When I started writing Love That Was Meant for Me, I believed that I was writing a guide to other people. However, in between these chapters about boundaries, forgiveness, and courage I understood that I was also writing my story.
I have more than ten years of experience as a Relationship and trauma coach, and a world-travelling trauma therapist, showing individuals in New York City, London, and Mumbai one simple but ground-breaking truth – choosing yourself does not ruin your relationships, it defines them.
The book was written as a result of hundreds of therapy sessions, real tears and the silent triumphs of those that finally chose to love themselves first.
The Reason Why Selecting Yourself Helps and Makes It So Hard
We are taught that love is sacrifice.
However, the situation turns different when sacrifice upgrades into self-abandonment and relationships are disproportionate.
It is usually in my CBT couples counseling services that I meet individuals who will give forever until they become the opposite of loving. They believe that limits will drive love out of the picture, and this is not the case. Love is sustainable because of boundaries.
The process of making a choice starts with awareness, the question, When did I lose respect for what I need?
Building the Relationship You Have With Yourself
When you talk harshly to yourself, you will accept criticism when other people criticize you.
When you stop sleeping, then you will find people who do the same.
I understand how self-worth quietly determines all dynamics as a best marriage counselor in a multicultural setting. When every individual is in charge of his or her emotional well-being, the couples prosper.
Finding peace within yourself is a prerequisite for loving another person.
That is why the first chapter of Love That Was Meant for Me welcomes the reader to meet themselves – not the one that others probably want to see, but the true self under the patterns of survival.
Limitations: The Language of Love
The experience that taught me the strongest lesson in my therapy practice is that a client learnt how to say no without feeling guilty.
One time she compared obedience to niceness until she discovered that she will say yes to everybody and no to herself.
In trauma therapy, she learned that there are no barriers to boundaries, but bridges toward respect for one another. The individuals who actually care about you will change; the people who merely cared about obedience will go.
During treatment, I remind them of the fact that it is not selfish to prefer peace to approval – it is prudent.
Ending the Cycle of Endless Emotions
Most of us talk about what we have not mended.
Childhood injuries are replicated in the love of adults with varying conclusions.
In Love That Was Meant for Me, I make the reader identify emotional loops – those instances when you are reenacting the same narrative with another individual.
I provide couples with CBT couples counseling services, which involve teaching the partners to recognize triggers, wait before responding and deliver information clearly other than defensively. Healing is not implicating the past, but making a new choice.
Vulnerability as Real Strength
My whole life I thought that being strong was to be in control.
But it controls armour, and armour will lock love out.
To make a choice of oneself is to shut no doors – on the contrary, to open them, safely and deliberately. Such blunt candor is shocking, more so when you have been socialized to suppress a coveting or a feeling. But there is nothing like being authentic that does not find correspondence.
Pleasure as Presence Experience
One cannot treat a detached mind with a detached body.
Pleasure does not only involve physicality, but it involves emotional safety via touch, movement, and perception.
As an online relationship coach, I have witnessed the changes in intimacy because of mindfulness. When you come curious rather than a performer, bond strengthens.
Choosing yourself means coming again to the right to pleasure, to joy, to being whole, to being fully seen. Honouring your body and your emotional sense, you instruct partners to honour theirs.
Relations as Reflections of Development
This is one of the most difficult lessons I have had to learn, both in life and in my career; that no other partner can fill a gap that is made by a person neglecting themselves.
Good relationships are a sign of your development, bad relationships are the magnification of your injuries. When you make this choice every day, you cease to aim at rescue, you begin to seek resonance.
My clients tend to have a change of heart: rather than asking why do they not love me the way I need them to, they start questioning, why am I lingering where love is not made to me?
It is that change that becomes the gateway to growth.
The Awakening of the Energy You Bring
Self-love is contagious.
By working with integrity, you elevate the emotive level of any environment you get into.
I have witnessed families mending their relationships, couples rejoining and even offices changing when someone begins to appear different.
Emotional intelligence is relational intelligence, as demonstrated by the best couple therapy in USA practices. The better you know yourself, the more secure other people can be around you.
And that is why making a choice with yourself is not the end of the love – it is the reborn love.
Healing as a Daily Ritual
No ultimate stage of curing. Even a therapist has his days – the days when old patterns speak up again.The distinction is now awareness.
I stop and take a breath and recollect that love is a practice.Whenever you decide to rest instead of brood, to speak truthfully instead of lying, to be kind instead of being judgmental — you are again making a decision in favor of yourself.That has been the point of consistency to you.
Self-Love to Soul Connection
Once you have mastered how to love yourself fully, you make room to find relationships that are soul-oriented.
They are relationship that are sustained not by necessity but by nourishment.
In Love That Was Meant for Me, I tell you that self-love is not what causes people to be difficult to love, but it assists you in selecting the right partners who will love you in the right way.
You quit confusing passion with closeness, messiness with sex, and silence with protection.
Therefore, the Ripple Effect of Choosing You
Selecting oneself is the most radical form of love that one can offer.
It alters your stance, your presence and your serenity.
The relationships you remain in will become lighter; the relationship that go will liberate you.
In any case, you win, since you are no longer lost.
My book Love That Was Meant for Me has been published, and it is time to start this journey.
It is not just a read – it is an exercise in reflection, of regaining your value, your bodies and your emotional voices.
My services include Couple and Individual relationship therapy in India and CBT couples counseling services, as well as trauma therapy, in India and around the world, where a client is offered a personalized approach.Together we will transform awareness to action and healing to wholeness.
Get more thoughts and healing resources and talk about emotional intimacy and empowerment with me on Instagram and on Youtube.
