When Self-Love is No Longer Loving
People talk about self-love all the time, often with the platitude “You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else” or responding to most problems with the advice, “Just love yourself.” For something with so much importance placed upon it, there can be a lot of conflicting messages about what self-love really is. Whether it’s from cliché advice or social media stereotypes, oftentimes this message of self-love can fall flat and be more harmful than helpful. To help avoid these pitfalls, let’s debunk some of the different misconceptions about self-love.
Misconception #1: Any type of self-praise is self-loving
But, praise is always a good thing, right? As it turns out, how we praise ourselves is really important. For example, think about how someone might praise themselves after a really productive day of completing many errands. They might say to themselves, “Good job being a real adult today!” but phrasing the praise this way is actually pretty invalidating. It reinforces the idea that being perceived as an adult means being the most productive. It could also reinforce the harmful message that you have less value on days with reduced capacity when you’re needing to rest and that attending to these needs makes you less of an adult.
Instead, a more self-loving approach could be celebrating or enjoying that you had access to the energy and motivation to achieve these things today. In viewing it this way, you can acknowledge with neutrality that some days there might not be access to energy and motivation, and that’s okay. Another option could be praising your ability to listen to the needs of your body and mind on the days when rest is important. It could also look like giving yourself some grace and compassion for when energy and motivation are further out of reach. This transforms self-love from being dependent on productive output to being inherently unconditional.
Misconception #2: You always have to be confident
Sometimes people conflate self-love with having peak levels of confidence all the time. When it comes to body image, there can be the desire to feel as confident as influencers on social media appear in their posts. First off, it’s okay to not be in love with your body every day. There’s even a whole movement called body neutrality which focuses on respecting your body, honoring its needs, and working towards acceptance and gratitude for your body exactly the way it is.
Body confidence can fluctuate day to day while self-love in the form of respecting your body can remain constant. This same idea extends to all aspects of a person and who they are. It’s okay for people to want to change some things. At the same time it’s important to acknowledge that people are worthy of self-respect and self-love wherever they are in their growth and healing.
Misconception #3: You have to be the best
This viewpoint can lead to people always feeling the need to outperform others. If people only feel self-love when they are the best, this leaves them with fragile self-worth that could shatter when they are not in that position. Additionally, people can be emotionally unprepared for situations in which there is no ranking to obtain external validation. A more self-loving approach instead could be focusing on being proud of the effort involved and appreciating your internal persistence and resilience, regardless of the outcome.
It’s okay to enjoy the achievement; it’s just important that self-worth is not dependent on it. And even if there’s disappointment around underperforming, self-love can look like practicing radical acceptance in acknowledging this reality. It can involve reflecting on how to support yourself to perform to the best of your abilities next time, while also remembering that even in the face of failure you are worthy of respect and have value. This can mean giving yourself grace that you’re an imperfect human being, that as the saying goes, “You live and you learn”, and that you don’t have to resort to self-flagellation to meet your fullest potential.
Misconception #4: Acts of self-love always feel good
Another way of understanding self-care is viewing it as acts of self-love. Sometimes people assume that practicing self-love always feels good and means giving yourself indulgences. While it might mean that some of the time, just as there’s tough love, there can also be tough self-love. Sometimes this involves doing the things you need, not just the things you want to do. For instance, confronting difficult emotions in therapy might be the last thing you actually want to do. Self-love in this moment might mean showing up for yourself to support getting your needs met, even when you’d rather be doing anything else. Always doing what you want could mean staying in your comfort zone and not meeting your growth edge or fullest potential. In this way, self-love can also mean supporting yourself through the discomfort of growth.
Misconception #5: I’m only lovable when…(I’m a different version of me)
This misconception can come up when people feel like they’re only worthy of love, from themselves or anyone else for that matter, if they suppress or change a part of themselves they view as unacceptable. This could be suppressing parts labeled as negative, selfish, passive, insecure, irritable, emotionally numbing, or any number of other aspects that society has deemed as objectionable. By definition, this is loving yourself in a very conditional way, it’s finding yourself only tolerable or likable if you conform into someone you’re not.
Instead of viewing these internal struggles or insecurities as incompatible with self-love, it can be helpful to acknowledge the broader context of your history and why these characteristics are present. Perhaps an insecure part of you exists to prevent you from taking risks and repeating past experiences that were intensely shaming. Maybe there’s an irritable part to prevent you from being taken advantage of in relationships again. Or a numbing part of you that shows up to prevent you from feeling flooded by uncomfortable feelings. Surprisingly, there are valiant, positive intentions beneath even the most disliked parts of a person.
Whether or not you can identify the reason why these parts show up this way, extending self-love can look like acknowledging that there is a positive intention behind it. Based on your past experiences, these parts of you could be doing the best that they can to protect you. This does not mean you’re stuck with always having to feel this way though. It just means that an important act of love for yourself will be doing the personal work in and out of therapy to process and release the pain from those past experiences. Doing so will enable new ways of responding to become available that feel more supportive for your present circumstances. With this in mind, self-love can be a practice of extending compassion to all parts of yourself, especially the ones you find difficult to tolerate.
In exploring these ways to engage in unconditional self-love, several common threads emerged. One is that through all of the ways of practicing self-love, there is an underlying foundation of being inherently worthy of love. The second thread is that this inherent worthiness truly applies to everyone–there are no exceptions. The third is that self-compassion is fundamental to the practice of self-love.
The true meaning of self-love cannot fully be captured by pamper days or confident selfies. Instead it’s about cultivating a way of being in a relationship with yourself and extending self-respect through the highs and especially the lows. Cultivating this kind of self-relationship enables a deeper level of intimacy, awareness, and sense of steadiness that comes from within. In the end, perhaps there is some truth to certain platitudes. After all, one of the most important relationships you’ll ever have is the one you have with yourself.
Erin Sathyamoorthy is a Self Space Seattle therapist who specializes in working with people who feel stuck in negative beliefs about themselves, live with high levels of shame, or have experienced abuse.
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