A Codependency Manifesto

What loving yourself really means.

We’ve all heard it. To love someone else, you have to love yourself first. I can’t tell you how many times this has been said to me in therapy. I even conducted a lengthy podcast interview series, and nearly every guest said the same thing. 

You have to love yourself first

When I first heard this, I scoffed. I was offended. “Of course I love myself”, I thought. How dare someone suggest anything different? Who is going to admit they don’t love themselves?

Loving Yourself is Hard

For those truly suffering from a lack of self-love, please reach out to someone. For myself, I am ready to admit that I could do a better job of loving myself and that self-loathing has played a role in my life. 

Most of us walk through life thinking we are fine. “There’s nothing wrong with me!”, we say. Admitting there is a problem is often the most difficult step. Denying a problem is a common defense mechanism. However, many people will admit to feeling ‘not good enough’, and even more have coping mechanisms to distract from these emotions. 

Like a lot of folks, I distracted myself from myself with nicotine, cannabis, alcohol, and work. But the most detrimental way self-loathing showed up in my life is in codependency. I believed that if I loved others enough, maybe they would love me back. I was taught that love is conditional. To ‘get love’, we must show up for people the way they want us to. If you get it right, you get love. 

Like many of us, I was taught as a child that love was transactional. But if love can be earned, it can be lost. Though my life wasn’t terrible, I was suffering unnecessarily, believing I had to earn love. To reduce my suffering and improve my quality of life, I needed to understand what love is, and to replace my old beliefs with healthier, more accurate ones. I had to accept that I was wrong. I had been taught something that was creating problems in my life, affecting my relationships, and diminishing how I showed up in the world. 

What We Are Taught About Love Is Wrong

A lot of what we think about love is wrong. Most of us start out thinking love is about parental and then romantic relationships. Whatever our parents teach us about love, we carry into the romantic relationships of adulthood. Many, like me, are taught that love has to be earned. We learn to behave the way we think someone wants to behave, to be who others want us to be, to earn their love. 

Similarly, we give love to people whom we think deserve it. Our pets earn our love when they seem to love us back. Our partners earn our love when they do things we like. Our kids earn our love when they behave appropriately to our standards. Unless we see this as a problem, this can be the end of the story. Until relationships change. This triggers us to reconsider what love is. 

Some of us are harmed or neglected by our parents, and we start to wonder if we were loved. Some of us go through break-ups and divorces that lead us to question love. Sometimes our children treat us poorly, and we don’t understand why our unconditional love isn’t returned. Love can be confusing, to say the least.

We think that love is something to be gained and lost. Something we have to earn. Something given to us as a reward for being a good person. If we feel love, we are good. If we do not feel love, we are bad. Because we can’t feel good all the time, we mistake this for a lack of love.

Self-Loathing is Not Love

We grow up misunderstanding love and have to figure it out for ourselves. I have been lucky to have smarter and more enlightened people to help me figure out what love is, and most of us need some help. We learn what love is from our primary caregivers. These lessons are inherently limited by our parents and guardians’ definition of love.

Ideally, we would be taught that love is an unconditional energy between and among all beings. We would understand that consciousness is precious and to be grateful for ourselves and each other. It would be beneficial to understand how love unites and connects everything as a means of orchestrating life as we know it. Our existence is miraculous, beautiful, and important. This is not what we are taught.

More often, we learn that love is conditional. Love is a carrot or a stick. Love is used and abused to motivate for selfish gain. Love is a temporary reward for good behavior. Love is power wielded to unbalance natural harmony among people. Love can be given, and love can be taken away. Love is the absence of pain, but pain is what remains in the absence of love. For many of us, love becomes pain because that is what we see most frequently. 

While it’s easy to blame, that’s not the goal. Sure, it sucks to learn that love is pain. But it’s not anyone’s fault. The ultimate source of these mistakes is lost. There is no one to blame. And larger and more looming than the anger placed on the fault is the sorrow for the perpetual trauma. For some of us, the first inkling of love’s true meaning is the sadness we feel for our caregivers who will likely never understand.

But before we reach this enlightened stage, love remains synonymous with pain. Or, pain is the surrogate we accept in place of the love we seek. In the absence of love that feels good, we will accept the love that feels terrible. The pain. We tell ourselves, if only we could be better, we would receive the love we deserve. Because we can never be good enough for traumatized caregivers, we eventually accept that the love we seek is unavailable. Instead, we take what we are given and pretend it is love. Because if it isn’t, then what does that say about us?

Self-loathing is the unavoidable result of denying a child love. They will believe love is absent because they are not deserving. The lack of love tells the child it is their fault. If they were bigger, better, prettier, thinner, or quieter, perhaps the love would be present. This is the beginning of many mental health issues that persist through adulthood, often for life. 

But the good news is, this suggests that humans inherently know what love is. We do, because we are. We know what it is we are supposed to receive and experience. It is when the love we give is absent outside of us that the problems begin. Self-loathing, then, is not about self at all. Once we understand this, we can begin to heal. 

Our Beliefs Are Hard to Change

Love is unique and doesn’t adhere to traditional explanations. It isn’t exactly a noun, but it isn’t exactly a verb. You can love someone, and that sounds like action, but you can have love, and that sounds like a noun. It’s both. And neither.

Love isn’t an atom or a molecule. It doesn’t obey the laws of physics. Love can’t be explained by religion or philosophy. Love, therefore, is abolished in the world of mystical woo-woo, where it can be manipulated for personal gain. Love has been weaponized in every possible manner to the point where it has lost meaning. Love has been vanquished to the world of rom-coms and romance novels. Our loss of understanding has rendered the concept too ambiguous for practical use.

For 53 years, I’ve been told all sorts of things about what love is, but I’m still trying to understand it. Writing or reading this article probably can’t explain it to anyone, but it may be a piece of what you need to figure it out for yourself. Understanding love comes from within. It is more a remembering than a learning. It took a whole lot of people trying to help me, a lot of reading, therapy, and contemplation to get to where I am now.

More than anything, learning to understand love required me to take a long, hard look at myself. I have had to open my mind and force myself to ask why people keep telling me I have to love myself first. They must think I don’t, or think I need to think about it. Obviously, considering my relationship with myself is something people who care about me think I should do. The least I could do was consider that they may be right. Maybe I was missing something. 

Love Is Being Open

It turns out that opening up to the idea that I might be wrong was a good first step toward understanding love. Considering that I may be wrong, and that other people who cared about me might be right, is an example of connectivity. We are all connected, I say it all the time, but I didn’t fully understand what it meant until I allowed others to help me. 

Love means we care about each other. And I know this because of my codependency. Though I recognize now it is unhealthy to love others more than you love yourself, it does indicate that one understands love at least a little. I honestly care about my family, friends, and acquaintances, and want them to live happy and fulfilled lives. The underlying drive for codependency, I think, is the inherent knowledge that love is in us all, superimposed on not receiving it from our caregivers.

That love extends itself to all beings is a tenet of Buddhism. The Metta, or lovingkindness, prayer asks us to extend love to ourselves, loved ones, fellow humans, and even enemies. This recognizes that all persons deserve love because we are all connected to everything. To ourselves, each other, and the planet.

Love is Connection

I spent the better part of two decades studying Ecology. I came to define this discipline as the study of how everything interacts. Ecology requires the consideration of all disciplines because literally everything affects everything else. Whatever your focus of study, the potential influences are limitless; the opposite of reductionism. This all-connected feature is a part of the universe. Our lives, our existence, cannot be understood outside this fact. Everything is connected. If you want to understand a thing, you must consider all things. People don’t like to hear this because it is too complex.

Our brains don’t like complexity. It’s too difficult. It’s overcomplicated. We want to simplify. To reduce the world into understandable pieces. And this line of thinking has produced many great things. Germ theory, for example. But it also led to the loss of connection and understanding because we went all in on the reductivism thing. 

It really is impossible to consider everything, so we need an alternative. What is the common thread within the systems? It is love. I’m not the first one to suggest this. Love is the ether within which meaning matters. The common substance linking everything together. Whether or not it is true doesn’t matter. Love provides a means of comprehending the impossible. 

Just because we don’t like something doesn’t make it not exist. Systems are hard to understand, so we reduce them to parts we can comprehend. Love is universal and infinite, so we create stories about how it’s just romance. By reducing the universe to understandable components, we have completely lost connection and meaning. The only way back is through love.

Love is Always With You

If you can suspend judgment long enough to consider that I might be right, you could change your life. Love is always there. It is present in everything. The difference between thinking love is pain or some fleeting passion that only happens to Disney princesses is releasing yourself from the stories you’ve been told. You have my permission to do so. Not that you need it.

Love is present in the morning dew. We live on a planet where water changes forms to nourish life. The plant leaf accepts energy from the sun to capture a gas and produce tissue. The wind rustles the leaves and provides a gradient for evaporation. Oxygen is released that enters your lungs and nourishes cells. You blink your eyes to moisten them as you gaze out the window at the infinite miracles that connect everything in your view. 

Without love, that narrative becomes a two-dimensional storyboard. A machine cranks out widgets for public consumption with no meaning. The value lies only in the inner workings, the reductionist parts doing jobs. There are philosophies and disciplines completely void of meaning available to those who despise the mystical.

But love is evolutionary. It is adaptive. It is the drive to make the system work. To maintain life. To protect all that is. Without love, the machine — like most human creations — would rot. 

Love is Adaptive

Animal evolution on Earth created a complex neurology in humans to nurture a unifying energy necessary to promote and protect life. It makes sense in the context of life’s purpose. Life, for all the organisms we understand and those we don’t, is to be and to continue to be. To live, grow, and reproduce more life. 

Life exists in an environment or ecosystem. The universe is the ultimate scale humans can comprehend. Without life, the ecosystem is dull and meaningless. Life exists to capture the emergent magic that comes from nothingness. Life is the something that makes it all worthwhile. Life defines the environment and vice versa. The two exist together in an interdependent dance.

And everything within the universe is necessarily connected in the most physical and metaphysical ways we can imagine. None of it matters or exists without the other. We could imagine a universe without life, but could you imagine life without a universe? Or itself?

If we accept that part of life’s meaning is to persist, reproduction, and adaptation to changing environments is of utmost importance. Perhaps the central rule of life is that it perpetuates through multiple individuals and lineages. All individual organisms die. To persist, individuals must reproduce. This happens because of or as a result of the ever-changing universe. The universe changes. Species must adapt to persist. Life needs to change along with the environment.

Love is Mystical

But why care about any of it? The nihilist will say that meaning isn’t required. Life could be a random occurrence with no desire or purpose for anything. But it’s way more fun to think about the magic. Why do we love a sunset? Or to see a whale breach from the sea? Or cry when our heart is broken? Why does anything seem to matter? 

It is love. Love evolved as an ultimate (at least thus far) integrator of all things. Love ensures we reproduce, care for our offspring, and nurture the foundations of our existence. In short, love is how the universe ensures its persistence. 

And I recognize the weirdness in all this. The practicality of modern life doesn’t need meaning. Our values and social structures have been modified to accommodate other measures of value, including wealth, status, and power. Our need to quantify and attribute causality has led us away from mystical experience. Humans are too busy solving modern problems to worry about ancient ones. 

Love is impractical within the constraints of Modernity. But the universe doesn’t care about human constructs. That we believe we can impose meaning across the vast expanses of space and time tells you everything you need to know about the value of our assessment. The universe, nature, and biology have several billion years’ head start. 

I’m not a gambler, and I’ll always take what I perceive to be the better odds. I’m not saying humans aren’t incredible, but I’m putting my money on evolution.

Love Yourself First

 Saying you need to love yourself first is misleading. All humans love everything upon birth. It is, figuratively, in our DNA. We are vehicles and stewards of love. We don’t need to try to love; we only need to remember. Mostly, we need to clear all of the other stuff away and make room for love to be present. Loving ourselves isn’t the hard part. 

If you are struggling with self-loathing or feeling not good enough, this is where I started. I thought about what love really is and whether or not I have it for myself. Turns out, most of us do. And, again, if you are struggling to find an inkling of value inside, please reach out to someone who can help you. Eventually, I hope you can open yourself up to the idea that love is not something humans created. Love is in you. Love is in me. Love is you. Love is me. 

Once I realized I love myself, I could at least start to heal. It wasn’t that I actually wasn’t good enough, I just felt like I wasn’t good enough. This misunderstanding wasn’t about me, nor was it my fault. My ignorance about love was an artifact of poor teaching combined with inherited trauma. Generations of miseducation left me defenseless. 

As I made room for love being a part of the natural world, I let go of my need for extrinsic validation. If love is omnipresent, its availability is universal. I didn’t need permission or special access. I just needed to open up. And to open up, I needed to let go of the things that were blocking me. Things like feeling I’m not good enough.

While convincing myself that I was, actually, good enough was difficult due to the intensity of my training, I could at least open myself up to the idea that it was possible. As with love, if I reduced my presumptions, my poor training, and my miseducation, I could make just a little room for something new. What if there was more to love than romance? What if my parents had their own troubles? What if I were capable of determining my own worth and emotional state? 

Opening up to love helped me see that I had choices. I wasn’t a passive victim being dragged along through life. I have agency and capacity. I am aware. I have inherent worth simply by being alive. We all do.

Ultimately, opening up to love has led me to the following question:

If love is universally available and humans are all born with it, what differentiates us at all? 

Love, it seems, is egalitarian. It is equivalent. Equanimity. Love is the great equalizer of all things. It is therefore impossible that I am not good enough. I have an equal capacity to love and be loved — to participate in the connective web. I am inherently part of it. If there are any limitations to this relationship, they are coming from me. Because I am loved, the feelings I have about my self-worth aren’t real. They are manifestations of the human psyche. They are stories I was told. Dreams I concocted to feel safe in an unsafe environment.

Stories, like those about Disney princesses, are incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous. I told myself a story for most of my life about my value. I created these stories to feel safe in an environment that was void of love. In an environment of pain, my loving, childhood mind did whatever it could to help me feel safe. Telling myself I could try harder, be better, and love more — maybe enough to compensate for the huge void of love that was my recent ancestry — maybe I could restore what was missing.

I am proud of and, dare I say, love that creative child. The dangerous story I created helped me survive a loveless childhood. I’m grateful to have made it to a place in adulthood where I could understand what happened and to be grateful and not vengeful for the opportunity to heal. Love has helped me find a way back to the childhood stories I told myself and to see them as necessary and not pitiful. 

To Be Continued. . .