don’t believe that you have to love yourself or fix all of your flaws before you meet someone, because emotional work is lifelong and there’s no finishing line. But I do believe that you have to consider yourself worthy enough to receive love, and for some of us who put our needs last, that requires emotional growth.

Most of our longings can be expressed as a desire to love (self, another person, work, nature, or God) and to be loved (by self, another person, our environment, or God). The first step is to learn to love, and be loved by, ourselves. In this way we establish a foundation for fulfilling all our longings. We learn to identify with a part of ourselve

These kids were given the message their desires and needs did not matter, and in turn, this evolved into anger and bitterness. As adults, when similar emotional pain erupts that causes the inner child to scream, “my needs don’t matter,” the entitlement wheel starts in motion.

Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop