"Hard To Love”: No Negative Self-Talk

Interpersonal relationships can often be difficult, and they don’t always work out in the long run. If you’ve been struggling to maintain close connections with other people, you may tend to put all the blame on yourself when something bad occurs.

Do you often find yourself thinking, “I’m hard to love”? If so, you may need to work on cultivating positive self-regard, optimism, and positive self-talk. You might do this by practicing self-affirmation, learning your triggers, confronting and accepting your feelings, and getting help from a therapist. It can be easy to connect with a therapist who can help you improve your confidence through an online therapy platform.

Anxious attachment and feeling hard to love

In many cases, a person’s belief that they’re “hard to love” originates in childhood. Many researchers think that people can develop negative “core beliefs” about themselves as a result of formative experiences. Because these self-limiting beliefs may form when you’re first developing an understanding of who you are, they can be very difficult to shake and replace with positive ones. Several common negative core beliefs tend to relate to the idea that it’s difficult for you to receive love and affection from others. 

Examples may include the following:

• “I feel like I will always be rejected when my flaws are perceived.”

• “I think it’s difficult for someone to like me.”

• “I feel that I will hardly ever have the love or friendship I would like from others.”

• “I think I’m not good enough to be loved.”

• “I think it is unlikely that someone will be attracted to me.”

If thoughts like these from your inner critic frequently arise in your mind, you may have developed harmful core beliefs. This could be related to an attachment style high in anxiety, meaning that you may struggle with a persistent fear of being abandoned by those you care about.

Your negative thinking could be sabotaging your relationships

You might find it hard to imagine that your feelings of being unlovable are inaccurate and continue to automatically blame yourself when things don’t work out.

“Of course I’m hard to love,” you might think. “How else do you explain how I keep ending up alone?”

However, there’s a strong possibility that you may be mistaking a cause for an effect. Some studies have found that an anxious attachment style can make both forming new relationships and sustaining ongoing ones difficult. In other words, your belief that it’s hard for anyone to care for you could be causing your interpersonal difficulties instead of the other way around. This can happen in a few different ways.

Doubting others’ interest

If you’re constantly questioning whether other people could really love you, you might miss out on opportunities to strike up a relationship. And if you do get involved with someone, you may be hesitant to take things to the next level since you may worry that the other person’s interest is insincere or that they’ll regret it later. Some partners may mistake this for a fear of commitment or a lack of interest on your part and decide to break things off. 

Seeking excessive reassurance 

Researchers studying low self-esteem found that people with a negative self-image were usually more likely to engage in “indirect support seeking,” or trying to get others to reassure them emotionally by sulking, crying, or whining. Though this may come from a genuine desire to receive affection, it can make those close to you feel manipulated or impatient. This can happen in relationships of all kinds, potentially leading to greater distance instead of greater intimacy.

Focusing too much on yourself

If you’re constantly worrying about whether you’re good enough to deserve love, it may leave you with little emotional energy for others. A lack of self-confidence may cause us to overestimate the confidence of the people around us, potentially leading us to forget that they may need reassurance, too. Even the most supportive people may get frustrated in these circumstances and choose to walk away. Are your negative self-beliefs getting in the way of expressing your affection for others? 

How to let go of negative self-talk and thoughts

Although it can be difficult to shake off core beliefs and completely stop negative self-talk, it may not be impossible. Almost everyone has negative thoughts from time to time. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to let go of these thoughts and encourage positive self-talk. 

Here are a few strategies you can use to reorient the way you think about yourself and your capacity for love, manage stress about relationships, and silence that self-critical inner voice.

Practice positive self-talk

If you’ve built your identity around the idea that you’re difficult to love, it may be necessary to build yourself up based on different foundations. One way to do this may be through self-affirmation, which usually involves grounding yourself in the things that matter most to you in life. 

The first step is typically to identify the things that make you feel most personally fulfilled in life. Possible examples may include:

• Creative expression

• Career success

• Spiritual pursuits

• Learning new things

• Helping other people

• Spending time with loved ones

Once you’ve written down the things that matter to you, you can spend some time each day imagining yourself fulfilling these goals in the future. You may also want to do this when you’re feeling particularly unwanted or unlovable. Research has shown that self-affirmation typically activates parts of the brain associated with positive valuation, reward, and self-image. It may help you begin to form a view of yourself that’s shaped by positive goals instead of feelings of helplessness.

Learn your triggers

Certain events or situations in your life might tend to bring up your worries about being hard to love. These may be things that remind you of the childhood incidents that led to your negative core beliefs, or they might be things that challenge your self-esteem. Whatever the case, learning to identify the things that spark feelings of unworthiness may help you let them go.

Keeping a journal could help with this. Whenever you’re feeling hard to love, you could try writing down where you are, what you’re doing, and what happened right before the self-doubting feelings set in. In time, getting to know your thought processes may help you see your negative self-beliefs as irrational and exaggerated.

Confront and accept your feelings

When we’re confronted with unpleasant thoughts about ourselves, it can be tempting to simply push them aside and refuse to acknowledge them. We may try to distract ourselves with other behaviors designed to comfort us, such as the indirect support-seeking described above. 

However, trying to suppress unwanted thoughts and feelings may make them harder to release. Challenging negative self talk may be effective. Numerous studies have provided evidence that accepting your emotions without judgment can be a more effective way to cope with them. This could be because forcefully rejecting your negative thought patterns may only strengthen the feelings of distress, anxiety, and helplessness that can make them so persistent.

Reframe your self-talk in terms of change

It may be helpful to cultivate a different way of talking to yourself about the possibility of receiving love. Over time, you may be able to build a habit of learning to practice positive self talk. According to Positive Psychology, positive self talk may even help improve anxiety and depression.

The most effective way to do this may be to practice “effort self-talk.” This means that instead of telling yourself, “I’m hard to love,” or, “I’m easy to love,” you can find a bit of middle ground and think, “I’m working on being easier to love.” Though you might think this would reinforce your negative ideas about yourself, experiments have found that it can be the most helpful form of self-talk. This might be because it can give you a greater sense of agency, helping you focus on the things about yourself that you can control, which puts a more positive spin on how you feel. Besides, most of us do have room for improvement. Cultivating change-focused self-talk with self compassion and gentle language could be an opportunity to reflect on practical changes you can make in the ways you relate to others.

Get help from a therapist

Support from a mental health professional can be helpful when you’re trying to overcome negative beliefs about yourself and engage in more positive thinking. A therapist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may be able to suggest strategies for building healthier mental habits. A randomized controlled trial found that CBT was usually effective at improving self-esteem, with the effects persisting when researchers followed up several months later.

Online therapy may be a good option if you’re worried that it may be difficult to locate a therapist. Receiving treatment with tools like videoconferencing typically means that you can choose from a wide range of mental health professionals instead of being limited to those located near you. It may also be more convenient to set up and attend appointments when there’s no need to travel to a therapist’s office. 

Research suggests that internet cognitive behavioral therapy can work just as well as attending appointments in person. For instance, a 2022 meta-analysis of 26 different trials found “a similar therapeutic effect” between the two methods.