Here is what happens when you do not love yourself. You would expect it to buy you some ease. It does the opposite: it walks you into your own suffering. Read it psychologically and that is the whole mechanism. The thing you did to guard yourself is the thing that pushes you further in. Which is why loving yourself is not an option. It is required.
That suffering turns up in a life more times than anyone could count. A day of talking would not get through them. It happens between a husband and a wife. It happens between a parent and a child. Somebody keeps the thought they arrived with and walks, on their own legs, toward the side where they get hurt. You can find that any day of the week without looking hard.
Not judging yourself, and respecting what you feel
So what is it, then. It starts with not judging yourself. Not passing sentence on who you are. You are like this. That verdict is what kills us — and this one you nailed up yourself, on yourself.
Then: respecting your own feeling. What you feel is allowed to stand as what you feel.
Your own demand, met at the size reality allows
One more thing goes on top. You meet your own need as far as reality allows. If you need rest but cannot leave work, you may cancel one evening obligation, ask for help, or stop demanding a perfect dinner from yourself. You neither grant yourself everything you want nor pretend you want nothing. You identify the need and meet the part that can be met in the circumstances you actually have.
And who does the meeting. Not somebody else. You do. This is not the position of waiting for a person to turn up who will finally notice what you need. It is the position of doing it for yourself, here, in the reality you have.
A good place, a good road
A good place for me. A good road. Putting yourself down on the side of what is good for you. Self-love is not a decision taken privately somewhere behind your eyes; it shows in where you put yourself. If you have put yourself somewhere you can look at yourself, that is already it. Go the other way and you do not simply drift — you end up at the place where the accident can happen, at the place where the fight can start.
Taking an interest in the other you belongs here too. Not multiple personality, nothing pathological. Even in a healthy person the inside is not one solid piece; it comes divided. That division is why you can speak to yourself at all. There is a you doing the speaking and a you doing the listening.
You sent the child off, and it got heavier
Here is where people lose the thread and cannot tell whether what they are doing is love or selfishness.
You are tired. To love yourself you would have to not be this worn out. And the child keeps asking, keeps wanting to be played with, and not playing with a child is abuse, and you are supposed to answer, and you have nothing left.
Yesterday went exactly like that. I can’t do it, I’m too tired. I’m getting angry. I’d like you to do it on your own for now. Said it, sent the child off — and then the heaviness did not lift. It grew. I did that to love myself, and still: shouldn’t I have done it anyway? Loving yourself comes first and loving the child comes after it, so when I refused at the end of my strength, was that the loving part or the selfish part, and isn’t a mother supposed to manage some of it regardless. There are places in this where the answer is genuinely unclear. There are cases that sit right on the line.
“Mum is too tired today” is only today
In the large frame, self-love gets fed first. Mum is too tired today, so I can’t play with you. Say that and it is only today.
Tired today, and I say I cannot cook tonight — then it does not get cooked. There is no law making me the one who cooks it. Once, twice, I can leave a thing undone. I am worn through, and no rule requires that it be done tonight by me.
“I’m never playing with you again” is self-abuse
The sentence to stop at is the other one. Because I am tired, because I am finished with this: I am never playing with you again. That one has to be taken seriously, and that one is self-abuse. It takes a single day and rules on an entire life.
It feels, saying it, like guarding yourself. It drops you into suffering. It is the move that arranges the conditions in which you can go on suffering. And once you have been wrecked that way there is no version of you that is comfortable. Which returns the question to where it started: what is it to love yourself.
If that sounds like the opposite of what I said before
I have put it down flatly elsewhere: not playing with a child is abuse, and nobody has to raise a hand for it to be that. Here I am saying a day without play is survivable. It can read as though the earlier line is being taken back.
The difference is one day versus a pattern. A parent who says, I cannot play today, but we will make time tomorrow, is naming a temporary limit. A parent who repeatedly refuses, never repairs, and leaves the child alone with the same unmet need creates a lasting condition. One exhausted day is not a verdict on your love; neglect hardened into a way of life is what abuses the child.
Self-love has the priority
Consideration for other people and protection of yourself carry different weights from case to case. But in the large frame, self-love has the priority, because loving yourself more and loving yourself better is what lets you do more of the devotion and more of the consideration. The capacity itself gets bigger. You love yourself, and what reaches the other person is then a healthy form of it.
Suppose you have loved yourself to about ten. Then what you can spend on somebody else is ten — there is no more than that. Love yourself a hundred and a pocket of a hundred opens up for devotion and consideration, and you can hand out that much. The size you have loved yourself to is the size you have available for anyone else.
You get tired. Living wears people down. A day you put off when you had nothing left is that day, and nothing more than that day. Self-love and selfishness divide at the point where you decline to turn it into a life sentence.
Related
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
- I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
- You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious
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