I had heard so much buzz about this book on self-love written by John Kim aka The Angry Therapist. It is all about finding yourself first because he says ‘many times people stop working on themselves when they’re in a relationship’. 

He went through a divorce and realized that he had never really been on his own. He began a journey to rebuild his relationship with himself to find fulfillment. He names his approach, the “self-help in a shot glass”. This book discusses how to own your shit, break patterns, and find a sense of self. 

What have you been through and how has that changed you? 

We’re humans and we’re not meant to do life alone; we want to love someone. 

Think of this book as my Eat, Pray, Love. Instead of traveling to exotic locations around the world, eating amazing foods, having passionate love affairs, and praying to God in ancient temples, I got tattoos, rediscovered Los Angeles on my motorcycle, and ate a lot of doughnuts. 

Your happiness isn’t contingent on loving someone else. The world has been waving his flag in your face since you were given your first Barbie doll and then quickly added a Ken doll to complete the picture. But Barbie never needed Ken. All she needed was that convertible Vette. It was the world telling her she needed a house and a man. (And we never even gave Ken a job or a personality. Or asked him if he liked women). 

We need to have a healthy relationship with ourselves, but who teaches us how to do that? There’s no general education requirement in school that covers boundaries, independence, and knowledge of self. 

We don’t know how to feed our soul. We don’t know how to draw boundaries with Sharpie instead of chalk. We don’t know how to recharge. 

Radical Acceptance is the practice of accepting life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot change. Radical acceptance is about saying yes to life, just at it is. 

We buy things to fill a void and lock our dial on “Achieve”. 

Our internal scales go out of balance, and the world begins to shrink. What was once an ocean is now a plastic swimming pool. With cracks in it. We have created our own prison. Same shit, different day. 

The more we disconnect from ourselves, the more we crave connecting with someone else. This is why so many of us fall into lukewarm relationships that lead to years of misery and heartbreak!

We can’t fix other people. So even if we could be perfect, that would be only half and HALF IS NOT ENOUGH. 

Allowing ourselves something we wanted, something we deserved. Reconnecting with your spirit can be anything that brings you back to yourself, that makes you feel alive and human. That allows the essence of you to shine. 

Remember that you are not defective. You are a product of where you grew up, who raised you, and what has happened to you. And realize that you can return that shit and think new thoughts and choose new ways of thinking. 

Watch your thoughts as if they were drifting in a snow globe. 

With friendships- you can outgrown them. Just because you have a history doesn’t mean you have a healthy friendship. As long as you’re surrounding yourself with people who hold space for you to be your true self, you’ll never be stuck on an island or spending time with fake friends. 

In high school, we are all just putty being formed. We have no inner shape. We define and find our worth in others. 

We don’t learn about co-dependency, attachment styles, and healthy boundaries, or about why we behave the way we do in love. 

I didn’t know that relationships meant constantly looking inward, expressing your truth, and holding a safe space for your partner. Looking inward without defensiveness is what it means to love. 

(Regarding past relationships)- Maybe you told yourself you have but you know deep down you haven’t moved on because old unresolved issues are impacting your current relationship. You can’t build anything healthy and sustainable with someone else until you’ve let go of the old. 

When a relationship is over, there is loss. Whatever you haven’t grieved is the virus you will carry into all of them. 

I hadn’t yet learned that relationship dysfunction feels like crack cocaine. And that’s what I was chasing. Not love. Real love doesn’t knock your socks off. Real love holds up a mirror. 

Anger was a giant brick wall that prevented me from really getting to know myself. 

Working on yourself is a never-ending process, not a onetime thing. 

You are now sharing with another person all the time you were spending on yourself. 

When you’re in a relationship, you’re now dealing with your shit plus someone else’s shit too. 

Chasing after approval and validation and the super-high of feeling desired. 

We sit in shit all day and use it to help people grow. 

We all have underlying patterns. Once we realize what they are, what’s really going on, we can break unhealthy patterns and start to grow. 

When we chase old feelings, experiences, and definitions, we are not allowing new ones in. 

Try to understand before trying to be understood. 

Happy is also not a constant. It comes and goes. There is an ebb and flow to happy. Some days it’s easy to feel happy. Some days it’s difficult. But happy starts with a choice, like everything else. Then creating a space that produces the feeling of happy. To do that, we must hang our lives on three things: 

• Meaning
• Joy
• Engagement- means showing up in your truest form every day. 

Truly believing you have value requires years of rebuilding your relationship with yourself. We tie all of that to our worth, letting the external events of our lives determine our internal beliefs about ourselves. 

Know that by giving yourself new experiences, you are building your worth. 

 

To order a copy of this book, click below!

 

 

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