Wanna love yourself and allow yourself to be loved by others? You've gotta understand what makes you feel loved, first. In this episode, we talk about the Five Love Languages and the one question that can reframe how you give love.
Mentioned on the episode
Welcome back to another episode of Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison creator of Inner Workout and you as always are our expert guest. Thanks for being here. You know, I like to start the episode with a micro mindfulness practice. I want you to play along for this one. So what I'm asking you to do is to say I love you to yourself out loud, three times. I'll do it. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Now, I'm really gonna push you to say that out loud. I know it can feel silly.
I'm in a coach training right now and there's a practice that we're working on where you're supposed to speak out loud. And I totally skipped the out loud part. And then when I did it in class with everyone else, and actually said words out loud, it was insane. What a difference it made in how I experienced the practice. So I'm asking you to say it out loud, intentionally. And I also want you to notice like, how does it feel to say I love you? Does it feel really weird? Do you have anything pop up in your body? Is there some cognitive dissonance that comes up?
That can be something to make a note of and to reflect later on. You should tell yourself that you love yourself. It's important. It really is. And that kind of gets us into what we're talking about this month.
On the podcast, we're talking about love and relationship and community. And this week, the question that we've got on the table is what makes me feel loved? What makes me feel loved? I chose this question, because it pops up a ton in my relationship with my husband. We will have been together, not married, but together for 11 years next week. I don't think he listens to the podcast but if he happens to be listening, Happy Anniversary, babe. But yeah, we've been together for a long time. Some of that time, a little less than half at this point, of that time was long distance. And by no means am I an expert on relationship and love but the odds were definitely against us working when it comes to the statistics of long distance relationships that last. And one of the questions that we ask really, really frequently is, what would make you feel loved? Or would that make you feel loved?
I think it's really easy in any kind of relationship, doesn't have to be a romantic partnership, for us to do things out of obligation, or to do things out of an assumption that someone else will appreciate them. But we just really make it super explicit and say, “hey, babe, it would make me feel really loved if you ran to the grocery store and got my favorite cookies”, or my husband loves having his back scratched. So you might say, oh, can you scratch my back? And I might be like, oh my gosh, I don't want to scratch your back again. I'll say “would that make you feel loved?” And you'd say “yeah, yeah, I really would.” And even that question is a little reframe where it stops being about, oh, I just have to do this. And, oh, this is an act of love that is happening right now. And again, this can be something with your friends, this can be with yourself.
But the more that we say “would that make you feel loved” or express oh, this does make me feel loved, the better we're able to love each other. Because we know we've stated yes, it makes me feel really loved when you are willing to cook a meal when I am editing this book, or it makes me feel really loved when you take Blue out after because I'm tired and I want to go to bed early. We see those things explicitly and then we're able to show love really, really intentionally. And I want us to do the same for ourselves. I want us to know the things that make us feel loved. Yes, it could be the things that other people do that make us feel loved, but also the things that we do for ourselves that make us feel loved. Because when we make it explicit, again, then we can integrate those things intentionally rather than just have them be random things that happen sometimes and don't happen other times.
So I thought the tool that would be most useful for exploring this is The Five Love Languages, maybe you've heard of them, maybe you haven't. But I think any framework that can give you some language to explore a concept in your own life is, is golden. Like, why not use a framework. And so if you've heard of the The Five Love Languages, this will be a nice refresher.
If this is new to you, it'll be a nice introduction. And again, the goal of this is to help you think about what makes you feel loved, I believe on their website, and we can link to this in the show notes, they have a quiz that you can take. So if you're like, oh, all of these would make me feel loved, maybe taking the quiz would be even more helpful.
So the first one acts of service, someone does something for you, or you do something for yourself, and that makes you feel really loved. So having someone helping you put together your Ikea furniture, or having someone take the time to listen to you practice a presentation. That's an act of service for you. Personally, an act of service could be giving yourself a really nice manicure ,not like when you're just slapping on nail polish in a big hurry. But taking the time to really do your cuticles and shape your nails and make it an experience. One of the services that I love doing is giving myself a nice facial at home. I have a steamer that I use, and I have this facial serum that I use. And it's like this whole long process that just leaves me feeling so loved and so taken care of by myself.
The next one is physical touch, pretty self explanatory. You feel loved through hugs and kisses and all kinds of physical touch. If someone is being kind of standoffish or someone…I mean, it's different in the pandemic now and probably especially hard for people with physical touch in the pandemic for you to feel that that type of love fully…but yeah, it's being touched. And it doesn't have to be a sexual type touch - it could be a high five, a handshake, those types of things. And again, for yourself, it might be you're putting on lotion, you're putting on body oil, you're doing a dry brush before you get in the shower. And it's that sense of self touch or self massage that gives you love.
And there's gifts - giving things, getting things can make you feel loved. And I know it can be easy to write this one off of like oh, this person just wants you to buy stuff for them. No, it's fact that you thought of them, people who have gifts, and love languages. It doesn't always have to be big, it could be I know that you love this type of apple so I got you this apple, because I know it isn't always available. But it's it's available now and so I got you something, or it'd be I went on a trip to San Francisco and I love know that you love See's Candies. So I brought you some back home.
It's not particularly expensive or extravagant. But it's that that thought of giving you a little something. And you can do the same for you. You can buy yourself little gifts a little treat when you're going grocery shopping. Or if you're having a hard time or you hit a mile a big milestone, giving yourself a little something. One, I wish I could remember who said this but I remember a business woman talking about how whenever she signs a really big contract, she'll set aside like a little portion of it to buy herself a gift that she can always tie back to that book deal or that corporate contract or whatever it is. And I would be curious to ask her if her love language was gifts, because basically she was buying gifts for herself.
The next one is quality time, spending time together. And this has to be really intentional time, at least from what I know of people who have this as a love language. It needs to be intentional time. It's not just like we're sitting next to each other and you're watching a football game and I'm reading a book. It's time where we're focused on each other and you don't have to be doing anything really big necessarily but there's not a distraction in the mix. It's not like you're sitting next to each other, spending “quality time” but then you're both constantly scrolling, your feeds are stopping in the middle of the conversation. Quality time requires presence and active listening.
And then the last one is words of affirmation, which happens to be mine. And words of affirmation is just what it sounds like, of being encouraged and supported through words. So my husband has gotten really good at doing this for me, of telling me that he loves me, telling me that he's proud of me, that he thinks that I'm beautiful. I really appreciate those words of affirmation. And that's also why when I get a sweet note from someone in the Inner Workout community, or from a client, I save those things for rainy days, because those are the things that make me feel really loved. And I can do that for myself too. Just like we practiced doing at the beginning, saying I love you is a word of affirmation to yourself, or some of the affirmations that we put in the Inner Workout Self-Care Sunday's newsletter, those are ways that you can give yourself words of affirmation.
And the example for spending quality time with yourself, I realized I only kind of said the relational version, it’s spending that intentional time with yourself. Where the goal is to be with yourself, not to be distracted from your thoughts, not to be productive for someone else, but to be with yourself by yourself doing something that you enjoy.
So those are the five love languages, acts of service, physical touch, gifts, quality, time and words of affirmation. And I hope those gave you a really good starting point to think about what makes you feel loved because in a moment, I'm handing the mic over to you, for you to reflect and I want you to think about what makes you feel loved. Did you identify with one of these love languages? And maybe maybe you didn’t, then you can think okay, what was the last time when was the last time that I felt loved? When was the last time someone else made me feel loved? And what can I learn about myself through that interaction?
So there's some ways that you can go at this. You can maybe think about a specific love language, or you can just think about a time where you made yourself feel loved or someone else made you feel loved and see what you can learn about yourself through that specific instance. Okay, I'm going to give you some time to reflect.
Thanks for taking the time to reflect with me. If you want to share some of your reflections. Feel free to DM us on Instagram and if you haven't already, please rate and review the show. Thanks for listening and take care!
