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hey guys Heidi PRI here I am feeling very happy to be back it's been a little while since I've been filming consistently and honestly it will probably be a little while until I am once again filming consistently because
Heidi Priebe argues self-love means unconditional acceptance across successes and failures, not conditional approval, using a parenting analogy to illustrate the point.
Key Takeaways
- Self-love is unconditional acceptance that includes both successes and failures.
- Conditional self-acceptance tends to be fleeting and harmful; unconditional love sustains growth.
- Unmet inner-child needs often appear as self-sabotage or resentment and should be addressed compassionately.
- Accountability and self-compassion are compatible; you can own consequences without self-hatred.
What the video covers
- Heidi Priebe, finishing a master's dissertation on attachment theory, returns to discuss self-love.
- She admits she once believed self-love had to be earned through success, morals, and meeting expectations.
- She argues you either love yourself unconditionally or conditionally accept yourself; there is no 'sometimes love.'
- A parenting analogy contrasts teaching a child conditional acceptance with teaching unconditional love through every stage, including failure.
- Conditional self-acceptance is compared to a cocaine diet: quick, fleeting motivation; self-love is compared to nourishing food for long-term growth.
- Self-love is hard because we often 'jump ship' by seeking external approval instead of staying present with ourselves.
- She shares a therapy insight: her resentment toward supportive friends reflected an inner child outsourcing needs for comfort and affection.
- Self-sabotage is framed as repressed parts of the psyche signaling unmet needs.
- Accepting yourself does not mean letting life fall apart; it means facing consequences while staying kind to yourself, like cleaning up a baby's puke without shaming.
- Self-love begins with learning to meet and accept yourself fully, since we can only meet others as deeply as we have met ourselves.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Dissertation Update
- 01:49Rethinking Conditional Self-Worth
- 03:30The Parenting Analogy: Two Beliefs
- 05:30Why Self-Love Is Hard
- 07:11Jumping Ship and Seeking External Validation
- 08:59Inner Child Needs and Self-Sabotage
- 11:00Accountability Without Self-Hatred
- 13:00Loving Others Starts With Loving Yourself
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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I am finishing a dissertation right now for my master's program in attachment Theory and it turns out that takes up a lot of time and energy that I would love to be pouring into YouTube but that is going to have to wait until later this
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summer but in the meantime I felt called today to do a video like I have just been turning something over in my mind that I imagine it feels very important for me to share like I would like to
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have a conversation with you all about it so here we are today to talk about self love now my entire life I had a very flawed relationship with self-love in that I thought you could feel love for yourself sometimes and not other
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times like I thought I love myself when I am living up to my own expectations or when I am living in alignment with my morals and values and maybe succeeding in certain areas that feel important to me and when I am not doing any of those
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things I don't love myself I felt like okay I have to earn my own love you know and I thought that was kind of a point of Pride like I was like oh I'm not one of those weak people who loves
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themselves when they're depressed or whatever and at this point in my life what I have realized is that there is not a pick or choose with this you either love yourself or you conditionally accept yourself but you cannot have it both ways there is
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literally no such thing as sometimes love because what love is is a space that is big enough for absolutely everything to exist within both your successes and your failures both the things that you are prideful about and the things that you feel incredibly
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shameful about if your love is not big enough to Encompass all of that stuff for other people or for yourself what you're practicing is probably not love it's conditional except okay so to make this clearer I want you
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to imagine that you have a baby that has just been brought into this world it is your baby you're going to raise it it's your responsibility to instill morals and values and a way of understanding the world into this baby so far as it's
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within your power to do so and you get a choice you get to teach the baby one of two things thing one is baby I will accept you when you are performing in a way that I like when you are acing your
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tests at school when you are the fastest runner on the team when you look and speak perfectly then it's time for you to feel okay about yourself but the rest of the time when you are failing when you take your first step and then fall
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over when you try to speak your first word and it comes out funny I will reject you I will shame you I will tell you that there's something wrong with you and you will grow up with the belief
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that you are good enough only when you are doing well and the rest of the time you are not worthy of love okay that's one belief you could instill in your baby the other belief you could instill in your child is I love you all
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of the time I love you when you are the fastest runner on the team and I love you when you are the slowest runner on the team I love you when you are getting straight A's I love you when you are
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flunking out of school I love you when you are taking your first step I love you when you are on the ground crying because you have fallen over that is love right that's what love is it is being there to witness and hold space
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for the entire spectrum of who someone is and what happens to them throughout their lives and I think that for most of us it's a no-brainer that that's the one we want for our children right we want our children to feel loved and valued
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and accepted at every single step of the process even if they're failing and if anything most of us would intuitively understand that children need the most support and the most love and they need to be seen and validated and cared for
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the most when they are not doing well right that's when they need the most support from us as their parents but we don't always apply that same principle to ourselves right because the choice that you are making with that child is
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the exact same choice you need to make about yourself okay if you accept and love yourself only when you are doing well you do not love yourself you conditionally accept yourself self-love is either big enough to hold the entire
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spectrum of who you are or it is not love it's something else and each of us have to make a choice about whether we are going to love ourselves or whether we are going to conditionally accept ourselves some of us my past self-
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included have this story that if we love ourselves all of the time then we will never have motivation to get better then we will never catch ourselves if we're doing something wrong then we will become unmotivated and unintelligent
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slobs of human beings who have no real place in the world and I would argue that conditional self-acceptance is kind of like surv suring on a diet of cocaine where a self-love is like surviving on a diet of nourishing and Rich vegetables
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and foods that actually give you what you need to thrive right one is very motivating for giving you a quick hit that will get you a quick but fleeting result and the other sustains you on the long-term journey of becoming an
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emotionally stable and successful human being in all areas of your life not just certain ones so the first thing I want to be clear about is that we cannot have both you cannot be someone who hates yourself and criticizes yourself and
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thinks you're a piece of [ __ ] when things are not going well for you and who also loves yourself you have to pick are you going to be conditionally self-accepting or are you going to love yourself and this video is going to talk
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about how to do the second thing we are not talking here about how to be mean to yourself and Bully yourself into achieving your goals not what this video is about this video is about learning how to love yourself at every stage of
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the process even when you have just failed tremendously at something even when you are disgusted with yourself even when you are deeply unhappy with where you have arrived in life this video is about seeing yourself staying present with yourself and accepting
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yourself in those moments and that is so not easy and that's why so few people really do have that self-love right it's hard it is hard to show up for ourselves in the moments when we would rather jump
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ship and jumping ship often looks like going okay I don't really like what what I'm what's going on with me right now so uh I going to go find someone else to approve of me and decide that I will
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only feel warm and conditional acceptance for myself again once someone else approves of me once someone else loves me once the world thinks that I am beautiful and successful and worth being admired that's jumping ship on our self-love a little bit earlier this year
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I was going through this phase where I was starting to feel um a weird sense of resentment towards some of my friends and these were awesome people who were super there for me during a period of my life that was very difficult and yet
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this weird part of me started feeling like I want some space from these people I want them to stop being so present and attentive with me was very bizarre so I brought it into therapy and my therapist was like do you think that your inner
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child feels jealous of your friends because right now you are Outsourcing a lot of your needs for comfort and warmth and affection to those people and you are not giving yourself a lot of those things it seems like you're kind of
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losing touch a little bit with yourself and that felt very true for me I didn't want to deal with having to see and love and validate myself at that time I was like ah someone else just do it for me
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but what message is that sending to the child inside of me right if every time things get tough I'm like go live with your aunt like go live with my friends for a while they'll validate and support you I'm going to be here hating myself
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when I'm left alone right it doesn't work like that you cannot allow your self love to come from other people you got to give it to yourself I know that's so cliche and annoying to hear but it's true if you cannot be present with
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yourself when things are difficult and say I'm staying present for you I'm staying on your team I'm looking at the problems in your life and I'm saying let's tackle This Together self and inner child then you're not being a
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loving parent to the little child that lives inside of you I was listening to this song by Muna Muna Muna wow I don't I don't know how to say the band name let me check hey this is Bill and you should
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know us M Muna uh I was listening to this song by Muna earlier who's a band that become obsessed with this year obsessed and they had a single that came out in I think it was their 2019 album called
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number one fan and there's this line in it it's this awesome like Bop about self- Lov when I say I was listening to it earlier what I mean is I spent a full three hours playing this song on Loop
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dancing around my apartment to it my neighbors must hate me and Muna by now uh but there's this line in it that's so good that goes I've been staring at myself in the mirror going don't leave me now and that is the exact sentiment
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that I think we all need when we are at the worst we need to be able to stand in the mirror look ourselves in the eye and go I am not going anywhere for you right now I am not going to abandon you in
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this painful place you're in I am not going to tell you that I will only love you again once things are better this is where it matters this is where you are picking up the heavy weight of self-love
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right it's so easy to love yourself on the days when everything is sunny and everything's going your way and you look super impressive to the outside world it is easy to show up for yourself on those days any idot could love themselves on
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those days right the people who actually know how to do it know how to look at themselves in their worst moment and pick up that heavy ass weight of self- Lov in that moment right even now I will
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not abandon you even now I will show up for you and I will choose what is healthy for you I will not jump ship on you I will not Outsource that self-love I will listen to what you need I will
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listen in this moment to what my inner child needs and I will give that to my inner child without judgment and the reason this is so important is because often I believe our failures the things we get wrong the things that drive us
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off the rails in life are often our inner children screaming at us there's something wrong right anything that we see as self-sabotage I believe is often some other repressed part of our psyche screaming at us to have a need met and
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if the second things go wrong we just go into self-hatred mode and start self- abandoning like crazy we will never figure out what that need was that needs fulfilling and how to give it to ourselves and when we find a way to do
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that then we can start building ourselves towards that healthy equilibrium where we are actually showing up for our own needs giving ourselves what we want and sustainably working in a healthier Direction so earlier this year I went through a
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period where I was struggling a lot with some personal stuff that was going on in my life and I started overeating a lot and drinking I went through a period of about 2 years of no drinking and then I
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kind of tued myself back into it and was like nah no no I can like drink sometimes now but it got to a point where I was like now I'm just drinking for the sake of drinking I'm eating for
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the sake of eating I am totally dissociated from my body and what my body wants and that doesn't feel good but there's this part of me that's like compulsively doing it and I can't figure out why and it wasn't until I got really
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quiet with myself and was like okay I'm going to listen I'm just gonna pay some attention to my inner child and ask her what's up and have a conversation with her and what she had to say in uh much
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more words than this is that I was jumping ship a lot I was Outsourcing my self-esteem a lot I was Outsourcing my needs for Comfort a lot I was trying to rely on the outside world to make me
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feel steady and secure and grounded in a time of my life when I am not feeling steady or secure or grounded and I had to stop and figure out what would mean to make myself feel steady secure and
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grounded without anyone else's help and I had to commit myself which meant actually making some drastic changes to creating a space for myself where I felt those things independent of anyone else's input before I was able to get
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back on track comfortably and easily with my health there's another direction that could have gone in right I could have gone ooh I'm not liking the way I feel about myself I'm not liking the way my body looks right now I'm going to go
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try to get a bunch of validation out of other people to make me feel better about those things and that would have worked intermittently and passively and in the meantime this chronic sense of resistance would have been happening in
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my body between the part of me that wanted my own attention my own love my own support through this time and the part of me that wanted to jump ship and just get everybody else to do that work
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for me and the problem probably would have kept getting worse but at the end of the day it turned out what I needed was to stop traveling I was traveling for a while and that worked for me for a
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period and then stopped working I needed to come home I needed to find a bunch of ways to find love and acceptance and support from people without drinking or partying with them because I'm too [ __ ] old for that and I don't enjoy
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it anymore and I needed to feed myself healthy food and ground myself in physical activity which feels so nice for my body and I needed to get good sleeps and I needed to ask for some extensions on my school assignments and
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ask for help with some things that I was struggling with and doing all of that stuff required adjusting some of my self- expect expectations and I think that honestly that is half the battle a lot of the time with self-love is
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allowing the expectations that we hold for ourselves to change when our feelings are kind of railing against them right I really wanted to graduate at the top of my class I had to change that expectation because I was not
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willing to sacrifice my health for it I really wanted to go have a fun summer in Europe and I had to change that expectation for myself because my Health was more important than that it's so tempting to feel like once we get all of
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these needs in our external environment satisfied then we are going to be happy and we are going to be at peace but I imagine that the truest measure of whether we are happy and doing well and at peace is can you just sit in a room
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alone with yourself and like who you are and feel like your own company is chill and cool and great and you don't have to run away from yourself I think that's the only real measure of if we're doing well and if we're doing okay and
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if we're loving ourselves is how does it feel when nothing else is going on when there's no distractions what's it like in your body are you at home in your body and in your mind and in your soul
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or are you just always looking for that Escape right and I'm not trying to shame anyone for looking for the Escape either I spent most of my life looking for like which problems I could solve and which things I could achieve and what I could
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do and experience and build and control in my environment in order to make myself feel okay right I get it it's so natural to reach like that and it takes a lot of work and a lot of practice and
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kind of like a lifetime of trying to get to that place where we just feel okay when we're with ourselves but here's kind of what I like to think of when I feel like I've messed something up when
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I've handled a situation in a way that I'm not proud of when I have failed at something when I have had to lower my own standards for performance in some way I like to remind myself that I am
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constant in the process of maturing and if you believe you are not constantly in the process of maturing that is a giant ass self- red flag cuz I don't care who you are I don't care how old you are I don't
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care how much work you've done we are hopefully chronically in the process of learning how to show up in the world in a better way and shaming myself for getting things wrong is kind of like shaming a baby for puking if you have a
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baby it's going to throw up all the time why I don't actually know why do babies puke so much is it like a like a sphincter issue like it's not strong enough yet or is it something to do with
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their stomach not being able to hold and digest food properly if you guys know why babies puke as much as they do please leave it in the comments but the point is there's some physical reason that is outside of the baby's control
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why it has to throw up after feeding right so you as its parent have two choices you can shame and be cruel towards your baby and tell it it's disgusting every time it pukes and then it's going to grow up with all these
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like weird mental health issues and digestive problems probably or you can accept that your baby developmentally is not capable of eating without puking yet and that in time your baby will become capable of eating without puking but in
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the meantime the choice you have is do you clean up your baby's puke while shaming and blaming your baby for something that is beyond their control or do you clean up your baby's puke while telling your baby it's okay that
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you puked this is totally normal for the point of your development that you're at and I completely love you and I will clean up your puke 5,000 more times because you are growing and growing babies puke this is the same attitude we
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can take to our own failures like thinking that we should be anywhere in terms of our development that we're just not is as useless as shaming a baby for puking before they are ready to stop puking we just are where we are and we
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are making the best decisions we're capable of making with the information that we have and if you believe that you have enough information to to be making a better decision then great you can make it next time and this time clean up
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your damn puke with self-love and tell yourself cool you tried for something you puked it up it didn't work that's fine I'll clean up your puke again I will clean up your puke 5,000 more times if that's how many times it takes for
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you to learn a lesson that you need to learn there's some muscle inside of you that is not strong enough yet just like I'm imagining that the baby's sphincter isn't strong enough yet right it just can't perform that action yet so until
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it can I will keep holding you and I will keep cleaning up your puke that is self-love right conditional self-acceptance is telling ourselves if you ever puke again I'm going to hate you forever and then what's going to
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happen is you're just going to like puke in your mouth and swallow it and you're going to get all emotionally ill inside mess up be present for yourself in your mess ups clean up the mess ups right I'm
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not saying let your life go to [ __ ] and don't deal with the consequences of any of your actions quite the opposite I'm saying deal with the consequences of every single one of your actions clean up the puke every single time and accept
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and love the part of you that is trying to strengthen that muscle and is not strong enough yet accept that do not shame yourself for not having a well-developed sphincter yet I think I just like the word sphincter it's funny
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word you never use that word unless I guess if you're like a throat doctor or something you would use that um but yeah you cannot develop certain emotional skills without trying a bunch of times and making a bunch of messes and if
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that's happening it doesn't mean you have to say like yeah I love this mess I love the puke it just means you have to be loving towards yourself as you try and fail and clean up your own messes
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again and again and again and again and again all that means is that you are in the process of maturing and of growing new muscles and of strengthening internally I think such a humongous part of self-love is just having complete
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acceptance for ourselves in the areas that we are not acing yet in the areas that it feels like we should be doing well at by now but aren't or the areas where we used to be doing well and now
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aren't maybe that's our call to get interested in what changed right something else came up that now made this area a little bit harder to deal with or a little bit harder to regulate ourselves around and again if you're a
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good parent to your kid and let's say they start getting worse marks at school or getting into fights all the time you're not just going to go what's wrong with you change you're going to go huh is my child experiencing stress in other
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areas is my child getting enough sleep is my child feeling stressed or they being bullied you're going to look at the entire ecosystem of your child's life and try to figure out what's going on for them in a way that's causing them
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to act out in other ways and that's often how it works for ourselves as adults too for a while things go well it's easy to keep to our routines and healthy coping mechanisms it's easy to get along well with other people and
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then things shift and we're not always conscious of when when those shifts happen and we start reacting differently right but we can hold space in an ideal world for looking at oursel as part of an ecosystem and figuring out what's
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changed in our ecosystem that is now causing us to react differently and then we can do some work on that but just shaming ourselves and saying that it is all our fault that we're acting in a way we're not proud of probably isn't going
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to work if we're still constantly getting triggered then it's just going to be a shame spiral as we're constantly hating ourselves for doing something and then not having another to do it so sometimes I find it helpful to remember
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that hard times just deplete our ego strength when we are going through something difficult it's kind of like we are running an emotional marathon and it's like if someone stops you and goes hey do 400 Jumping Jacks in the middle
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of a marathon it's going to be a lot harder than it normally is because you have already depleted so much of your body's energy and emotionally the same thing happens when we are dealing with emotional issues right we don't always
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have as much ego strength as we normally have and so we need to be extra compassionate and understanding with ourselves during those times we have to be willing to be very very non-judgmental if we are making messes a
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little bit more often right that's probably going to happen it probably just means you are reaching a really tough part of that race and you know what the only reason problems crop up for us in the first place is because we
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are in the race to start with the only way we're ever going to not mess up at all is if we are not trying if we're not going for anything if we are not engaging with our Liv lives fully and
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completely and enthusiastically that's the only way we're ever going to save ourselves from messing up in any capacity so this year of my life I'm finding a lot of freedom and just being like damn I running an emotional
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marathon and you know what it makes total sense that I'm really tired it makes total sense that my judgment is impaired sometimes it makes total sense that I'm making the wrong call a lot of my energy is going towards this Marathon
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I'm running maybe I need more rest breaks maybe I need to adjust the time that I've told myself I'm going to finish the race in and again a lot of the time it's really difficult to go oo I'm going to lessen my expectations for
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myself but if you want to engage in true self-love you're going to have to be willing to do that you're going to have to be willing to put that feeling of I am okay with myself in my life when I'm
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sitting in a room alone with myself above everything else every external achievement or goal or thing that you think is going to get you to this place where you never think ill of yourself again all of that every single piece of
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it has to be seconded to your willingness to fight to get yourself to a place where you can just sit alone in a room with yourself and be pretty damn happy with that company I mean the most perfect person in the world could come
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along and say they're ready to validate you you just have to give up this little piece of yourself that feels very important to you you have to be willing to go nope keeping that piece of myself that feels important to me the most
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incredible opportunity could come your way and it could say look I'm going to grant you all of your Earthly dreams of Fame and success and wealth but you're going to need to sacrifice a lot of your health and emotional stability and
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well-being and you're going to have to go no I'm more important than that you have to be willing to not jump ship at any cost to get to that place of self- Lov because once you get there other
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people can criticize you other people can deny you opportunities other people can tell you everything they think about you that is unpleasant or angry or wrong and it's still going to be okay for you because you're not self- abandoning
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you're not replacing what you think about yourself with what other people think of you so you can have wonderful and growing and Incredibly deep and Rich relationships only with people who are willing to accept and hold space for the
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full entire range of you like you are holding space for the full entire range of you because that's love right when we love ourselves at our best and at our worst we naturally learn to only accept love from people who also love us at our
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best and our worst but when we can Al accept ourselves we also seek out relationships with people who only conditionally accept us too because that's what we're used to that's what matches up and uh here's the kicker I
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fully believe until you unconditionally love yourself and know how to sit with yourself in your worst most shameful most scary moments and be a source of comfort and acceptance and encouragement for yourself you also don't really know how to do that with other people we can
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always only ever meet people as deeply as we have met ourselves right so if we want to love our partners our friends our children our first job our first job has to be learning to love the full and
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entire range of who we are because we cannot pass on what we don't have within us so when I say I love you at the end of these videos what I mean is I am rooting for you when you are at your
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absolute best and I am rooting for you when you are at your absolute worst and that I hope that you are showing up for your s that way too so with that I love you guys I hope you're taking care of
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yourselves really really deeply and I will see you back here again sometime in the nearish future no worries got me no I got no problems no problems I can see
Topics:self-loveself-acceptanceinner childattachment theoryself-compassionconditional acceptancepersonal growthmental healthHeidi Priebetherapy
