Introduction
Stephanie Bailey is the CEO and founder of Miss-Adventures Love Coaching, where she works with women and couples on self-love, dating, relationships, personal empowerment, and life transitions. She is a Certified Master Life & Professional Coach with 26 years of experience, and her intuitive and clairvoyant abilities complement her practical coaching approach rather than define it.
In this interview, she discusses what typical self-love advice misses for women recovering from a breakup or a long period of self-neglect, the patterns that most relationship writing leaves out, and the sequencing mistake people make when trying to rebuild.
What 'Just Love Yourself' Gets Wrong
Bailey says the most common error is telling a woman to "just love yourself" without helping her understand what that actually means. She draws a clear line between surface-level gestures and something deeper.
Self-love, she says, "isn't simply bubble baths, affirmations, or treating yourself to something nice." Those things can be wonderful, but genuine self-love "goes much deeper. It's about the relationship you have with yourself when nobody else is watching. It's about your boundaries, your choices, your inner dialogue, and what you're willing—or no longer willing—to accept."
After a breakup, Bailey notes that women often ask themselves, "Why wasn't I enough?" She encourages a different question: "Where along the way did I stop believing I was enough?"
Her position after 26 years of this work is that choosing yourself "isn't selfish. It's necessary. You can love someone deeply without abandoning yourself in the process." She adds that self-love "isn't about becoming someone worthy of love. It's about remembering that you already are."
What Most Relationship Writing Leaves Out
Bailey points to the connection between relationship patterns and self-belief. Women, she says, "don't always stay in unhealthy relationships because they don't recognize the warning signs. Sometimes they recognize them perfectly well, but their fear of being alone, disappointing someone, starting over, or questioning whether they deserve more becomes louder than their intuition."
She also pushes back on the assumption that strength or success protects anyone from this struggle: "You can be a strong, intelligent, successful woman and still struggle to choose yourself in love."
Self-love, in her framing, "isn't just about recognizing your worth intellectually. It's about learning to honor that worth emotionally and through your actions, even when doing so feels uncomfortable."
She describes healing as requiring "compassion, accountability, and forgiveness," and distinguishes forgiveness from reconciliation. Holding on to resentment, anger, and blame, she says, "can keep us emotionally connected to the very experiences we're trying to move beyond." Forgiveness, as she defines it, "isn't about excusing someone's behavior, forgetting what happened, staying with them, or inviting them back into our lives. It's about letting go of the emotional hold that pain can have over us." She adds that "sometimes, the person we most need to forgive is ourselves."
Her summary of the goal: "the goal isn't simply to find someone who loves you differently. It's to learn to love yourself differently, too."
The Sequencing Mistake After a Breakup
Asked what people decide too quickly or in the wrong order, Bailey is direct: "They often rush to decide who comes next before discovering who they are now."
She acknowledges the impulse behind it. After a relationship ends, "it's natural to want reassurance that you're still desirable, lovable, and wanted. But jumping into another relationship before processing the previous one can mean carrying the same wounds, fears, and patterns into a different person's arms."
She encourages women to "give themselves permission to grieve—not only the person they lost, but also the future they imagined together." In her Elephant Journal article on emotionally moving on from a breakup, she outlines what she calls the eight grieving stages of a breakup. Her view of the process is that "healing isn't linear. We don't all move through the stages in the same order or within the same amount of time. Some emotions resurface when we least expect them, and that's part of being human. Healing isn't a race, and there's no prize for pretending you're okay before you truly are."
What follows, she says, is "the beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable work of rediscovery." The questions she puts to clients: "What do I want? What do I need? What have I been tolerating? What boundaries have I been afraid to establish? And perhaps most importantly, who am I when I'm no longer defining myself through someone else's love?"
She connects this to what she calls the happiness meter—"becoming consciously aware of what genuinely brings you joy, fulfillment, peace, and purpose—and recognizing what consistently takes those things away." The deeper the self-understanding, the more intentionally someone can choose "the people, experiences, and relationships we welcome into our lives."
Her closing guidance: "You don't have to have everything figured out before loving again. But you do deserve to enter your next chapter from a place of self-awareness rather than fear."
Takeaways
- Treat self-love as a practice of boundaries, choices, and inner dialogue, not a set of nice gestures.
- Replace "Why wasn't I enough?" with "Where did I stop believing I was enough?"
- Recognize that fear of being alone or disappointing someone can override intuition, even for capable, successful women.
- Separate forgiveness from reconciliation; forgiveness is about releasing the emotional hold of pain.
- Grieve the relationship and the imagined future before pursuing someone new.
- Use a happiness meter to track what genuinely adds or drains joy, peace, and purpose.
- Enter the next chapter from self-awareness rather than fear.
Bailey's message, as she puts it, has always been simple: "Choose Yourself First."