How to Feel Loved After Child Abuse

Adult survivors of child abuse often feel unloved. Many of their needs to feel loved and cherished as a child were never met, and those unmet needs continue to leave holes inside of the adult child abuse survivor. Child abuse survivors might turn to romantic relationships or friendships to meet their need for love, but those relationships inevitably fail to meet the person's deep longing for the love that was not received in childhood. If you suffered child abuse and continue to crave love, you are not destined to go through life feeling empty.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Heal from your past. Enter into therapy and work through your childhood issues. Until you face your past head-on, it will be difficult for you to receive love. No matter how many people in your life truly love you, your guard from childhood will prevent you from feeling that love.
2. Love yourself. Learning how to love yourself after child abuse is extremely difficult because self-loathing is a very common aftereffect. Change the way you think about yourself. Choose to stop telling yourself self-deprecating messages and replace those messages with loving ones.
3. Tell yourself that you love yourself. Say, "I love you," to yourself multiple times a day, even if you do not believe it and feel ridiculous doing it. In time, you will be ready to receive those messages. After you can receive those messages from yourself, you will be ready to receive them from others.
4. Engage in yoga and meditation. Meditation is a powerful way to get in touch with the source of unending love. Whether you want to call that source of love "God," "life energy," or another label, an unending source of love exists. Yoga helps you quiet your mind and prepare for meditation. Even if you do not believe in a spiritual realm, try meditating anyhow. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
5. Love others. When you show compassion to another person, it is only natural for that person to respond by being compassionate back to you. The more love you give away, the more love will come back to you.

Tips & Warnings

• Loving yourself is your natural state. The child abuse is what fueled the self-loathing. No matter how much you hate yourself, love will always conquer hate. Choose to love yourself, and you will eventually succeed.