How to Learn to Belong to Ourselves for a Happy and Satisfying Life
Pscyhology Insights from Dr. Bronce Rice, Seasoned Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Curator’s Note: The exploration of self-love emphasizes the importance of developing a relationship with oneself, rooted in early emotional experiences and societal influences. Love perceived in childhood shapes adult emotional responses and expectations in relationships. Often, love is viewed as dependent on external validation, leading to fragility in one’s self-worth. As individuals learn to navigate their feelings and needs, fostering a kinder inward relationship is essential for emotional stability. This journey requires self-reflection, patience, and practices of self-care, ultimately reshaping not just personal well-being but also how one interacts with others, cultivating a more substantial inner peace and self-acceptance. This premium content was written by Dr. Bronce Rice, A psychoanalyst and psychologist who helps people explore who they are, why they live their lives as they do, and how to bring their wellbeing into existence.
Dear Reader,
For most of us, love in its current form differs from what love was like at the beginning of our lives, and it often shows up in ways that shape how we live with ourselves each day. And yet it is rarely separate from the emotional foundations formed early in life, before we had words for what love was or what it means to us now. What we later come to recognize as love is therefore rarely something neutral or entirely new. We often experience it through earlier-formed patterns of expectation and emotional response that shape how love is felt and understood.
What is not yet present is the capacity to organize those experiences into a psychological and emotional form that we come to recognize as love. When we are young, our earliest experiences are not yet organized through psychological concepts, but through direct involvement with others.
What happens in relation to those around us is taken in directly, in the immediacy of being with others, before it can be separated into feelings, thoughts, or what it might mean for us later. What we later come to call love is first situated within the emotional world of our early relationships. It is here that the earliest meanings of connection are established, before they can be reflected on, named, or remembered as such.
As development continues, our emotional world widens into family arrangements, roles, and the unspoken rules through which we come to belong. Love becomes associated not only with being held or responded to, but with how one comes to secure a place within important relationships.
By the time a child develops the ability to speak of love, love has already become woven into the emotional complexity of life. It is already tied to matters such as who we should be loyal to, who we should fear, who we should be responsible to, and how the loss of love first enters our emotional life. Love is no longer only something a child feels; it is already beginning to organize how they experience themselves in relation to others.
These early experiences, and ways of locating ourselves in important relationships, do not remain confined to the family. These ways of organizing experience are also shaped and taken in by the wider society around us.
Valentine’s Day, for instance, is one of the clearest cultural moments in which this organization of love is on display. It reflects how love is repeatedly framed as something that takes place between people, rather than as a way of living with oneself. Love becomes located primarily between people.
Under these conditions, love continues to develop outwardly. Others increasingly become the place where love is expected to reside. A person’s emotional life can then begin to organize around those connections in ways that place something essential to their sense of self outside of themselves.
This outward way of organizing love is part of what I explore more broadly in my work on the Wellbeing Equation, a framework focused on how the ways we live with ourselves shape our wellbeing over time.
Within this organization, the relationship to oneself often remains undeveloped, and there is little guidance for how to think through what this means for us as we move through the world. Love then tends to take shape and play itself out as something that exists for us primarily in relation to another person.
When love is organized this way, the self often becomes experienced as something that depends on whether love is present or absent elsewhere, tied to someone or something existing outside of us. Within this way of organizing love, a person can come to experience their relationship to themselves as fragile, unstable, or dependent on aspects of life they have little ability to control or even understand.
When love remains organized primarily through outward ways of relating, the developmental movement of forming a more internal relationship with oneself may never become established. What is often missing is not simply an idea about oneself, but the gradual formation of a way of being with one’s own feelings, needs, and inner life.
Over time, this way of being with one’s own inner life can become a way of relating to oneself, shaping how a person meets and responds to themselves and their own experience. This inward relationship is not organized around where love appears elsewhere, but around the capacity to remain in contact with one’s own experience.
When this inward relationship has had difficulty consolidating or has failed to form at all, people often find themselves turning outward to orient themselves and make sense of what they are feeling. Looking outside oneself to important people, relationships, or external situations can come to serve as a primary way of orienting ourselves and helping us to feel safer.
Over time, this outward organization can leave a person increasingly dependent on what is happening around them for a sense of where they are emotionally. In unfamiliar situations, new relationships, or moments of uncertainty or higher stress, inner peace or a sense of self can easily become lost. In these moments, people may feel suddenly unmoored from themselves, unsure of what they feel or what they need.
In this state, people often look to others not only for connection, but for relief, reassurance, and a way of restoring a sense of inner peace and coherence.
This way of organizing love takes shape within emotional environments that ask a great deal of a child, often leaving little room for or emphasis on how to build a loving relationship with ourselves. In some families, love becomes closely tied to meeting the expectations or emotional needs of others, or to securing one’s place in relation to what is important to another, in ways that come to take precedence over one’s own needs and desires.
Within these kinds of emotional environments, learning how to attend to others, anticipate what is needed, or adjust oneself in relation to important figures can become central to how love is experienced and understood, and this way of relating often extends into later emotional life as well.
Under these conditions, love can come to be experienced primarily as something that happens between people and in relation to circumstance, rather than as something that can be developed and cultivated within ourselves.
As we grow and life becomes more nuanced and complex, organizing love primarily through others often begins to create difficulties. People may find that how they experience themselves shifts in response to what is happening around them, particularly within important relationships.
When love feels tenuous or becomes uncertain, many people find they struggle to remain in contact with what is important to them, separate from another. In these moments, a person’s sense of self and what love means to them can become increasingly dependent on another person’s wishes or desires.
Over time, this way of relating can leave a person less equipped to know what they want, what they feel or need, or even what kind of love, and what kind of love relationship, is truly good for them.
Under these conditions, what has not yet taken shape, or what remains difficult to develop, is a more stable inward relationship through which we come to live with ourselves.
By an inward relationship, I don’t mean only how we think about ourselves or the attitudes we hold, though clearly these are important, but more a way of being with ourselves that takes time and dedication to develop.
It is through our eventual relationship with ourselves, shaped in relation to others, that we develop the ability not only to recognize what our needs are, but to discover whether and how we are able to meet them in a loving and caring manner.
In this sense, learning to love ourselves is not only an attitude or stance we adopt, but an aspect of maturational growth, an achievement of living, that requires time, experience, and a different way of being with ourselves than what was provided to us early on.
For many of us, questions about love, and more specifically what it means to us, often begin when the ways we have gone about important relationships start to affect other areas of our lives. What often happens is that we have a hard time making sense of how we end up feeling. We may find ourselves suffering within existing or newer relationships, experiencing a painful loss, or beginning to feel emotionally neglected or abandoned in ways that are difficult to understand or place in the context of what love meant to us growing up.
When these emotional struggles continue, we often need help making sense of why they feel so painful. Over time, our efforts to understand present pain can lead us to explore our emotional upbringings, and whether the ways love was expressed early on are shaping how we experience relationships now.
Questions related to family dynamics, emotional roles, and unspoken expectations often begin to emerge as we try to understand why love and closeness affect us the way they do.
For many of us, myself included, this kind of exploration often begins in a therapist’s office. People arrive speaking about the painful feelings they are having in a current relationship. Others come carrying the pain and suffering that has followed the loss of an important relationship. Still others arrive wanting to explore why they keep finding themselves in familiar emotional dynamics or situations they don’t understand and can’t yet make emotional sense of.
In those early sessions, much of what gets talked about often centers on what is happening in our current lives and relationships. People generally describe current events in their lives, the emotional conflicts they are experiencing, and the losses they feel.
As they speak, they begin to bring their reactions and feelings into the room. The room begins to fill not only with their personal stories, but also with their tensions, irritations, confusions, and disappointments, in addition to other moments that neither person quite expects.
Over time, I begin to focus our attention not solely on current events, but on how the person is feeling and experiencing themselves with me, as they speak.
A man in his late thirties is sitting across from me, looking tired and agitated as he speaks about a recent fight with his partner. He moves through what was said, how he said it, who left the room first, and how the conversation ended. As he talks, his breathing quickens and his fists tighten in his lap.
After a few moments, he becomes teary-eyed and says, “I don’t know why this always hits me so hard.”
I pause to let his question settle, then smile slightly.
“That’s a good question,” I say, gesturing toward his hands. “What else do they want to say right now?”
He looks down at his hands.
“They’d tell you I’m still angry,” he says, “but I know I shouldn’t say any more.”
I tell him that in this room, his thoughts and emotions are welcome, including the anger he feels he shouldn’t show.
His fists tighten again and he looks at me angrily, rage in his eyes, as tears begin to run down his cheeks.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t do this again.”
“On the one hand, your anger is here and welcome,” I say, “and on the other, you’re telling me you made a promise, to someone, not to do this again. Who did you promise?”
“When things got bad at home, when I was a kid,” he says, “I promised my father I’d be good and watch after my mother.”
He grows silent, looking down at his hands, rubbing them feverishly.
When he speaks again, he says, “I feel like I’ve been fighting with him, or myself, for a long time. I don’t really know who, or for how long.”
He exhales slowly and his hands drop from his waist.
“I’ve spent so long trying not to feel this,” he says, “I don’t think I ever noticed how much it’s been costing me.”
He pauses, then adds, “I was just a kid,” rubbing his hands more gently.
What distinguishes moments like this is not only that attention turns inward, but that it begins to do so in a more loving fashion.
In the slowing of his breath, in the way he speaks of the child he was, and in the way his hands soften, he is beginning to relate to himself more lovingly. Instead of meeting his inner life only through restraint or self-control, he is beginning to experience concern for himself.
The man feels his anger, his efforts to restrain his emotions, and the intensity of his conflictual grief. At the same time, something new is taking shape.
He begins to notice himself having these feelings, and to respond to himself with more care. There is curiosity now about what they have cost him. He allows himself to acknowledge his own hurt.
In doing so, he is not only exploring himself. He is beginning to treat himself in a more loving way.
Gradually, his awareness turns toward a promise he has been living by for most of his life, and the conflict it creates inside him.
What organizes his attention is no longer only what happens between him and his partner, or between him and his parents. It now includes how he is living with these experiences within himself, and how he is beginning to relate to himself with more care.
What is beginning to take form here is often described as “self-love.” When people speak about “loving themselves,” it is usually framed as an attitude or a stance, something one decides to adopt or take up as a practice.
What my work shows with this man, however, is the beginning phase of a developmental shift in how he is able to take up, reflect on, and interact with his emotional experience. It is a shift that carries greater care and begins to provide new developmental support for his emotional life.
With this shift, he is no longer only living inside an inner life shaped by what was handed down or sought from others, but is beginning to contribute something new by responding to himself with greater care.
As my work with this man continues, what begins to shift is his capacity to question how he wants to respond to himself, to his frustrations and desires, and whether he wants to respond to himself differently than others have in the past.
As this capacity grows, the automatic ways he has learned to treat himself can be taken up and reflected on, allowing space for a different emotional response to his own experience.
We work on helping him respond to himself with less criticism and urgency, and with more patience, kindness, and allowance for being human and making mistakes.
In its place, a different inner experience, or emotional atmosphere, begins to take shape. He begins to experience himself less as someone who exists primarily to meet other people’s expectations, and more as someone who can question what he wants, allowing concern and care to be directed toward himself as well.
When we begin to turn inward and interact with ourselves in a more loving fashion, it does not pull us away from relationships, per se, but begins to establish a different kind of relationship with ourselves.
In this sense, what this shift highlights is that we begin to be able to belong to ourselves differently, and that our inner life is no longer something we have to organize primarily around others, particularly when doing so is not being kind to ourselves, but something we can actively take up and be responsible for.
Developmentally, this means that as our inward relationship continues to develop and grow, love and connection in our outside relationships are no longer asked to carry the full weight of our worth and sense of self.
I want to point out that developing a kinder, more loving relationship with ourselves is not simply a comforting idea, or some self-help or new age concept, but something that is increasingly supported by what we are learning about our bodies, our nervous systems, and our emotional health.
Research across psychology, neuroscience, and the field of health and wellness consistently points to the fact that the emotional environments we live inside shape our physiology and stress responses, immune functioning, and the way our nervous systems organize around safety, regulation, and our long-term health.
When the inner environment becomes more supportive and caring, the body is no longer living under the same stress conditions, and research links these kinds of emotional climates to shifts in the chemistry of our nervous systems, including the so-called “feel-good” chemicals like serotonin and dopamine.
Over time, these kinds of internal environments are associated not only with changes in mood but with lower overall stress burden, different patterns of inflammation, greater support for emotional and physical well-being, and a growing sense of internal confidence.
What these points to is how we respond to ourselves and our emotional needs each day is not only emotionally meaningful, but shapes the conditions our bodies and nervous systems are living inside.
This is one reason learning to respond to ourselves differently in ordinary moments matters, as a way of gradually shaping the inner environments we live within.
Seen this way, learning how to respond to ourselves becomes part of the work of living, a developmental task and activity in its own right that takes time, attention, and ongoing practice.
This can begin in very simple ways: noticing how we speak to ourselves when we become irritated or stressed, taking time to pause, and giving ourselves the chance to question how we would like to respond rather than reacting immediately.
Often, this also finds expression in the forms of self-care we allow ourselves, such as slowing down, spending time in nature, exercising, resting, or taking up forms of learning and growth that support our well-being.
In doing so, we open the possibility of responding with kindness and love when it feels appropriate, allowing care and concern for ourselves to take a more central place where they may not have been present before.
For some, this may take the form of keeping a journal focused on noticing moments of kindness toward ourselves, moments of gratitude for our own efforts, or times we choose to respond to ourselves with greater care.
For others, practicing kindness outwardly, in relation to our neighbors, strangers, or people in our daily lives, can become another way to cultivate this inner orientation and support a developing sense of self-esteem, since the emotional environments we help create around us often feed back into the ones that surround us as well.
🗓 February 13 | 2:00 PM EST | Substack — LIVE: Self-Love, Courage and Finding Our Voice
Join me and Deborah Jeanne Weitzman, founder of Set Your Voice Free, for a conversation on writing, love, and finding our own voice. We’ll explore how the kinds of love we show ourselves shape the stories we tell ourselves — and how we can reconnect with ourselves with compassion, and meaning when we feel stressed and anxious.
Deborah brings her background as a musician, novelist, and teacher, to help creatives find their voice and courage. She has written an absolutely wonderful book The Sinking of the Leonardo de Vinci. I loved every word of it and it is well worth buying in my opinion. She explores themes such as love, loss, grief and finding our way back to ourselves.
You can purchase a copy of The Sinking of the Lenardo do Vinci HERE.
You can find out more about Deborah and her Substack work HERE.
If you want to explore more about the science and practice of self-care, self-compassion, and their links to health and wellbeing, these accessible pieces are a good place to start:
- Neff, Kristin D. — The Role of Self-Compassion in Development: A Healthier Way to Relate to Oneself. Human Development, 2009. An accessible paper showing how self-compassion relates to wellbeing and emotional maturity. (Neff, 2009)
- Homan, Kristin J. & Sirois, Fuschia M. — Self-Compassion and Physical Health: Exploring the Roles of Perceived Stress and Health-Promoting Behaviors
A review showing links between self-compassion, lower perceived stress, and better health behaviors. - Harvard Health — The Power of Self-Compassion
A clear, evidence-based overview of how being kind to yourself benefits both mind and body. (Harvard Health) - University of Kentucky — What Is Self-Compassion? Why It Matters and Seven Ways to…A practical, research-informed introduction to self-compassion and ways to practice it in daily life. What Is Self‑Compassion and Why It Matters
- Verywell Health — What Is Self-Compassion?
A reader-friendly article explaining why self-compassion matters for mental health and wellbeing, including accessible tips. What Is Self‑Compassion? (Verywell Health)
In Closing,
To belong to ourselves in the way I’m describing is not something we arrive at suddenly or by mistake, but something that develops over time, through effort, patience, and practice, and through the ways we learn to live with ourselves.
If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.
👇 Comment below:
Where in your life are you still looking outside yourself for something that might need to be developed within?
With care,
Bronce
👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.
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