Self-sacrifice and doing things for your partner is great and it is not a criticism, but ask yourself, are you all give and no take?

Everybody needs a healthy dose of self-love and robust self-esteem so that those ’special’ relationships are positive and balanced in terms of give and take. Too much give and not enough take leads to resentment.

Resentment is the enemy of love as the giver withdraws to nurse the vacuum in their relationship. It does not have to be this way if we take time to appreciate our selves, our achievements and our personality traits.

Love yourself enough and that love can spread outward to everybody around you. Your partner benefits and you can save your relationship with these simple self-esteem builders.

1. Take steps to be physically healthier. Look to your diet and eat more REAL food, especially plants. Real food is anything with five or fewer ingredients or does not come in a package. Refined foods are particularly unhealthy such as white sugar, white bread and saturated fats.

Thirty minutes of vigorous exercise every day, particularly before breakfast, will benefit your system, your body shape, your mental attitude and your sleep pattern.

2. Talk to yourself nicely and get your thoughts down on paper. The mind is a very limited computer. It can only hold one or two ideas at a time in our short-term memory. It is thereby very prone to repetition and circular trapped thinking.

By writing or drawing out your ideas you can exorcise repetitive thoughts and move on to develop your mind and attitude.

If you treat yourself and talk to yourself in the same way you talk to a child just learning the way of the World, then you will have a self-loving attitude.

3. Take time out from all the duties of daily life to meditate and reflect alone and in a calming situation. Reflect upon the modalities of your thoughts. Modalities are things like the color of the images in your mind’s eye, or the soundtrack that goes with your thoughts.

See what happens to your feelings when you deliberately change your modalities. By draining bad memories of color, dissociating from them and making them smaller we can reduce the pain they give us.

4. Be sure to treat yourself both physically and intellectually. You deserve what ever you feel will be good for you.

When you care and promote your own inner joy and good feeling, you will be able to share it with your partner and save your relationship.

Original article published here