The terrible cost of loving ourselves<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People always talk about how important it is to love yourself. No-one ever talks about how much that hurts. Maybe if you\u2019ve always loved yourself it\u2019s not the case. Most of us haven\u2019t 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\u2019s something wrong with us: we\u2019re bad, we\u2019re not good enough, we\u2019re 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\u2019re acceptable, tolerable, so long as we do the right things. Behave the right ways. As long as I always put other people first, I\u2019m okay. As long as I\u2019m always striving to do better, I\u2019m okay. As long as I always achieve, I\u2019m okay. Whatever it is, we internalise these conditional forms of acceptance \u2013 if I meet the conditions, then I\u2019m acceptable. If not, then I\u2019m a failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s not love though. Love – real love – is unconditional. It doesn\u2019t ask questions, it doesn\u2019t require meeting a standard, it doesn\u2019t involve conditions. We don\u2019t love our children less if they take longer to learn to walk. We don\u2019t love our friends less when they lose their job. We don\u2019t love our partner less when they\u2019re sick and need to rest. These are the ways we treat ourselves, not someone we love. But there\u2019s an upside to not loving yourself, of sorts. When someone you don\u2019t love suffers, it doesn\u2019t really hurt that much. You don\u2019t 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\u2019t care as much as we could, because we don\u2019t really like ourselves that much. At some level, it feels fitting when we\u2019re 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\u2019s our fault. If only I tried harder, was more likable, wasn\u2019t 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\u2019re not allowed to simply feel grief. Grief is for people who deserve it, who are good enough that they\u2019re justified in feeling sad. Not us. We did something wrong. We are<\/em> somehow wrong. And so whatever ills come our way, well, that\u2019s only right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s attached but only barely. Or maybe we dissolve into invisibility, making ourselves as small as possible, our anxiety ensuring that we don\u2019t take up space, don\u2019t have needs, don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 outlets, escapes, mechanisms for staying distant from ourselves, from the person we don\u2019t much care for. And because we don\u2019t 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\u2019s not grief though, not rage. It\u2019s deadness, apathy, endless weight and grinding misery. A predictable pattern, day after day. Sometimes that feels easier, at least you know what\u2019s coming \u2013 more of the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The solution, we\u2019re 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\u2019s not talked about so much though is the cost, and that cost is great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t matter \u2013 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\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. What\u2019s worse, you might also see that some of the things you suffered never needed to happen, that perhaps they happened precisely because<\/em> 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s an unfurling, an unravelling of grief that can go on and on as new facets of yourself come to light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not just you, either. If you start to love yourself your relationships will<\/em> 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\u2019t 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<\/em> grieve, the people who love you also have to grapple with what this means for them, that they didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So why the hell should we even try to love ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because there\u2019s another side to pain and grief. The cost is so high because<\/em> 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\u2019s very hard to lose, just as it\u2019s 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 \u2013 but once we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And those relationships? The ones that survive will become stronger than ever. It\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To get there though, you\u2019ve got to accept the cost, and it might be that there\u2019s nothing more excruciatingly painful \u2013 at least emotionally – than loving yourself. It\u2019s still worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Author\u2019s 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\u2019s something I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever really seen addressed so directly in any of the psychology or psychotherapy reading I\u2019ve done. Not to say it\u2019s not out there \u2013 I\u2019m sure it is \u2013 just that I haven\u2019t encountered it. It\u2019s been my experience from years as a therapist that even when people aren\u2019t consciously aware of the cost, there\u2019s often some implicit sense of it, of what would happen if they truly loved themselves and let themselves be. There\u2019s 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\u2019s part of it, but I think this cost is part of it too, because if they started just being themselves and they weren\u2019t<\/em> rejected that means having to confront the terrible reality that they\u2019ve denied themselves something they could have had a whole lot earlier. And that hurts, a lot. Ask me how I know!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I won\u2019t address here in detail the obvious question of \u2018okay, so how do I come to love myself even if that was<\/em> what I wanted\u2019 because well, that\u2019s a huge question and ultimately the work of therapy, or something like it. There is however a simple, single answer that\u2019s accurate and entirely complete and at the same time, completely useless: You\u2019re already lovable. There\u2019s nothing to discover, there\u2019s 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<\/em> answer to this question, because the process isn\u2019t one of learning to love yourself, it\u2019s one of identifying what\u2019s blocking<\/em> the love from being directed towards yourself and removing those blocks, and those blocks look different for everyone. Almost everyone I\u2019ve ever met who struggles with self-love is already very capable of loving \u2013 it\u2019s just that they\u2019re only able to do it for other people. The process we need to work through is understanding why<\/em> we don\u2019t see ourself as deserving of that same love and picking apart each of those reasons until there\u2019s nothing left between our love and ourselves. And that\u2019s when the hurting starts (and the good stuff too!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019ve always loved yourself it\u2019s not the case. Most of us haven\u2019t though. Despite the best efforts of our parents who usually do love us despite all their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n