No, But Really, You Have to Love Yourself First
How can you give what you don't even possess?
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I was scrolling through my Substack home feed today, and came across the following post by
:"You can't love others until you love yourself" is the most destructive lie in modern psychology.
Parents love their children before they love themselves.
Soldiers die for their comrades before they love themselves.
Saints serve God before they love themselves.
Self-love isn't the prerequisite for love—it's often the obstacle.
I replied there, and I’m going to simply repeat what I said:
Christ said to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Parents and spouses who don’t love themselves tend to be needy and constantly seek external validation even to the detriment of their families.
Many adult children, unable to believe in their own worth, constantly seek the approval of their parents.
While it’s certainly possible to love others when you don’t love yourself, you’ll always do so more poorly than if you learned to love yourself first.
Self love doesn’t have to look like self indulgence. It’s found in things like well-founded confidence, self-awareness of both weaknesses and strengths, and the ability to be ok even when you’re alone. The capacity to endure silence because you’re not afraid of what you’ll encounter within. The ability to handle unfair criticism or judgment without collapsing into self doubt.
As someone who has never loved myself, I’ve got an idea of what that would look like, but I damn sure know what it looks like when you don’t.
It’s disastrous.
And I’d like to expound on that here, if only briefly.
I don’t know why the need for love is so fundamental to human beings, but it is. The need to be seen for who you are, valued for your qualities, validated in your efforts to live well and pursue the good…it’s all baked right into the source code.
Human flourishing demands these things.
I am currently in the middle of a life and death battle to learn how to love myself, because the illusion that I can outsource that core need to others has been shattered. Confronting deeply-ingrained feelings of worthlessness has become a daily struggle for me, and my life experiences only seem to confirm that love is ultimately transactional; that you only receive love if you provide sufficient value to obtain it, and if you stop providing that value, it can be taken away.
As someone still struggling with coming to terms with having ASD nine months after I scored very strongly on an Autism test, I am also trying to peel back the layers of masking I’ve done my whole life to hide my inner turmoil and chaos and try to find out who the real me even is. I certainly feel love towards others, but I have been told that I do not make others feel loved. For someone who has massive social anxiety, I handle most interpersonal interactions pretty adroitly, and have proven to be good at coming across as charming and warm and friendly, despite my curmudgeonly interior (which is itself a protective, ablative coating around my soft, mushy core). I don’t even think I’m faking the warmth or the charisma; they feel authentic to me in the moment. But only others can be the judge of what they perceive.
And they have often perceived me to be an asshole.
I have become aware, through a significantly increased focus on self-discovery, that if I am hard on others at times, it’s because I’m even harder on myself.
Some actual lines I often find myself repeating, sometimes on autopilot — that is to say, I made no conscious decision to actually say them to myself, I just catch my mouth or my brain running an autonomous script:
“You’re a fucking worthless piece of shit.”
“You’re nothing but a loser, a failure, and that’s all you’re ever going to be.”
“You don’t deserve to be loved.”
“You deserve all the bad things that happen to you.”
“I don’t even exist.”
“I am nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter, I don’t matter, nothing matters.”
When I make a mistake — make a mess, scrape the car on a low hanging branch, break something I was trying to fix, etc. — I beat myself up:
“You’re such a fucking idiot!”
“Everything you touch turns to shit.”
“Why do you always make stupid mistakes?”
And so on.
Now let me ask you: do you think a person with an internal monologue like this is more or less likely to treat others well? Are they more or less likely to tolerate others’ mistakes? Are they more or less likely to encourage rather than criticize or blame?
I used to externalize a lot of this. I was the same unrelenting bastard I was to others that I was to myself. I had to learn to stop doing this, particularly to my wife and kids. I’ve made a ton of progress in that regard, but I did a lot of damage along the way. All I can do is keep apologizing and keep trying to become more and better than what I was. What I still am.
But I have made almost no progress at all on being kinder to myself.
I hate being alone too much. I hate being captive with my thoughts. I have to distract myself to stay out of my own headspace, because it’s a dangerous place to be.
But it’s also where the battleground is.
Jordan Peterson says, “Don’t hide unwanted things in the fog.” Well, I have hidden this part of me, even from myself.
And this underlying Christian ethos, as expressed in London’s post above — the one that believes that self-love is somehow a form of vanity or pride and maybe even sinful (even though it contradicts Christ’s own words) is one of the reasons why I think I never tried to fix it. Learning to “love myself” felt like stupid psychobabble. Modern narcissistic self-help guruism. Just more bullshit from the moral therapeutic deism (or secularism) crowd.
So instead, I tried to be popular. Funny. Famous. Smart. Influential. Respected. Liked by freaking everyone. I even accomplished a number of those things — despite my churlish tendencies. But it’s a bottomless void. You can’t fill it up.
Years ago, I saw a John Mulaney bit about what it’s like to need this external validation so much. It hit home:
I have often run for Mayor of Nothing. And it really is exhausting.
So no, I don’t think Laura London is right about this at all. Maybe she is surrounded by supporting, loving people. Maybe she was raised with an appropriate and healthy sense of self-worth, instead of a nagging voice in her head that nothing she did was ever going to be enough. Maybe for her, “loving yourself” implies something very different than it does for others, because maybe she already does love herself, and just doesn’t realize that’s what it’s called.
So no, I don’t know how to love myself. A lot of times I don’t even want to do it.
But if you don’t love yourself, you won’t love others well. You’ll try, but you’ll fail. You’ll want to receive more than you give, because there’s a hole in the bottom of the bucket and all the love drains out faster than you can refill it.
How can you give what you don’t even possess?
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Excellent post, and further proof you must keep writing, Steve.
Regarding the CSL quotation given by another commented, what CSL seems to miss is that attention to one's own needs must take practical priority in many cases because you know your needs better than those of others. E.g., eating when hungry, going to the loo when you need to. But even beyond basic biology, you know your own mind better than that of others, usually, so you have the primary responsibility for your own mental health.
It can really be an uphill battle, loving one's self. In my case, it seems to be more a question of liking myself. I wish myself the best, but experience a deep dissatisfaction with that same self. At almost 70 I would really like if I and myself got along.