In a self-love group, people meet to practise a particular kind of self-love: loving not their looks or the things they are good at, but the parts of themselves they think of as pathetic or inferior. Each person works out their own way of doing this. Sooner or later, you find yourself watching the person sitting next to you. You see how they are going about it, and the thought arrives on its own: so it works when they do it that way. Then: I should try it that way myself. That is how people learn to love themselves. You watch it work for someone and you carry the method home. On your own, you can only come up with so many ways. In a room full of people, you see many more. That is why the group asks members to post in the group chat whatever has worked for them: a way you would never have found on your own becomes one you can follow.
Then you try it exactly the way they did. It worked for them: doing it that way, they got to the point where they could accept themselves. You do the same, and nothing happens. So is their method wrong, or is something wrong with you? Neither.
The same method works for one person and not for another
Do the same practice in the same way, and the result differs from person to person. For one person it works; for the next, doing exactly the same thing, it does not.
At a seminar on self-love, one participant said the hardest part for them was finding a way to love themselves that actually worked. They had tried one method after another, and it was still hard. Saying kind things to yourself in the mirror, or keeping a gratitude journal, suits some people but not others. So you borrow a method, notice what changes in you, adjust it, and try again. Your own way is built through that repeated trying; it cannot be copied whole from someone else.
Finding your own way takes more than one try
You do not find your own way on the first try. You try one method and keep at it for a while. If it does not work, you try another. That is all there is to it. You find the way that is yours by working through the ones that are not.
So where is the answer? Inside you.
The way that works for you is not somewhere out there. It is already inside you. The methods you borrow from other people do not put it there; they are how you find it. You try them one at a time, and along the way you come across what was in you from the start.
There is one point where people give up: Right — tried that, that does not work either. And they stop there. Stop there, and you will not find it. Not in a lifetime.
You can see someone hurting themselves, and there is no quick fix
So far this has been about finding your own way. Now picture yourself as the one watching someone else struggle.
At the same seminar, a participant asked this. Suppose a person close to you is cruel to themselves — blaming themselves, running themselves down, treating themselves with contempt — or keeps staying in whatever is hurting them. From where you stand, you can see it plainly. How do you help? When you are the one watching, you always want to do something about it — sort it out, change something, step in.
There is no quick fix. So you are left watching it go on.
Comfort, then trust, and only then a suggestion
But there is a place to start. First, you stay with them. You comfort them, you let them know you understand, and trust builds between you. Then you can say something like this is far too much for you to be carrying, and offer a suggestion. The order is the point. Trust comes first; the suggestion comes second, never first. Make it before there is trust, and what comes back is: “What would you know about my pain?”
You do not drag a person along like a bull on a nose ring
One person at the seminar described exactly where they stood. They knew who their ideal self was — the person they wished they were — and they kept trying to become that person, with no thought at all of letting that ideal go. Letting it go was what needed to happen, but at that point they could not bring themselves to do it.
Self-love is something we all want. But our own pain, our own ways of thinking and our own beliefs often keep it from coming, and that person’s grip on their ideal self is one example. When self-love is not happening, you do not put a ring through someone’s nose, like a bull, and haul them along.
So the state they are in has to be respected: for now, self-love is simply not happening for them. You do not tell someone who cannot love themselves yet to do it right now. Say it anyway, and it can sound less like help than like one more task: they already feel they fall short, and now they are being judged for failing at self-love too.
We can be a safe place for them. We cannot be the solution.
Being a safe place for them means offering a relationship in which they are heard, not shamed, and not abandoned when change is slow. You can make that place safer, but you cannot make their decisions, feel their feelings, or practise self-love for them. Beside them, you are a companion, not a problem-solver.
They may stay with you in that safe place for a long time. It is not that they do not know what needs to change. It is that, for now, the change is not happening. So you keep standing by them, comforting them and staying with them, for as long as you can. Just as you have to find your own way, they have to find theirs, and that takes time. No one can go through that time for them. What you can do is be a safe place for them while they go through it.
Related
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts
- Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board