At a seminar on self-love, I had been talking about ideas from Carl Jung’s psychology, among them the Self: the real you, further inside than the you other people see. In the discussion afterwards, someone put two questions to me at once. You said to love the Self. Do you mean that acknowledging the shadow and going through individuation is self-love? Or have you changed the subject? And you said that meeting the Self inside me is meeting God. So am I meant to take the relationship I had with my mother as a child and put God in her place? That part confuses me.
Anyone who understood me that way would be right to be confused, because it would sound as if I were telling you to push your mother out of your mind and put God where she used to be. That is not what I said. I was talking about the place itself — the place your mother held in your mind when you were small — and what kind of place it was to begin with.
Individuation is the closest thing to self-love
The first question first: is acknowledging the shadow and going through individuation the same as self-love? In Jung’s psychology, the shadow is made up of the parts of yourself you think of as inferior and would rather not look at, and individuation is the long process of becoming a whole person by accepting those parts as your own. Individuation is the closest thing to self-love that I know of. So I have not changed the subject: self-love and individuation are two names for much the same path.
Object relations is the branch of psychology that looks at how the relationships we formed with our parents early in life stay inside us and shape us. In those terms, individuation means following that early relationship with your parents as far into yourself as it goes, until at the bottom you meet the Self.
In practice, loving yourself starts with looking inside yourself, and once you start looking, you keep going further in. You let sadness be sadness, joy be joy, depression be depression — you allow each one and accept it as it is. That process is what loving yourself is. Keep going inward like that and you eventually reach the deepest point of the thing you call I. That deepest point is what I mean by the Self. And in that place there is something divine.
Why our parents feel like gods to us
The Bible says that human beings are made in the image of God. If that is so, then deep inside each person there is something of God. In object relations, an object is someone or something your mind is attached to. A parent is an object in this sense. The deepest object of all, at the very bottom of a person, is divine. But in a small child’s real life, the one who actually fills that deepest place is the parent, so the child finds the parent in the place of the divine. That is why our parents feel like gods to us.
So I am not asking you to remove your mother from your mind and put God in her place. As a baby, your life depended on the parent who fed you, held you and came back to you, so that parent felt absolute to you. Seen through faith, there is a deeper reason why that dependence went so deep: the place the parent filled was a divine place to begin with. Because we are made in the image of God, that place is part of us from the very start, and the parent is the one who came to fill it. Nothing is being swapped, so there is nothing you have to throw away. Seeing this does not erase your mother. It changes how you understand what you were reaching for, as a small child, when you depended on her so completely.
We did not make ourselves
When God suddenly turns up in the middle of a talk about psychology, people can get confused, so here is the broad picture. We did not bring ourselves into being. We were made — we are creatures, beings that were created. And because God made us, there is something of God in us: the breath of God, a part of him. (The Bible tells how God shaped the first human and breathed the breath of life into him; that breath is what I mean here.) That is why loving yourself and loving God are the same in kind: when you love what is deepest in you, you are loving something of God. Seen this way, self-love is more than a personal matter. It goes all the way to meeting God, the one human beings come from.
There is also another road to the place where you meet God. In So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name I wrote about opening my hands and letting go of everything I had been gripping so tightly. When I had become nobody at all, I found God standing right there. In that piece, the place is reached by emptying your hands. In this one, it is reached by going all the way into yourself.
Whole rather than perfect
The place where you meet God is the place where you become whole. Whole rather than perfect. Perfect would mean nothing in you is flawed; whole means nothing in you is shut out, including the sadness and the parts you think of as inferior. Once you are whole, you have room to care about other people. That is how loving yourself turns into being able to love someone else.
Can you truly love yourself? That question leads straight to another: can you treat another person with real love? Can you give your own child real love? And real love is not love for the capable, good-looking, impressive side of someone. It is love for the side we look down on as inferior, whether in ourselves or in someone else. Loving your child only when they do well at school and do as they are told, or loving someone only because they are good to you, is liking, not love (That isn’t love, that’s liking). Liking says, “I like you because you are good to me.” Love means you can still be good to someone who is not being good to you.
“The world is as I see it” — so where does God come in?
Later, someone in the audience asked another question. These days Buddhism talks about self-love too, and so do other religions. People change themselves through spiritual training. They say the world is as I see it: how I take things in decides what kind of world I live in. What you teach from psychology and counselling is a help, of course, but what I want to know is what part God plays in all this.
Love itself is the part God plays
This question, what part God plays, is exactly where many Christians get confused, and then they put too much weight on it. They look for God’s part in something they can see, something happening before their eyes. That is not the way to look at it. Love itself is the part God plays. Simply love itself. Think of it this way: whenever we love ourselves, forgive ourselves or love another person, we are doing it by the breath of God and by his grace.
Forgiveness is love put into action
Because there is something of God in us, God’s love for us and our love for God are self-love too. And that self-love spreads outward into love for our neighbours, the people around us. Forgiveness is love put into action. As soon as love begins, forgiveness has to begin too.
Love and forgiveness begin in the same place. They begin with me. Not with the other person. I have to forgive myself before I can forgive anyone else; as long as I have not forgiven myself, forgiving someone else is hard. Love works the same way. When I love myself first, respect myself and do not belittle myself, I am able to keep from belittling other people too.
You can see all of this in the way people raise their children. Parents who do not love themselves treat their children badly — they belittle them and handle them roughly. Parents who love themselves treat their children with great respect. They listen closely to what the child has to say, and they take the child’s feelings into account when they decide how to handle things. It all comes down to one thing: whether the parent can love themselves or not.
Take care of yourself first, then go and help someone
So this is what I tell people: spend what you need to spend on yourself, buy the clothes you need — look after yourself — and after that, go and help someone. That is the order. And the people who should start are the ones who already can: anyone who can say, “Whatever else is going on, I have some peace and some happiness inside.” If that is you, you can begin helping others now.
So, to come back to the question about the mother and God: I was not telling you to take your mother out of that place in your mind and put God there instead. I was telling you what kind of place it was to begin with — a place that already had something of God in it.
References
- Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. — the definition of individuation.
Related
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
- The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
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