How can we love ourselves through suffering, and heartache? Navigating seasons of sadness, pain and rejection is never easy to deal with. Self-love is an appreciation of you even when the future appears bleak.

The only way through this is making small steps including being gentle to yourself, allowing good people into your life. Additionally, through the process of self-loving, you can find forgiveness, and acceptance is the way towards loving yourself with all your flaws. We will look at ways you can love yourself, even if you feel there is no love to give.

Having good people in your life will help keep you grounded and inspired. The right people will support, encourage, and celebrate your successes, not back stab you. Get rid of them, and set boundaries to guard the heart along with the soul. Stop criticizing yourself for mistakes.

Negative talk over time will increase suffering. It will destroy your self-esteem even more now since it is so fragile. Inner chatter like: You’re a failure, weak, or never will be happy again will sabotage hope. Try another path to keep hope ignited.

Punishing yourself needs to go, wrote Psychology Today. We need to be more human by forgiving ourselves.

“Practice being less hard on yourself when you make a mistake. Remember, there are no failures, if you have learned and grown from your mistakes-- there are only lessons learned.”

Jot down the benefits of changing to positive thoughts, eating better, and exercise even when feeling like all is lost. Write down thoughts on what you can accomplish. Take small goals one at a time.

Don’t believe in everything you think or feel. Put up a filter to catch how thought and emotions are affecting moods and actions.

Everyday start with a list of affirmations like: “I am going to have a great day,” despite feeling or circumstances. Make this a habit everyday.

Let go of perfection. No one will have it and it prevents you from having fun and freedom. This is false, wrote John M. Grohol, Psy.D. for Psych Central.

“Perfection is simply unattainable for any of us. Let it go. You’re never going to be perfect. You’re never going to have the perfect body, the perfect life, the perfect relationship, the perfect children, or the perfect home. We revel in the idea of perfection, because we see so much of it in the media. But that is simply an artificial creation of society. It doesn’t exist.”

Look at ways that work for you during a period of suffering. Try something fun, or do a hobby that there was always a passion for. Turn self-pity into power, by doing good not only for you, but others.

Harry Emerson Fosdick was pastor in the early 20th Century said regarding self-pity.

“Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world making the most of one’s best.”