The terrible cost of loving ourselves
People always talk about how important it is to love yourself. No-one ever talks about how much that hurts. Maybe if you’ve always loved yourself it’s not the case. Most of us haven’t though. Despite the best efforts of our parents who usually do love us despite all their flaws, most of us grow up not loving ourselves. Most of us grow up believing there’s something wrong with us: we’re bad, we’re not good enough, we’re selfish, lazy, unkind, thoughtless, heartless, boring, weird, crazy, ugly, fat, dumb, too much, not enough, take your pick. You probably know which ones stuck for you. You only need one or two to stick in order for that love for yourself to fail, or at best, we end up with an idea that we’re acceptable, tolerable, so long as we do the right things. Behave the right ways. As long as I always put other people first, I’m okay. As long as I’m always striving to do better, I’m okay. As long as I always achieve, I’m okay. Whatever it is, we internalise these conditional forms of acceptance – if I meet the conditions, then I’m acceptable. If not, then I’m a failure.
That’s not love though. Love – real love – is unconditional. It doesn’t ask questions, it doesn’t require meeting a standard, it doesn’t involve conditions. We don’t love our children less if they take longer to learn to walk. We don’t love our friends less when they lose their job. We don’t love our partner less when they’re sick and need to rest. These are the ways we treat ourselves, not someone we love. But there’s an upside to not loving yourself, of sorts. When someone you don’t love suffers, it doesn’t really hurt that much. You don’t care too deeply when the losses and disappointments happen to someone you dislike, much less someone you hate. So when we fail, when things go wrong, it stings. Sometimes it hurts a lot, but ultimately we don’t care as much as we could, because we don’t really like ourselves that much. At some level, it feels fitting when we’re hurt. It feels deserved. Perhaps on the surface we feel aggrieved, treated unfairly, like life is conspiring against us. But deep down some part of us believes it’s our fault. If only I tried harder, was more likable, wasn’t so lazy, so stupid, such a failure. And those criticisms that we direct at ourselves have the odd effect of shielding us to a certain extent from the full pain of the failure or the loss. Instead of simply feeling grief, we feel frustration, anxiety, shame or guilt. Because we’re not allowed to simply feel grief. Grief is for people who deserve it, who are good enough that they’re justified in feeling sad. Not us. We did something wrong. We are somehow wrong. And so whatever ills come our way, well, that’s only right.
When we spend years, a decade, a lifetime living in this way we develop other ways of managing the self-criticism and the self-hatred. We detach from it, exist only in our heads, thinking machines driving the body that’s attached but only barely. Or maybe we dissolve into invisibility, making ourselves as small as possible, our anxiety ensuring that we don’t take up space, don’t have needs, don’t inconvenience or impose on others. Or project it outwards, unstably lashing out at people before begging forgiveness and trying desperately to make up for the harms we cause. Or escape, into alcohol, drugs, obsessions of any kind. There’s a lot of options, though usually the ones we end up with happen without much active choice on our part. They all serve the same function though – outlets, escapes, mechanisms for staying distant from ourselves, from the person we don’t much care for. And because we don’t much care for that person, we watch with only partial interest to what happens to them. It sucks, yeah, it might suck so bad that we even get as far as contemplating suicide. But it’s not grief though, not rage. It’s deadness, apathy, endless weight and grinding misery. A predictable pattern, day after day. Sometimes that feels easier, at least you know what’s coming – more of the same.
The solution, we’re always told, is to love yourself. And the assumption seems to be that the hard part is finding a way to love yourself, working out how to do so, how to truly show yourself compassion and understanding. Which it is. What’s not talked about so much though is the cost, and that cost is great.
Think of someone you love. Truly love, as much as you feel that for any person. Or even a fantasy, a character from a book, it doesn’t matter – just someone you could truly imagine caring for deeply. Now imagine that person going through the worst moments of your life and being there alongside them through each of those torments. The losses, the endings, the loneliness, the isolation, the tragedies, the failures. Every part of it. And you’re there, beside them, but not able to do anything. Not able to stop what is happening, only able to watch it happen, see the ways in which they hurt and suffer. To see someone you care for go through something like that is almost unbearably painful.
Which is what happens if you begin to love yourself after years of not doing so, because suddenly you see your past through a different lens, as if it happened to your own child or a loved one in your family. All the terrible things in your life no longer happened to a fuck-up, to someone who deserved them in some way, to a person who had no reason to expect better. They happened to someone lovable, someone kind, someone who was just a child once, someone who had value and worth and was a human being like anybody else. And that can be excruciating. What’s worse, you might also see that some of the things you suffered never needed to happen, that perhaps they happened precisely because you did not love yourself. That you kept yourself in isolation, turned down opportunities, pushed people away, made yourself less because you believed you weren’t good enough for more. To love yourself now means facing the grief that you suffered, maybe for years, when perhaps you never needed to. When your life could have been more, when you could have had more. You have to grieve every single thing you missed out on along the way.
As you come to love yourself you come to discover who you truly are, and with each discovery comes more grief. If you discover that you are playful, you have to grieve all the times you didn’t get to play. If you discover that you are creative, you have to grieve everything you never made. If you discover that you love others too, you have to grieve all the relationships you never had, the loneliness you endured. It’s an unfurling, an unravelling of grief that can go on and on as new facets of yourself come to light.
It’s not just you, either. If you start to love yourself your relationships will change. People around you have become familiar with relating to you as you have been, the way you function in the world when you don’t love yourself. When you start to love, the way you relate to others changes and that causes upheaval. The better relationships will survive but even those will experience pain because as you grieve, the people who love you also have to grapple with what this means for them, that they didn’t know you were hurting, that they now have to witness your pain and work out how to navigate a relationship with a person in the process of change. Other relationships will fail altogether as you discover that some people weren’t really there for you. They were there for what you could do for them, the benefits you could provide, the fact you made it easy for them, the fact you suppressed your own needs. And every bit of it is hard, and every bit of it hurts.
So why the hell should we even try to love ourselves?
Because there’s another side to pain and grief. The cost is so high because the potential love is so great. We hurt so much precisely because we love, and that love feels wonderful beyond words. We can finally give ourselves what we should always have had. Compassion, grace, forgiveness, love and holding. And once we have it, it’s very hard to lose, just as it’s hard to ever stop loving our children no matter how difficult things become. We carry that love with us always, for the rest of our lives. It can come and go, be more or less present, and it will be challenged and waver at times – but once we’ve found our way there once, we can always find it again. Every day, every situation, every challenge from then on out we can face with love for ourselves behind it. Every future failure we can treat ourselves with care and compassion, feeling the sadness of it but not blaming, not shaming, not judging. And every success and every joy we can celebrate to the fullest, happy for ourselves and not having to hold a single thing back. We get to discover who we are, what we love, and pursue and embrace it with the knowledge that if we are true to ourselves we will never get it wrong. Each thing you discover becomes a new avenue to experience joy, to play, to create, to connect, to care, to feel, to love.
We free up so much energy, everything that we ever used to pour into trying to change ourselves, trying to be someone else, trying to suppress ourselves, make ourselves less. Every bit of energy we used to try and analyse and assess situations to work out how to behave, to read people, to be what we thought we had to be. Every bit of energy spent worrying about mistakes, trying to avoid getting it wrong, thinking and overthinking in a futile effort to always know what to say and do. All that energy becomes ours to use as we wish, to bring joy and fulfilment to ourselves and those we love.
And those relationships? The ones that survive will become stronger than ever. It’ll be bumpy, but the people that love us will come to experience the joy in knowing us more fully than ever as we become free to be ourselves. The connections become deeper, richer than we ever thought possible. Perhaps for the first time we can feel truly together with someone. It’s not just the existing relationships though. When you love yourself, when you become free to be, other people will come into your life. The kind of people who are right for you are drawn to your presence, your life, your love.
To get there though, you’ve got to accept the cost, and it might be that there’s nothing more excruciatingly painful – at least emotionally – than loving yourself. It’s still worth it.
Author’s note: I wanted to address what I think may be one of the largest unacknowledged barriers to a person actually reaching a point of self-love, as it’s something I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen addressed so directly in any of the psychology or psychotherapy reading I’ve done. Not to say it’s not out there – I’m sure it is – just that I haven’t encountered it. It’s been my experience from years as a therapist that even when people aren’t consciously aware of the cost, there’s often some implicit sense of it, of what would happen if they truly loved themselves and let themselves be. There’s often a tremendous anxiety about starting to truly let oneself exist in the world without filtering or modification for a great many reasons, most commonly the idea that if a person was to let themselves exist in this unfiltered way they would be hated and rejected by others. And I do think that’s part of it, but I think this cost is part of it too, because if they started just being themselves and they weren’t rejected that means having to confront the terrible reality that they’ve denied themselves something they could have had a whole lot earlier. And that hurts, a lot. Ask me how I know!
I won’t address here in detail the obvious question of ‘okay, so how do I come to love myself even if that was what I wanted’ because well, that’s a huge question and ultimately the work of therapy, or something like it. There is however a simple, single answer that’s accurate and entirely complete and at the same time, completely useless: You’re already lovable. There’s nothing to discover, there’s no trick to it, no technique or method or strategy or process or thing you can do that will make you feel it. You just need to see that reality. The problem is that most of us have developed psychological patterns and mental barriers to seeing this simple truth and that is why no-one can provide a useful answer to this question, because the process isn’t one of learning to love yourself, it’s one of identifying what’s blocking the love from being directed towards yourself and removing those blocks, and those blocks look different for everyone. Almost everyone I’ve ever met who struggles with self-love is already very capable of loving – it’s just that they’re only able to do it for other people. The process we need to work through is understanding why we don’t see ourself as deserving of that same love and picking apart each of those reasons until there’s nothing left between our love and ourselves. And that’s when the hurting starts (and the good stuff too!)
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