Say the words self-love out loud and watch what crosses people’s faces. Something pulls back — not disagreement exactly, a flinch. Press on it and the objection is nearly always the same. Isn’t that artificial? Working up a feeling that was never there, pretending to be fond of yourself. It arrives sounding like a performance, and nobody wants to be caught giving one.
I want to take that flinch seriously. It is pointing at something real — just not where you think.
Two ways of tipping over
Watch people long enough and they sort into roughly two piles. One kind lives balled up tight around their own position; their case is the only case in the room. The other spends the day reading everyone else’s face — a whole life built out of what other people needed. They give and give and cannot take a thing in return.
I am not telling you one of those is the bad pile. You need both capacities. What does the damage is the excess — tipping so far one way that the other side is no longer in you at all. Holding your own corner is not a defect; I’ve written about that side of it in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil.
“Why are you only thinking of yourself? Think of your brother.”
You heard that before you were old enough to answer it. Hear it enough times and it stops being a sentence about the last biscuit or the good seat in the car. It condenses into one line, and the line reads: thinking about myself is wrong.
After repeated often enough, the sentence becomes an internal rule. Each time you want to eat first, rest, or decline a request, the rule interprets your need as wrongdoing. Guilt therefore appears before you have even decided whether the request is reasonable.
The more you give, the more staged your life becomes
Follow that line the way a person actually lives it. If my wanting is the wrong part of me, the repair is obvious: want less, give more, tilt further toward everybody else.
So you say yes with something in you saying no. You pick up the piece of work that belongs to another adult and carry it without mentioning it.
That is the artificial life. You say yes while feeling no, give what you resent giving, and hide the cost so that others continue to see you as good. Looking after yourself feels fake because self-denial has been practiced for years and now feels natural. The unfamiliar act is not necessarily the false one.
The child who never got to be selfish becomes the adult who can’t stop
Children who were never allowed to want openly may become adults preoccupied with getting their share. Because the need was repeatedly denied rather than satisfied and outgrown, it remains unfinished. Adult attention keeps returning to what was missed, even while the person appears generous.
The reverse holds too, and nobody expects it. A child who got to be thoroughly selfish, who got their portion plainly and without a lecture stapled to it, grows up with room to spare. Their own share came in, so there is space left over to notice what somebody else needs. The generosity you keep trying to manufacture comes standard in people who were allowed to want things.
We hand morality to people who can’t read it yet
We hold very small children to adult morals. If you have raised one, you know the scene — the moment you reached for your own standard of what a decent person does and used it to shake your child’s mind out of place.
The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is who is receiving it. A young child’s mind has not joined up into one piece yet; it comes apart in places, or sits in fragments (splitting, fragmentation). So the words do not land as you sent them. What arrives inside the child is bent, and in more places than you would believe.
And notice what is being taught there. Think of your brother. That material is good. These are not bad parents passing on bad instructions; they are decent people passing on decent ones. The child takes in the good lesson with a second thing fastened to the back of it: my wanting is the wrong part of me.
Then you try to come to your senses, and it won’t go through
Run that forward into an adult life. The accommodating thickens. You fit yourself around everyone until you are worn straight through — never receiving, endlessly giving, tired in a way sleep does not reach. I’ve written about how that exhaustion turns into hating the very person you are being good to in You Gave Past Your Limit.
Then some ordinary evening a thought arrives with fight in it. What is this. What am I doing. You decide to look after your own life for once.
That is the precise spot where it jams.
Inside you, selfishness has been equated with badness. Therefore the decision I will protect my own share automatically produces guilt and hesitation. You did not lose your nerve; an old rule classified self-care as a moral failure before you could act.
The belief you keep somewhere you don’t look
Everyone tells you to change your thinking. See it differently. But there is a philosophy sitting in a place you never check, and while it is intact, living the new life is enormously hard. You can want it badly and still not manage it.
I think that philosophy is the one sentence. Thinking about myself is wrong.
Which is why being told does nothing. A seminar, a book, a friend explaining how you ought to be living — none of it moves the sentence, because it was never argued into you and cannot be argued out. You have to come around to it yourself — give the new life your own consent. That is when you start living it with force behind you.
The word never meant taking too much
It probably never occurred to you that selfish could be a good word. It carries a picture: someone who looks after himself and no one else, who reaches first. Take the word that way and that is exactly the feeling it gives you.
But that is not what the word was pointing at. Selfish never meant taking too much.
So if self-love makes you flinch, look again at where the flinch is aimed. Not at self-love. At the meaning you were handed when you were small — and that meaning is still in the room, still working. While it stays, you can try as hard as you like and caring for yourself will go on feeling artificial — because something in you keeps filing it under the thing you are not allowed to do.
You will not argue that line out of yourself tonight. But the next time the snag arrives — when you say you’d rather rest, or that you want to go first — name what is snagging. It isn’t self-love. It’s a sentence about your brother, still being obeyed.
Related
- Why Someone Warm to Everyone Turns Cold With You
- Why the Loudest Person in the Room Feels Empty at Home
- Codependency: Why You Can’t Leave a Relationship That Hurts
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
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