, but when I said it, something shifted inside of me. Saying those words into this little stone, it somehow gave me the permission to open myself up to loving myself, and I genuinely felt something shift inside of me. It was like something broke open, just a crack. When that crack broke open inside of me.

Jerry Henderson: 6:07

It then caused me to go on a journey of understanding self-love. What is it? How does it work? How do you develop it? It also set me on a journey to understand the sources of shame that I had, both religious and childhood trauma that I had carried for over 40 years. And what I realized through all of that work of learning and growing was that that trauma that I experienced had broken my relationship with myself. It had separated me from my own love. You know we talk a lot about how trauma is not what happens to you, but it's what happens in you.

Jerry Henderson: 6:44

And one of the things that often happens in us is that we make a decision that we're not lovable, that there's something wrong with us, that we're broken, and then we'll wind up carrying that message with us our whole lives if something doesn't change. But the good news is is self-love can begin to heal that broken relationship that you have with yourself. It can begin to let you see that there's nothing wrong with you. There's never been anything wrong with you. You had experiences that the natural outcome of those experiences is for you to feel the way that you feel is for you to struggle with self-love, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're broken, and you can learn to love yourself, heal your relationship with yourself, and that is why I do the work that I do. And it all started with this little stone and me saying those words into it that were so transformational for me that now my hope through the coaching that I do, the podcast that I do and things like this that I is to help other people awaken to the fact of how much power they have to heal the relationship with themselves.

Jerry Henderson: 7:53

All right, let's now talk about what self-love is, and we're going to start by talking about what self-love is not. Self-love is not selfishness. It is not narcissism. It is not ignoring your responsibilities. It is not a constant indulgence or self-coddling. It is also not avoiding challenges, and these are some of the reasons why people are resistant to self-love. One they don't want to be considered selfish, or they might have a religious background that looks at self-love as something that's sinful or bad. They also might be associating self-love with narcissism, and we're going to talk here in a minute how those are two very different things. But they might have also watched people who, under the term of self-love, started ignoring their responsibilities, started avoiding challenges and not doing the things that they had some responsibility to do, and so what I want to set the foundation for here is that self-love is not weak, self-love does not cause us to abandon the important things in our life, and it's also not selfish or narcissistic. So now let's talk about what is self-love.

Jerry Henderson: 8:58

Self-love is an individual's capacity for positive regard, self-acceptance and care for oneself. It encompasses self-compassion, self-respect and recognizes our intrinsic worth, that we are worthy of love because we exist, because we're on this planet, because we are human. We don't have to do anything to deserve our own love. Now it also involves maintaining a healthy self-concept, engaging in behaviors that promote psychological well-being and establishes boundaries that protect our emotional health. Now, clinically, self-love is associated with things like resilience, adaptive coping mechanisms and lower susceptibility to mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. It is distinct from narcissism as it fosters balanced self-awareness, so we're able to hold a sense that, yes, we have things that we need to improve about ourselves, but we can love and accept ourselves and have compassion with ourselves, even in the recognition that we have some flaws, where narcissism is actually one of the deepest forms of shame. Dr Brene Brown talks about it that way in her research around shame. A narcissist is not practicing self-loving behavior. They're actually compensating for shame, and they're doing that by creating all of this damage in other people's lives and all these control mechanisms that they put in place. So it is not at all about self-love. Now, the other thing that makes self-love distinct from narcissism is that it actually helps you become more empathetic towards other people. As you learn to love yourself, you show empathy towards yourself, you're able to give that empathy to others and you're more aware of the empathy that other people need Very different than narcissism.

Jerry Henderson: 10:56

So now let's talk about what blocks self-love in our life. And number one childhood trauma and attachment issues that come from childhood trauma. The research shows that when we have experiences of neglect, abuse or inconsistent caregiving, it can lead to insecure attachment styles, and what can happen from that is that we can begin to feel unworthy of love. We can then develop a very active inner critic and we're always beating ourselves up because we believe that we deserve it and we're actually internalizing the messages of our caregivers, and then we can believe that we're inherently flawed. So if you're experiencing that once again, a normal response to abnormal situations and the beautiful thing is is self-love can begin to heal that sense that you're fundamentally flawed. It really truly can. And the second thing that can hinder self-love can begin to heal that sense that you're fundamentally flawed. It really truly can.

Jerry Henderson: 11:50

Now, the second thing that can hinder self-love are the things that come out of that trauma, which are those negative core beliefs and those cognitive distortions or those errors in the way that we think or that we see things. Research shows that persistent negative beliefs about ourselves, such as I'm not good enough, I'm broken, I don't deserve love, can inhibit our ability to accept ourselves. And then cognitive distortions, like all or nothing thinking or that catastrophizing thinking, can contribute to self-defeating thoughts, which can then reinforce the thoughts and the feelings that we're not worthy of love. Now the other thing that blocks self-love is that internalized criticism that comes from those core beliefs and then the self-sabotaging behavior that can happen as a result of that self-criticism. So the inner critic, that harsh, self-judging internal voice, can wind up dominating your perception of yourself and that can lead to a chronic dissatisfaction and a lot of self-blame. And when that's happening, we can then get into self-sabotaging behaviors. And self-sabotage is really about you trying to serve yourself. You're trying to pull yourself back to what you feel worthy of, and in self-sabotaging yourself, you're trying to reinforce your negative self-views that you have of yourself and realign your life to what you believe that you're worthy of.

Jerry Henderson: 13:16

Now, the next thing that can block self-love is shame, and it does a great job of it. Shame, the belief that you're fundamentally bad or unworthy, can deeply block self-love, and it's different from guilt. Right, guilt says I did something that I'm not really feeling good about, or something that I'm not proud of, or I did something bad and I want to change it. It's action-focused I did an action that I don't feel good about when, on the other hand, shame says I'm bad, I'm something that's wrong, and shame actually targets the self, which can lead to chronic self-rejection. And how in the world are we going to learn how to love ourselves if we're constantly rejecting ourselves? And the good news is, shame can be healed, and one of the ways that we heal shame is by learning how to love ourselves.

Jerry Henderson: 14:08

Now, the next thing that can block self-love is a lack of boundaries and people-pleasing. Why? Because if we have difficulty setting boundaries, which is often stemming from a fear of rejection or abandonment, this is going to lead to us overextending ourselves to get the validation that we're not able to give to ourselves, which, then is going to undermine your own self-worth. Why? Because you're abandoning yourself all the time. You become so desperate for the love of others and their acceptance that you're letting them walk all over you. You're self-abandoning, as I said, and then none of that is going to let you feel good about yourself and, of course, it's going to be hard for you to love yourself when you see yourself engaging in ways that's devaluing yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 14:52

Now, the next thing that can block self-love is societal and cultural conditioning. Okay, what happens is we see all of these things out there, that we're trying to compare ourselves to these unrealistic standards of beauty, these unrealistic expectations for success. And when we're getting into the comparison game and we're trying to compare our worth to what we see somebody else reflecting and, by the way, we're only seeing what they want us to see it's absolutely going to reinforce feelings of inadequacy and it's going to lead to lower self-esteem. All the research is very clear on this. The comparison trap is something that's going to make it very hard for us to accept ourselves and to love ourselves. So now let's talk about the impact that it has on us when we're separated from our own love.

Jerry Henderson: 15:39

Number one mental health. Issues like depression and anxiety are going to start showing up in our lives, because if we're in there beating ourselves up, criticizing ourselves, the research shows us that it's going to lead to feelings of sadness and hopelessness and fear. It's really going to start to constrict us. When we feel that way about ourselves, the next thing it's going to do is it's going to increase our risk for self-harm and suicidality. And I just want to take a moment and just say something to you If you need help, please get the help that you need. There's no shame in getting help. We all need help and you're worthy of help, and so if you're struggling with wanting to harm yourself or if you're having suicidal thoughts, please get the help that you need. There's all kinds of resources that are available for people who are struggling in this space.

Jerry Henderson: 16:36

I also want to take a moment and I want to speak to the men, because men are often some of the last of us to try to get the help that we need. Why? Because our culture tells us that trying to get help or admitting that we're struggling with things like shame or depression or self-hatred makes us weak and we're afraid of the shame, of having shame, but I want to tell you that if you need help, there's nothing weak about getting help, and it's worth the risk of somebody else shaming you for you to get the help that you need. You are worth it. Men often suffer in silence more than any other group because of the fear of what it means to be vulnerable, to express themselves and to ask for help, and I'm telling you, from one man to another who had to reach out and get help, that it's okay to, you're worth it and it can absolutely change your life. Okay, okay, so let's go ahead and move on to the next thing that might start to show up, which is chronic stress and burnout.

Jerry Henderson: 17:38

We feel like our worth is based on what we do, and we have to try to prove ourselves to be worthy of love. We're going to push ourselves. We're going to get on that achievement treadmill. We're going to wind up getting burned out. We're going to feel like we need to work ourselves to death. Why? Because we feel like we need to get the love and acceptance of other people and in order to get that, we got to do all this stuff and I'm telling you it's just going to burn you out, and a lot of the clients I work with are either trying to avoid burnout or come back from burnout because of this exact scenario, and one of the things we do is begin to work on their relationship with themselves. How can they learn to love themselves and accept themselves so that they're okay even without their achievements?

Jerry Henderson: 18:23

Now the next thing we want to talk about are relationship struggles. When we struggle to love ourselves, we're naturally going to struggle to have good and healthy relationships. Why? Because we're going to get into patterns of codependency and people pleasing because we are so desperate for their love. The other thing is we're going to choose toxic relationships, because we're going to choose relationships at the level that we believe that we're worthy of, and we're also going to choose relationships that reinforce the way that we believe that we're worthy of, and we're also going to choose relationships that reinforce the way that we feel about ourselves. So we're going to choose people who treat us the way that we treat ourselves. If we're in there beating ourselves up, we're going to choose people that are toxic towards us as well, because it feels comfortable for us.

Jerry Henderson: 19:03

Now the next thing is we're going to have difficulty with intimacy and trust, because if I don't feel good about myself and I feel like, if you really knew me, that you wouldn't like me I'm going to hide myself from you, because if I'm in here rejecting myself, I'm pretty sure that you're going to reject me if you see the authentic me. So I'm going to keep relationships at a distance, and what's going to happen with that is I can be surrounded by 100 people and still feel alone, and that loneliness is then going to lead to a sense of isolation, which is going to reinforce the fact that you're all alone, that you're not lovable, that you're not worth love, and that just keeps the cycle going. Superficial relationships, because if I don't trust people to know who I am and I think that they're going to judge me I'm going to keep myself pretty well locked down and people are going to say things like well, I know you, but I don't really know you, and then you're going to feel unknown, unseen, which once again just keeps the sense of isolation and loneliness going. And so for us to have authentic relationships, we're going to have to figure out how to be authentic with ourselves, and self-love can help us do that.

Jerry Henderson: 20:14

Now, the next thing that can happen is we can start having physical health consequences. We might neglect self-care because that lack of self-love doesn't allow us to prioritize ourselves. So we're not exercising, we're not eating right, we're abandoning ourselves and putting everybody else in front of us and so we're not taking care of us, which can then lead to chronic illness and immune dysfunction because of all that stress that we're carrying. It's going to have an impact on our nervous system, it's going to weaken our immune system and that's going to increase our vulnerability to these kind of conditions, and so not loving ourselves and not taking care of ourselves is going to have an impact on our health. The next thing it can do is it can lead to addictions. We have an increased risk of it. Why? Because we're trying to quiet the voice of shame, or we're trying to cope with the way that we feel about ourselves, or we're trying to escape our core beliefs about ourselves and try to give ourselves a refuge from all of that through addictive substances and addictive behaviors. We'll wind up doing what I did, which was me drinking in order for me to tolerate my own presence. We wind up trying to escape ourselves.

Jerry Henderson: 21:25

Now the next thing that can happen is that we can have impaired personal and professional growth. Why? Because when we have a sense of failure because failure doesn't mean that I failed at a task, it means that I'm a failure or we then have a high sense of perfectionism because we don't want people to see who we really are. So we have to project an image and then try to maintain and live up to that image. All of that can be stifling to our creativity and can keep us from taking the risks that can lead to self-expansion Because of the way that we feel about ourselves. It actually causes us to play small instead of living up to our full potential.

Jerry Henderson: 22:05

Another thing is that we then get into under achievement and self-sabotage. If you don't believe that you're worthy of success, you're not going to reach for it. If you don't believe that you're worthy of good things, you're going to sabotage them out of your life when they show up. Now the next thing is that it can lead to workaholism and burnout, like we talked about, and this compensation for the way that we feel about ourselves can lead to chronic stress, workaholism and here's the thing about that that's going to lead to burnout. That is not sustainable. It can help in the short term right, really pushing and trying to achieve can help us climb a ladder, but here's the thing that ladder, at some point has no more rungs in it and then you find yourself alone, burned out, don't know what to do. It will not allow you to maintain long-term success. If you're running after success in order to heal yourself. Your achievements will not heal you. They're not designed to, but you know what can Learning how to love yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 23:11

All right, so now let's talk about the next thing, which we can wind up having some pretty challenging existential and emotional challenges. We can wind up with a loss of meaning and purpose, because if I don't ever feel like I'm loved and if I never feel connection and I'm not able to connect with the things that are important to me, because without a sense of self-worth, we might struggle to find purpose and fulfillment in our life, which is going to lead us to be disconnected from life itself, and that can wind up leading to a loss of meaning and purpose in our lives. Now, the next thing that can happen is a constant struggle with guilt and shame. We talked a little bit about shame earlier, but if we don't deal with this, we're going to continue to have this persistent feeling of shame and guilt, making it difficult to experience joy and true self-acceptance. And self-acceptance has been found to be a powerful part of building resilience and sustaining a life that is happy and has a sense of overall well-being.

Jerry Henderson: 24:15

Now, the last thing I'll talk about in this area is that we can get disconnected from our authentic self. We may not even know who we are anymore. We've worn so many masks to try to get the approval of other people, we've played so many characters that we don't know who we are. And trying to connect with our authentic self, it's really tough because we're always hiding our authentic self and we're afraid that if other people see it, as we talked about earlier, they're going to reject us, and then we're self-rejecting and then we're so disconnected, as we talked about earlier, that trauma will separate us from ourselves and it'll separate us from our love, and one of the things that can start to reconnect us to our authentic self is learning how to love ourselves.

Jerry Henderson: 24:58

Now the next thing that happens is we wind up with reduced resilience and coping capacities. Why? Because we have all of this stress in our lives and then we're judging ourselves and we're fighting with ourselves and we're using all of this energy internally. And here's the thing Self-love actually acts as a buffer. It acts as a protective factor against stress. And here's the thing about stress Stress isn't bad, and the research shows that when we perceive stress as bad and we perceive that we don't have the capacity to deal with stress because we're shaming ourselves and beating ourselves up, it's going to reduce our resilience and it's going to cause stress to even be worse in our lives. And no wonder you're struggling to deal with stress when you're also in there giving yourself so much stress as well.

Jerry Henderson: 25:44

Now the next thing that happens is we get increased vulnerability to external criticism. Right? Because if I'm in there beating myself up internal judgment, then I wind up being very susceptible to other people's judgment towards me. Why? Because it's confirming the way that I feel about myself. It's increasing my levels of insecurity about myself, and then I'm much more likely to internalize their criticism and believe that it's true about me. I mean, think about it. You're going to have five people say something positive about you. You have one person who says something negative about you. You're going to gravitate towards the negative. I know that's somewhat human behavior, but it's actually so much more acute in people who don't love themselves who don't practice self-love because they don't have the buffer to be able to put things in context to go. It's just the opinion of one person, and so learning to love ourselves can really help as a protective factor against internalizing other people's criticism.

Jerry Henderson: 26:42

I really hope you enjoyed the first part of the course on learning how to love yourself. Now, next week, we're going to pick up the rest of the course and we're going to dive into the practical ways that you can start practicing self-love in your life. Now, if you feel stuck in this area and you've been trying things and you can't quite seem to get a breakthrough and you're interested in one-on-one coaching and how that can help you see some breakthroughs in this area, I want to encourage you. Go to my website, jerryhendersonorg, or simply see the show notes in this episode. Set up a free strategy call and during that call, talk about where you're at, where you want to be, and see if working together is the right fit to get you there.

Jerry Henderson: 27:25

Now I want to ask you to do something.

Jerry Henderson: 27:26

If these episodes are really helping you and the Permission to Love podcast is having an impact in your life, would you take a moment and leave a review, because the more reviews we get, the more likely people are to discover the podcast and the more likely they're going to find the help that they need in learning how to have a healthy and thriving relationship with themselves, and so you play an important part in that.

Jerry Henderson: 27:49

So I just want to invite you to leave a review if you haven't done that yet, and I want to say thank you in advance. Now, the other thing I want to invite you to do is to share this podcast with somebody else. If you've not yet had a chance to do that, you can simply click that share button. You can share it on your social media platforms, or you can send it via text or via email to somebody, because it's made a difference in your life. It'll make a difference in their life as well, so thank you for sharing this podcast with the people that are a part of your life. Thank you for joining me for this episode, and I want to remind you, as always, that you are worthy of your own love.