A blurred background with a hand holding a small mirror shard. The mirror reflects part of a person’s face—one eye, an eyebrow, and part of a beanie. The person’s head is also slightly visible to the right side of picture.

How Would You Describe Your Relationship With Yourself?

It’s a simple question, but when I was first asked, I didn’t know how to answer. And in my work with clients, I find that most people don’t either. They might say, It’s good or It’s bad, but when pressed for details, they often describe behaviors—how they treat themselves, what they allow, what they avoid.

Because what does it actually mean to be in relationship with yourself?

This is something I’ve been consciously exploring for years. In fact, when I look back at my journals from 2017, I can see the exact moment I started documenting this process—writing my way into an understanding of what it meant to truly be with myself. And what I discovered is that before I could build a relationship with myself, I first had to see all the ways I wasn’t in one.

And that? That was brutal.

But that hurt was necessary, because it allowed me to understand why I kept landing in relationships—romantic, platonic, even professional—where I felt unseen, unfulfilled, or outright harmed. It wasn’t just bad luck. It was a reflection of my own internal dynamics. When I consistently abandoned myself, of course I ended up with people who abandoned me. When I ignored my own truth, of course I attracted people who disregarded it, too.

Facing the Truth About How You Treat Yourself

Before I could build a relationship with myself, I had to get honest about the ways I abandoned, betrayed, and dismissed myself. I had to recognize how often I lied to myself, deflected my own feelings, invalidated my experiences, and used spirituality to bypass discomfort. I had to acknowledge how I avoided the truth because the truth was painful.

And that avoidance? That’s something people can do for their entire lives.

Because the moment you stop avoiding, the moment you actually practice radical honesty with yourself, it can feel like a collapse. Shame, grief, fear, regret—it all rushes in. And I get it. It’s so much easier to blame others, to focus on the ways they hurt us, to sit in victim consciousness and make it about them.

At first, it was easy to externalize the blame—to see the people who hurt me as the villains in my story. And sure, sometimes they were operating in their own patterns of harm. But I also had to take radical responsibility for how I was showing up in my life. If I wanted something different, I had to be different. And that meant looking at myself, fully and honestly.

And you don’t do it all at once. You do it slowly, intentionally—just like you would with any other relationship.

Your Relationship With Yourself is a Living Thing

Imagine your relationship with yourself as if it were a person. Who are they? How do they treat you? Are they nurturing, or do they neglect you? Do they show up consistently, or only when it’s convenient?

Relationships don’t thrive on neglect. They require presence. They require care. Your relationship with yourself is no different.

And like any relationship, it has seasons. There are times when it feels effortless, where you feel in sync with yourself, aligned, at ease. And there are times of rupture—where you fall into old patterns, betray your own needs, or struggle to be present with yourself. But just like in any relationship, the work isn’t in perfection—it’s in repair.

It’s in how you come back to yourself.

The Shadow Side of Self-Relationship

What happens when we reject the parts of ourselves we don’t want to see? When we exile our rage, our jealousy, our grief?

These parts don’t disappear. They live in the shadow, shaping our choices in unseen ways. If we refuse to face them, they show up in our relationships, in our bodies, in the quiet moments when we’re alone.

Dark work—turning toward what we’ve been taught to reject—allows us to build a relationship with all of ourselves. Not just the parts that are easy to love, but the parts we’ve been told are unworthy and too much.

And when we do that? We stop abandoning ourselves.

Practical Ways to Strengthen Your Self-Relationship

If you want to track where you self-abandon, start paying attention to:

The moments you dismiss your own feelings.
The times you say yes when you mean no.
The places where you silence yourself to maintain peace.
The small, everyday ways you don’t follow through on your own needs.
The choices you make not aligned with your values and self worth.
The incongrency of your words and actions not aligning.

Then start choosing differently. Not all at once, but in small ways. Hold yourself with compassion when you notice the pattern, and then practice something new.

Try this:

At the end of the day, ask yourself: Where did I stay with myself today? Where did I leave myself?
Before making a decision, pause and check in: What do I actually want?
When you notice self-judgment, get curious: Whose voice is this? Where did I learn this?
Be with discomfort. Acknowledge when something feels hard instead of bypassing it. Hold space for emotions rather than rushing to fix them.
Keep promises to yourself. If you say you'll rest, actually rest. If you say you'll do something that brings you joy, follow through.
Laugh with yourself. Let yourself be ridiculous, lighthearted, and real.
Celebrate small joys, the ones no one else sees.
Offer yourself praise—not just for big things, but for simply existing, for making it through, for taking care of yourself.
Be affectionate with yourself. Place a hand on your heart. Stretch in ways that feel good. Massage your feet. Let yourself be—no performing, no proving, no achieving. Just existing, and letting that be enough.

It’s not about perfection. It’s about presence.

Building a Relationship With Yourself

A relationship with yourself is not a one-time achievement. It’s a lifelong process. You don’t wake up one day, declare that you love yourself, and suddenly everything is easy. That’s not how any deep relationship works.

The deeper you get, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you have to hold space for. You change, you grow, you mess up, you repair, you build trust over time. And just like in any relationship, your words and actions need to align.

It takes tracking. It takes noticing where you self-abandon and then choosing differently. It takes staying with yourself even in the moments when you’d rather run.

Because here’s the truth: You can’t get away from yourself.

You can change cities, change relationships, go on vacation, start over as many times as you want—but no matter where you go, you’re still there. You are always in relationship with yourself, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

So you might as well make it a good one.

The Myth of Arrival

One of the biggest lies we've been sold in capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy is the idea that if we work hard enough, we’ll arrive—that healing, wholeness, self-acceptance are destinations we can reach and be done with. But there is no arrival.

Time isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. Healing isn’t a straight line. It’s a spiral. Every time we enter a new phase of life, experience stress, or move through transition, the parts of us we thought we had healed will show up again. Not because we’re failing, but because they need us to be in relationship with them from this new version of ourselves.

Clients often tell me, I feel like I’m regressing. But no—you’re not going backward. You’re revisiting something from a new perspective, deepening your understanding, tending to it from a place of greater capacity.

We are walking paradoxes. Even when we feel powerful, there will still be parts of us that carry doubt. Even when we feel love, there may still be parts that whisper we’re not enough. These parts don’t disappear—they evolve with us. The work is not to erase them, but to hold them with tenderness, to listen, to bring them along.

And this is where the practice comes in: Learning to trust that when old wounds resurface, it doesn’t mean we’re broken.

It means we’re alive.

It means we’re growing.

Self-Relationship as Rebellion

Choosing to be in relationship with yourself is not just an act of self-care—it’s an act of defiance.

We live in a world that conditions us to seek external validation, to numb discomfort, to stay distracted. A world that benefits from our self-abandonment. Because when we don’t trust ourselves, we are easier to manipulate. We overwork, we overconsume, we quiet our intuition in favor of what is expected. We stay in cycles that drain us because we have been taught that our worth is conditional—measured by productivity, perfection, and how well we perform the roles assigned to us.

But self-relationship disrupts that.

It is an act of rebellion to turn inward. To stop outsourcing your worth. To claim your own authority and decide that you are inherently enough. To feel your grief instead of suppressing it, to hold your rage instead of shaming it, to listen to yourself even when the world tells you not to. To no longer contort yourself into something more palatable, more digestible, more acceptable.

It is resistance to the systems that thrive on your self-doubt.

Because when you belong to yourself, you stop seeking permission to exist as you are. You stop making yourself smaller to fit into places never meant to hold you. You stop betraying yourself for the comfort of others.

And that kind of sovereignty? That shifts everything.

Because a person who is rooted in themselves—who moves from their own internal compass instead of seeking permission—that person is dangerous to the status quo.

That person is free.

The Paradox: You Are All You Have—And That’s Why It Matters

No one is coming to save you.

And at the same time, we don’t exist in isolation. I believe in the power of community, in being held by others, in showing up for one another. But at the end of the day, we are responsible for how we move through the world.

Our capacity to hold space for others is directly tied to the relationship we have with ourselves. The more solid we are in ourselves, the better we are at showing up—for our friends, our partners, our clients, our communities.

And if you’re someone who has the ability, the capacity, the privilege to do this work—to enter into a real, conscious relationship with yourself—then do it. Do it not just for you, but for the collective.

Because when we tend to ourselves, when we become who we truly are, we don’t just heal individually—we contribute to something bigger.

And that? That’s worth it.

In radical self sovereignty and rebellion,

AW🖤

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Let’s chat

How would you describe your relationship with yourself in one sentence? What systems are you disrupting by being yourself? I'd love to hear your thoughts—drop a comment and let’s explore this together.

Reckoning with Yourself: How Self-Connection is an Act of Defiance