When I first started my healing journey, I had a lot of conflict over self-love. If I love myself, does that make me a narcissist? Do I need to love myself? Can’t I just feel neutral?
Where Does Self-Love Come From?
I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago and an older man dropped a jar of pickles. The jar broke, pickle juice went everywhere, and the clerk came over to clean up the mess.
I watched a shame response come over this man.
He stood in the corner, nervously picking at his cuticles. He apologized over and over again, muttering about how badly he felt. The store clerk told him not to worry multiple times, but he couldn’t receive it. He was in a shame spiral.
Each and every one of us has a relationship with making mistakes. Whether it is painful or positive depends on your past experiences. How did the authority figures and social groups respond to us when when we made mistakes in the past, especially in our youth?
From watching his reaction, I could imagine he had a lot of experiences that showed him it was not okay to make mistakes. The way our parents and other authority figures treat us, as kids especially, impacts the way we learn to treat ourselves. If we do not love ourselves well, it means we have not been loved well by our most influential relationships. It also means it will be more difficult to love others well. This is not to blame the relationships in our lives, but to understand how we formed our current habits. The beautiful thing is that we can always change it.
Isn’t Loving Myself Narcissistic?
I used to think that loving myself would mean I was a Narcissist. First, I want to clarify that Narcissism is a personality disorder of someone who uses self-inflation to avoid blame, shame, and criticism. The inflated ego is a mask that hides a sad, lonely, and shame-driven person underneath.
Real self- love makes us less self-centered. Think about it, you don't typically think about our ankle. But if you were to sprain your ankle, you would suddenly start thinking about your ankle a lot. Self-centeredness is a symptom of woundedness.
For the man who broke the pickles, his lack of self-love made him more self-absorbed. He turned inward, apologized repeatedly, and honestly made the situation uncomfortable for the person helping him. If he had a more positive relationship with himself, an accident would not be a big deal.
He would have been capable of giving back to the situation rather than turning inward. Maybe he could have helped clean up the mess. Maybe he would have bought the store clerk a coffee to thank her. He could have made a joke and moved on with his day. There are a lot of choices he could have made if he had the freedom to do so. Self-love is not narcissistic, it makes us more resilient and effective.
Is Liking Myself Enough?
When I was first learning about self-love, I would question “Do I have to LOVE myself?” Isn’t it enough to like myself ? Or feel neutral? At that time, I thought love was a feeling you have, but now I also think love is active. Self-love is doing what is within my power to healthily get my needs met, and to enjoy doing it.
Self-Hatred is an Uncomfortable Term
Hearing someone talk about self-hatred can feel wild. I remember thinking “Self-hatred is such a strong word. No way! I don’t hate myself.” This is before I became aware of how disdainfully I treated myself.
I would stand in front of the mirror and criticize my face and body. I treated myself with contempt and judged myself harshly. After social situations, I imagined that people said horrible things about me after I left. I remember walking into a large auditorium for class in college. I heard a few girls laughing about 12 rows back. I was convinced they laughed at me for no reason at all!
I imagined the world hated me, and I really felt sorry for myself. When I realized those assumptions were my own thoughts and beliefs, my whole world started to change.
Turning Towards Self-Love
Action 1: Throw Away the Comfort Blanket
I’m not trying to say that I have arrived or that I love myself perfectly, but I have come a long way. For me, the first step was deciding that I actually wanted to feel better. I know this sounds crazy, but I was so deeply engaged in self-hatred that it was like a drug. Feeling sorry for myself felt like a warm blanket. It felt like a friend. I had to shed the victimhood so I could open myself up to love.
Action 2: Learn from Others
Once I was open to the idea of self-love, I started paying attention to examples of love. I used to be envious of other people's relationships. I was able to break away from that by getting curious about love. I would take mental notes on loving interactions between two people. The examples gave me an idea of what love should feel and look like.
Action 3: Grieve the Areas of Lack
This sent me on a journey of grieving the circumstances when I was not treated well. My self-hatred was learned from experiences of deep rejection. I never understood how much that impacted my personality. To me, they were just normal experiences. Once I saw healthy examples of love, it gave me a standard to learn how to validate myself for things I really needed.
Action 4: Lay Down the Knife
Getting validated for those pains prepared me to take ownership for my problem. Yes, there were wrong things that other people did to me, but I had perpetuated those pains my ruminating on their memory and creating repeat situations. I had to make a choice to live differently.
How Long Does It Take to Love Yourself?
Everyone wants to know how to get results fast! It took years to create the relationship you have with yourself. It is only reasonable to expect it would take years to change that.
What I can say is I started noticing little changes within 3-6 months. Other people began to comment after about a year. Two years into my self-love journey, I noticed that I showed up totally different in social situations. Some changes even became automatic. It didn’t take me 20 years to see a change, but it took more than 6 weeks.
In what area do you want to learn to love yourself better?
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