As you may have read here, I dealt with a severe depression last year. One of the symptoms I struggled with was self loathing. Now I've never really overflowed with self love, but this was bad! Don't want to look in the mirror, pubescent self hate kinda bad. It didn't really help that I broke two of my front teeth and got some facial depigmentation disease.
Not really the self image you want to portray for your children.
When I started healing from this depression, I knew that this lack of self love was something I had to tackle, for how can one enjoy life if you hate yourself?
I started taking Crab Apple flower essence and doing self acceptance meditations. I also tried to look at myself differently when I saw myself in the mirror, and when I felt that I was just not able to show any love towards my mirrored image, I just wouldn't look.
We are often brought up with so much negative self talk, instilled by our parents, our peers and society at large, that it's very hard to break the self destructive mental chatter. Yet as a parent, one of the most important things to model is self love, because our children learn by our image. If we portray an image of self care and self acceptance, they in turn will have that outlook on the world.
Check out my eBook "Mommy Overwhelm: A Holistic Approach to Parental Stress and Depression".

photo credit: stephcarter via photopin cc

- Mothering Myself- Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses how her children have been a catalyst for treating herself better.
- The Habit of Intentional Rest - Jennifer Hoffman, of Every Breath I Take, shares how she "puts her own oxygen mask on first" with her habit of intentional rest.
- Replenishing by Connecting - Gwynn Raimondi found the way to self care through connection to those who matter most: herself, her husband, her daughter.
- Overcoming Body Image For The Sake Of Our Children - Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama takes a hard look at how her own body image can positively or negatively affect her daughter and why that scares her more than anything!
- I Resented my Pregnant Body - Mercedes at Project Procrastinot blogs about body image and the pettiness she felt when she couldn't accept the physical changes of pregnancy.
- Staying Sane & Taking Care of Myself - Jana Falls at Jananas discusses how she, as an introvert mama, has made time to take care of herself.
- Depression and Self-Image - At Authentic Parenting, Laura confesses how much her recent depression has distorted her self-image and how she struggles to overcome this.
- mummy loves ... - Helen at Zen Mummy shares a post about re-finding the person behind the mummy.
- Can my inner critics stop me from participating in a self-love blog carnival?- Tat from Mum in search almost didn't get to write for this carnival. Until she stopped to ask herself why she was pulling out.
- Self-Love, A Formula and Pictogram With Ramblings - Susan May of Together Walking gives her formula for Self Love and some of the ramblings from her mind on what Self Love means. Her journey of Self Love began about a year ago when she first heard the "official" term, Self Love.
