What we get wrong about self-love

And how to facilitate healing

You’ve probably heard it 1,000 times. 

You have to love yourself first.

Low self-worth is holding you back.

It would help if on your self-esteem.

When I shared my struggles and concerns with therapists, counselors, and coaches I would hear some version of these statements. When we describe our traumas and suffering we often hear that we don’t love ourselves enough.

Traits like 

people pleasing

codependency

perfectionism

anxiety

hypervigilance

have all been blamed for not having enough self-love. Loving yourself more is presented as an obvious solution.

Not everyone dislikes themselves

After a decade of believing I needed to love myself more, I realized something. 

I do love myself.

I love the shit out of myself.

In truth, I sometimes wonder if I’m a selfish narcissist I love myself so damn much.

Not loving myself enough isn’t the problem.

The problem is we don’t believe other people will love us

Some of this is neurodivergent. ND folks don’t read the signs. We don’t pick up on the nonverbal communication. It freaks us out when people don’t just say how they feel or what they mean.

Most of us struggle with being seen. One of the most basic human needs is to be seen and validated for who we are. All we want is to be understood, and for other humans to convince us that they see us for who we are.

That last thing is what the self-love talk is all about. We need to be validated and understood.

Inauthenticity kills both ways

I’m not sure who started it, but inauthenticity rules the day. 

We ‘fake it til we make it’. 

We ‘resist what persists’.

We try to control the future.

We distract ourselves in every way possible from the present moment.

Humans nowadays are doing everything we can to fail.

When we try to be authentic, other people make fun of us. If we don’t conform we are ridiculed. Normalcy and conformity win the day. Coloring outside the lines gets you bullied.

This renders us ineffective on both sides. We can’t safely express our self-love, and we refrain from ‘each other love’ as well. 

This, of course, is evolutionarily maladaptive. 

To be authentic, we have to be ourselves over the long haul. Yet, being ourselves has become, itself, maladaptive in the short term. 

Quickly, humans learn to 

get in line 

sit up straight

walk the talk

keep our mouths shut

In short, we are encouraged to be inauthentic. Unless, of course, total conformity is your jam. (spoiler alert, it rarely is).

It is unsafe to assume people will love you for who you are

And that’s the problem.

There. I said it.

It isn’t about loving ourselves; it’s about loving each other.

In some pseudo-Fruedian universe where we blame the victims for non-consensual childhood brainwashing, we put this on those of us trying to heal.

Right?

Don’t make this about me because you don’t know how else to handle it.

We love ourselves. 

We just don’t want to be rejected by inauthentic, superficial conformists.

Stop blaming the victims and illuminate the real problem. 

Nonconsensual conformity goes against everything biological. Organisms’ nature is to reproduce diversity for future generations to adapt. Diversity is the measure of success (fitness), not sameness. We have it so incredibly backward.

Unfortunately, we have created a world where hiding what makes you unique makes sense

Humans are artificially selecting for maladaptive traits. Therefore, we are manufacturing our demise. 

The problem isn’t that we don’t love ourselves, it’s that we don’t love each other.

And it’s going to kill us.

The solution is ‘each other love’

So whenever someone prescribes self-love as a solution, remember that the solution is really ‘each other love’.

When someone tells you to love yourself, they don’t know what they are saying.

We are all crying out for ‘each other love’. 

And that’s what love really is, isn’t it?