A lot of parents describe the same thing. They loved the child. Really loved — poured it on, gave everything they had to give. And then one day they look up and something has gone wrong with the child. From the inside it makes no sense at all. The love was given, as far as they can see. And that feels like an injustice.
Then, later, the grown child says the line: “What did you ever do for me?” You thought this one had been easy to raise, and this is what comes back. I don’t hear that sentence as ingratitude. I hear it as a report on delivery. Something left the parent’s hands. It never arrived as love.
Why the phrase self-love sounds faintly wrong to so many people is a whole other question, and I gave it a whole piece of its own already: why self-love feels fake. Today’s question is narrower. It was given. Why didn’t it arrive?
The word self is doing two different jobs
Self-centered — thinking only of yourself — describes a state where a person is still standing where a small child stands. An infantile form. Self-love describes something else: a mature form of love.
They sound like relatives because the same word sits at the front of both. They aren’t slightly different. Followed all the way down, they’re opposites. In the mature form, the love has already left the place where only you are being considered. The love is outside. It’s out there, in another person.
Which is why, when self-love works, you become able to love someone else — and when it doesn’t, you cannot love someone else, not in a thousand years. I’ve written separately about why the order runs from you outward rather than the other way around: I looked after myself, and guilt got there first. What comes after that is where today starts. Whether you can truly love yourself gets settled in an unlikely place — in whether you can meet a person who is not you with real love. In whether you can give your own child real love.
Giving it by your own standard
Love has to be thought out with the other person at the center. Instead, we often give what would feel loving to us. A parent offers advice when the child needs to be heard. A spouse earns more money when the other is asking for time together. The giver can honestly say, I gave everything I had, while the recipient can honestly say, you never gave me what I needed. The effort left one person, but it did not arrive as love in the other.
Husbands and wives do this to each other exactly. He works hard at his own version of love. She doesn’t experience one bit of it as love. She works hard at hers. Both of them are giving. Neither of them is receiving.
Someone wrote about this not long ago. He had come right up to the edge of divorce, and had some kind of realization in the shower. From that morning on he asked his wife one question every day: what could I do for you that would make you happy? The first time, she got angry. You’re hopeless — nothing you do makes me feel anything. Tell me anyway, he said. The next morning he asked again. And she started naming things. Fine, then do this. He did them, one at a time, small ones. She got happier. So did he.
What that man changed was not how much he gave, but how he decided what to give. He stopped assuming that his own idea of care should satisfy his wife and began asking what she could actually receive as care. That is how love crosses the distance between two people. If you never learn who your wife is or what reaches her, years of effort can still leave her feeling unloved.
You’re good to me, so I like you
So where does the mature form go? What in the other person is it aimed at? One thing has to be cut away here first.
Loving the child who does well at school and is bright. The person who is impressive, who listens, who is devoted. The one who is good to you in particular. I don’t call any of that love.
That is liking. You’re good to me like this, so I like you — that’s the concept we’re actually running, underneath the word. And liking lasts precisely as long as the other person keeps supplying the conditions. The grades wobble and it wobbles with them. The conditions collapse and it collapses with them. There’s nothing wrong with liking. But call it love, and the child has not been loved. The child has been graded.
It goes toward the part you think is inferior
Real love runs in the other direction. It does not disappear when the child is frightened, dependent, jealous, ashamed, or no longer impressive. It reaches the part we are tempted to call inferior. Even when someone is not good to you, you remain a good person in how you meet them. You give them the experience of having encountered a good object, a good person, at least once.
Taken far enough, that direction reaches the neighbor who fell among robbers — someone who has not been good to you — and you spend your own money on him, and your own time on him. Real love starts from yourself, meets love at its source — I meet that source in God — and from there flows outward into another person. Having come that far, it changes form, into something like noble devotion.
The part you’d rather not look at is the part to love
Then what are you supposed to take hold of, inside? Self-love means taking hold of not your looks, not the competent version of you, but the part of yourself you find genuinely pathetic, the part you consider inferior. That dark, blackened, shadow-side element is the thing that has to be loved.
Light goes into darkness. So love, which is light, has to get into that darkness and find it. And when it never gets in? In session you can see it plainly, and the word for it is: dangerous. People in that position mostly shut their own hearts. Shut, and then a whole life lived that way.
Afraid alone, so we do it in a room together
Meeting that part of yourself is frightening. Of course it is — it means looking straight at what you spent a lifetime insisting was not you. Frightening, and frightening alone, so we gather and do it together. Gathered, handing each other courage, handing each other support.
In the self-love program there’s a step in the sequence: make a funny face. The point is to activate the child element. Not to send anyone back to the self-centered place from the beginning of this — to wake the child-like part that has been pinned down underneath. That child element is what we have to meet, and the older you get, the harder it becomes to meet it. So you supply a little stimulus. Children are good at funny faces.
If you loved and the child still came out strange, more of the same won’t solve it. The love that travels outward always passes first through the part of yourself you least want to look at. Love that hasn’t come through there ends up thrown to your own standard, no matter how much of it you pour.
Related
- Jung’s Shadow: What You Won’t Look At
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
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