You have heard the instruction often enough. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. And you have probably tried it, the way a person tries a technique, and found that nothing much happened. The usual conclusion is that you did it wrong, or that the whole idea was soft nonsense.
There is a simpler explanation, and it has nothing to do with doing it wrong. The self you were trying to love was not there.
Living as someone else leaves no you to love
Think of a life in which you never let people see what you are really like. You expect them to criticise the real you, so you act like someone else, and then you go on living as that someone else. In a life like that, loving yourself is not difficult. It is impossible. There is no you in it. You set out to love yourself, and the self that was supposed to receive the love is missing.
So when self-love does not work, there is no need to blame yourself for not trying hard enough. What is missing is not effort. What is missing is you.
The you that gets seen is not the only you
When someone tells you to love yourself, notice which version of yourself comes to mind. Nearly always it is the you that gets seen: the version other people see, the one you can look at from the outside. But when it comes to loving yourself, you should not stop at that one.
Inside that outer you is another one, and you have to go inward to reach it: the you that is inside. That is the real you. The outer you is the one other people see. The inner you is the one only you can go in and see. And one thing stops you from meeting that inner you: the mask.
The mask is simply putting on a front
The word mask sounds theatrical, but in daily life the mask is ordinary. You agree while resentment rises, smile while you are afraid, or say you are fine because you expect to be criticised if you admit you need something. What you show and what you feel become two different things, and you hide the gap. The mask is simply the edited version of you that other people are allowed to see.
None of this comes from bad character. It comes from the fear of being blamed. That is exactly why the mask is so hard to take off: you assume that the moment it comes off, the criticism will start. It is the same with mistakes. People are rarely frightened of the mistake itself; they are frightened of being caught making it.
The cat in the mirror who thinks it is a lion
There is a way of judging in which only what can be seen and held in the hand counts as real. You could call it the standard of the physical world. If that is the only standard you judge yourself by, you go looking for yourself in the mirror, and this is what happens.
A cat looks into a mirror and thinks it is a lion. You meet people like this: they are nowhere near as remarkable as they think, yet they live as though they were.
The opposite happens too: someone looks in the mirror and is convinced they are far heavier than they really are.
One sees themselves as better than they are, the other as worse. They look like opposite problems, but they are the same problem: both have taken what the mirror shows to be who they are. Neither is looking at their real self, and no mirror could show it, because the real self is on the inside.
That is the trouble with judging yourself by the physical world alone. You keep going after your outside — how you look, how other people see you — and so your outside is the only self you ever meet. You never reach the real you, and because you never reach it, there is nothing there to love.
Life keeps hurting, and you cannot see why
Living behind the mask makes you lose your way. You make your choices by what keeps up the front, not by what you actually need. You stay agreeable in a relationship that hurts, accept work that drains you, or keep saying yes until resentment takes over.
Because each choice looks reasonable from the outside, you may not see why life keeps hurting. The pain seems to come from nowhere. It does not: in every one of those choices, the real you, the one whose needs you kept hidden, was left out.
Finding yourself comes before loving yourself
So there is an order here, and it is not optional. Before you can love yourself you have to find yourself. Loving is second. Until you have found yourself, the sentence I love myself describes nothing.
The real you is not a matter of how you look. Still, your appearance, the outside you can see, is the first part of you that you can reach, so it is not wrong to start there. What goes wrong is taking the starting point for the destination and stopping there. You have to go past the outside and keep going in. You have to look inside yourself.
You still need a mask, within reason
Does that mean you should take the mask off altogether? How could you? Nobody can live among other people without one. A mask, within reason, is necessary. Out in the world, saying every single thing on your mind, unfiltered, is not the same as being honest.
But you also have to be able to take it off, because you cannot meet the real you while it is on. At the same time, there are places where it has to stay on, and you must not take it off there. When it needs wearing, wear it; when it needs removing, remove it. So the question is not whether you take it off or keep it on. It is whether you can tell what kind of place you are in right now.
One place where you can put the mask down
So you need at least one place where it is safe to take the mask off, with people you can trust: a group, a friend, a counsellor. It should be somewhere you can pull a silly face like a small child, or dance, and nobody will say a word about it. Not a place where you are admired. A place where nobody is judging you. Without a place like that, the you that is inside never comes out.
And when you do put the mask down, someone comes out, and it is often not a playful child. It may be a child with a cruel, vicious look on its face, or a child who is crying. Either way, it is you: the part of you that stayed hidden behind the mask. Feelings you keep pushing down and never show start to turn cruel, and that is where the vicious look comes from. Whichever child comes out, you have to meet it. If you refuse, you cannot go any further inside. It is a step you cannot skip.
So the order is this. First the mask comes off; then the real you can be found. Loving yourself comes after that. Only when there is a you to love does loving yourself become possible.
Related
- That Isn’t Love, That’s Liking
- I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
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