When you were a child – or a teen – did you ever play this game, where you pulled off the petals on a daisy to see if the person of your dreams likes you or not? Somehow, when we were younger, those little games held a lot of power. The result of this one could make us happy or miserable, bold or shy.

As adults, we often think we are beyond those games. We make our decisions based on facts and reality! Of course, in matters of the heart, reality includes our feelings, but still, we are not following the advice of a flower in deciding if we should call the other or not, if it is worth waiting, or if we should just let it be. If anything, we ask friends for advice, or a trusted family member, or maybe even our therapist. But not a flower!

Well, we may not pull the petals of an innocent daisy anymore, but how well-considered are our decisions really? Especially where emotions are concerned, our rational mind often takes a vacation. We know that the behaviours of that person we like aren’t really nice, but that’s only a small part of them, or only comes up because they are nervous, or, at the very least, it’s something we can change, right? When our infatuation is strong enough, we come up with an amazing number of explanations and justifications for signs of incompatibility that we would clearly see if one of our friends was in a similar relationship or situation. Why is that?

There are a number of explanations for that: physical/chemical reactions in our bodies overriding the brain; past experiences impacting our desires, hopes and fears; even spiritual reasons, such as past soul connections, could be named. But there is one thing we often leave out when we consider these situations: our own liking of ourselves.

When we did this petal-pulling game in childhood, the thrill came from the randomness of it all (until we started counting the petals beforehand and made sure to start with the right part of the rhyme). There was a certain magic in the result. We weren’t in control, and the result didn’t really have anything to do with how good we were, how likeable or pretty. It just depended on the flower.

But as adults, these questions have become very important to most of us: how good or bad am I? How likeable? Do I deserve this relationship, or do I deserve an even better one? From what I understand of the other, how likely is it that they see me as nice or not? The questions and doubts are often seemingly endless. But at the core of them is basically one question: Do I like myself, or do I not?

A lot of therapy comes down to that same question: how much do I like myself? And then, of course, we try to build a better, healthier relationship with that Self. But the magical thinking of the child part of us can get in the way. Magical thinking in therapy does not relate to fairies or Santa Claus. In psychotherapy, magical thinking is that thinking that somehow relates the woes of life and our environment to us. We are the reason our parents fight, our dog died, and our friends hate us. Most often, this kind of magical thinking holds us responsible for the bad things in our lives.

There is a logical reason for that, based on developmental stages: as little children, we have very little power to change our actual environment. We can’t leave home, stop our parents from fighting, change schools, or pay the medical bills for the dog. We are dependent on the adults in our lives to do the right thing – because, if they don’t do the right thing, we are in real trouble. If my parents aren’t good people, I am in danger. If they can’t look after the well-being of my most beloved companion (the dog), how can they look after me? If they are angry or anxious, or bad people, how can I be safe with them? Therefore, says my child-logic, because they must be good and right and kind for me to survive, the problems must have their root in me.

The fact that all our positive activities – listening more, doing our chores, etc. – don’t necessarily bring the desired results, is no deterrent for this logic, because we conclude that we just didn’t do it well enough. When this continues to happen all throughout our childhood, we become convinced that we are not worthy of anything good happening to us or through us. And, we learn not to like ourselves very much at all.

But this magical thinking can work the other way around. If we grow up in a family where we are affirmed and loved most of the time, where the bad things that happen are explained (in a child-appropriate way), and we are affirmed in the good things we do, while being taught how to learn and grow when things don’t go so well, we can learn that we are okay. That the world is a safe place. That, no matter what bad things happen, somehow we will be okay and get through it.

Not many of us have families like that, at least most people coming to therapy don’t. And healing the not-enough wounds of childhood is extra difficult if the negative messages keep being reinforced, either because our family-of-origin patterns haven’t changed and are still impacting us, or because we have recreated them in our adult relationships.

So, what are we to do? The answer lies in the knowledge of how healthy families run, and on making one choice – over and over again: to let go of the daisy approach to thinking about ourselves and just deciding, “I do like myself! No matter how difficult it gets, I have decided that I will like myself – and try again, if need be.”

With that decision, we can start the journey of re-educating ourselves:

• speaking to ourselves more kindly
• looking for things we can change in ourselves, and accepting the situations where we are not responsible for the bad things that happen – and learning to discern them
• asking for help from safe people – and learning how to find those people
• doing reality checks when the your-fault messages come at us from the outside – or the inside
• treating our bodies better: sleep, food, exercise, care, and clothing
• and so much more

This is not an easy path for most. Those old messages and beliefs are often lodged really deep in the subconscious. Sometimes we need another to support us, a loving spouse, a caring friend, or an impartial therapist, who reminds us of our innate goodness. And, like in 12-step programs, the goal is not to get better overnight. It’s a journey, one day at a time, maybe even one hour at a time to begin with. There is no way to always be totally loving and okay with ourselves. We all have our bad days. We may get judgmental when we are tired, or hungry, or stressed. Or we may doubt ourselves in times when everything seems to go wrong. And one of the most difficult things on this journey is to learn to discern when it is okay to say, “No, not my problem,” and when we have to take responsibility for something, and learn from it, and grow.

There is no specific moment when we arrive at a blessed place of complete and unconditional self-love for now and forever. But, we can get to a point where we love ourselves like a good parent would: with healthy boundaries (and appropriate consequences for mistreating them), a loving embrace (even when we messed up), and an apology and reassurance when they (we) mess up in showing the love.

And, the daisies of the world will thank us, because we won’t need to strip them of their petals anymore when the answer to the question becomes clear: I love me!

Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash