3 Reasons Self-Love is so Difficult
You’d think it would be just natural to practice loving yourself, but, unfortunately, it’s not that easy. There is, however, light at the end of the self-love tunnel.
Why is Self-Love so Difficult?
More and more, we are encouraged to love ourselves. That sounds fine, but we live in a world that has a limited understanding of what love really is. So self-love too is misunderstood.
So many people now believe that “love hurts”. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We have to understand self-love to help ourselves, not hurt ourselves, in case we get disillusioned with our own love.
There are three main problems with the idea of self-love. If they get in the way, it can make loving yourself harder to achieve.
Self-love can turn into narcissism.
Narcissism: when self-love becomes selfish. I like to call it taking-care-of-number-one. It is an idea extensively promoted and marketed. This idea sounds inviting; it appeals to our egocentric self.
If we believe it, we’ll more easily part with our money for special purchases and experiences for ourselves. But, the more take-care-of-number-one people out there, the more we become separate, lonely and narcissistic individuals who merely entertain and indulge ourselves. We’d share love with each other less and less.
This is not love. This is collective loneliness.
Take-care-of-number-one is selfish gain. Even Aristotle thousands of years ago warned us against narcissism. Selfishness and narcissism can lead to abuse of others. Narcissism is unhealthy self-love.
2. Faking high self-esteem is not self-love.
It seems right to have high self-esteem, and we are naturally attracted to people who feel good about themselves. I’ve been asked many times, “How do I build my confidence? How do I build high self-esteem?”
But the reality is that it isn’t easy to honestly achieve genuine high self-esteem. So people fake it.
If I don’t have a good opinion of myself, there must be something wrong with me! I’d better at least fake it to look good.
Faking high self-esteem leads to feelings of guilt and self-deception. It’s not easy to have high self-esteem, especially when we see that so many of our thoughts and feelings are really quite selfish. And that we all hurt each other with our selfishness, even inadvertently.
How can I love myself and have high self-esteem when I’m just self-seeking and hurtful?
Many people have no choice but to accept low self-esteem and fake high self-esteem. This feels awful.
3. We deprive others of our love.
If you make loving yourself an egocentric priority, something inside you will decide to deprive others of love in order to fulfill yourself: me first, you second and others last.
In depriving others of our love, we cut ourselves off from the flow of love and even begin to hate ourselves for being unloving.
Our society even jails people who fulfill their own selfish wants and needs too much. Yet the same society gives medals to those who altruistically risk their lives by putting others first.
It’s easier to love the selfless rather than the selfish, and that includes ourselves. So depriving others of our love isn’t the way to go either to obtain self-love. We’re caught in unhealthy and deceitful self-love again.
How do we get to healthy self-love? We need to consider the following:
What is healthy self-love?
How can I love myself without being narcissistic?
Why should I love myself?
What is healthy self-love?
Healthy self-love is loving yourself as much as you love the people around you. Treat yourself like a good friend, a close sibling, or your love-partner. No more, no less. Give and take.
Obviously, I’m assuming you treat them well, with love, kindness, understanding, acceptance and respect. If you take from others only, you cut yourself off from the love flow between you and others. You end up alone. If you can love yourself healthily, you dive into the Pool of Love: you give, take and share love with yourself and the people around you. You become part of the human love-cycle.
How can I love myself without being narcissistic?
Remember: self-love is not selfish. One of the best ways to love is to use compassion with other people and self-compassion with yourself. This means, caring for and being kind to yourself. This means taking care of yourself. Respecting yourself. We’ll talk about these in the next posts.
It means understanding and accepting your own failures and strengths as you strive to do this for others. You are human, like the rest of us. You can give, receive and share love with others and with yourself.
Why should I love myself?
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just to feel good about yourself.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling good about yourself, but if you achieve this by being a selfish little so and so, you’ll be left alone in your narcissistic, self-indulgent bliss. That’s not love, and in your loneliness, even your own love will dry up.
The abundant way is this: you love yourself not only to feel good about yourself but also to value yourself enough to want to share yourself with others and for them to want to share themselves with you. By loving yourself, you become lovable.
This way, others want to be near you and love you. You’ll be swimming in more and more love.
To achieve this, we’ll have to understand the important differences between narcissism and self-compassion. We’ll get to that next post.
To go a bit deeper into this topic, watch our YT video with some great tips about how to love yourself more: