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. Something in your life really is artificial — but it is not self-love.
Two ways of leaning too far
Watch people long enough and they sort into roughly two kinds. One kind is too selfish: they think only of their own side of things and hold on to it tight, as if no one else’s side counted. The other kind is too selfless: they spend the day reading everyone else’s face, a whole life built around 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 kind. You actually need both: looking out for yourself and looking out for others. What does the damage is the excess — leaning so far one way that the other one is no longer in you at all.
“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 about the last biscuit or the good seat in the car. What stays with you is a single sentence: thinking about myself is wrong.
That sentence goes on working like a rule inside you. Each time you want to eat first, rest, or say no to someone, the rule tells you that wanting it is wrong. So guilt shows up before you have even asked yourself whether what you want is reasonable.
The more you give, the more artificial your life becomes
Follow that sentence into everyday life. If wanting things is what is wrong with you, the fix seems obvious: want less, give more, lean further toward everybody else.
So you say yes while something in you says no. You take on work that another adult should be doing, and you carry it without a word.
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 you have practiced self-denial for years, and self-denial 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 being selfish
Children who were never allowed to want things for themselves often grow into adults who cannot stop thinking about getting their share. They never got it as children, so the need never went away. On the outside they may look generous, but inside, their attention keeps going back to what they missed.
The reverse is also true, though few people expect 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. They already had their own share, so there is space left over to notice what somebody else needs. The generosity you keep trying to manufacture comes naturally to people who were allowed to want things.
We teach adult morals to children who can’t take them in yet
We hold very small children to adult morals. If you have raised children, you will recognise this: the times you took your own standard of what a decent person does and pushed your child to fit it.
The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is who is receiving it. A small child does not yet understand standards like these. Their mind has not yet come together into one piece; it is still split up, in fragments. So it takes in bits of what you say, not the whole of what you mean. What reaches the child is distorted, and in more ways than you would believe.
Here is one of them. “Think of your brother” is a good lesson. These are not bad parents passing on bad instructions; they are decent people passing on decent ones. But the child takes in the good lesson with a second message fastened to it: what I want is wrong.
Then you try to come to your senses, and you get stuck
Now carry that lesson into adult life. You go along with other people more and more. You fit yourself around everyone until you are worn out — always giving, never receiving, tired in a way sleep does not fix.
Then one ordinary evening a thought arrives with fight in it: What is this? What am I doing? You decide that, for once, you are going to look after yourself.
And that decision is exactly where you get stuck.
Somewhere inside you, being selfish has come to mean being bad. So the moment you decide I will protect my own share, guilt and hesitation come with it. You did not lose your nerve. An old rule got there before you could act, and it told you that looking after yourself makes you a bad person.
The belief you keep somewhere you don’t look
Everyone tells you to change the way you think. But you hold a belief in a place you never look. As long as that belief stays unbroken, living differently is enormously hard. You can want to change badly and still not manage it.
I think that belief is the sentence from childhood: thinking about myself is wrong.
That is why advice does nothing. A seminar, a book, a friend explaining how you ought to be living — none of it moves that sentence, because it was never argued into you and cannot be argued out. You yourself have to say yes to living differently. Only then do you live that way with real strength behind you.
The selfishness I mean is not 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 of course it feels bad.
But that is not the selfishness I am talking about. It is not taking too much. It is having the strength to protect what is yours — your rest, your share, your right to say no — without feeling guilty about it.
So if self-love makes you flinch, look again at what you are flinching from. It is not self-love. It is what you were taught the word selfish meant when you were small: that a selfish person is a bad person. That old meaning is still in you, 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 things you are not allowed to do.
You will not argue that old rule out of yourself tonight. But the next time guilt shows up — when you say you’d rather rest, or that you want to go first — name what is causing it. It isn’t self-love. It’s that old line, “Think of your brother,” still being obeyed.
Related
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- 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