The necessary conditions and beliefs for self-love
It is common for those on social media without anything more substantive to say to preach the importance of self-love. They’re not wrong, but they’re usually not helpful either, especially when they equate self-love to simple actions like going to a spa or relaxing and watching a movie. Frankly, plenty of people who watch relax and watch a movie actually dislike themselves very much. It’s obviously much deeper.
So what are the components that make up self-love? Whenever you are dealing with the subjective, you can view it from multiple angles. For this article, I want to approach it from the perspective of beliefs. What kinds of beliefs must one hold in order to truly love oneself?
1. You must believe that self-love is as important as others-love
For many, especially those who grew up in a spiritual tradition emphasizing humility (often in terms of “killing your flesh” or trying to eliminate your ego), they find the idea of self-love to be selfish.
There is a lot of wisdom in emphasizing humility. By humility, I mean simply the freedom of not thinking too often about yourself — not taking yourself too seriously. I’ve never met a happy person who thought about themselves all day.
And for many, when they hear “self-love,” they think “self-obsession,” which would obviously be psychologically unhealthy and go against everything they know about the benefits of humility.
But the truth is, even when we are fully engaged in the present moment and caring for others, we all have what Steve Andreas calls a self-concept. It’s how we view ourselves at the most fundamental level, and it’s always impacting us, even when we are not consciously thinking about it.
Most people have very negative self-concepts. They view themselves as fundamentally bad, lazy, gross, awkward, a failure… and the list goes on and on.
So the point isn’t to think about yourself all day long (which would go against the wisdom of humility and self-forgetfulness). The point of self-love is that when you do think about yourself, you view yourself with basic kindness and compassion. And perhaps even more importantly, the point of self-love is to avoid having a negative self-concept that sabotages you at the subconscious level.
And perhaps this framing will resonate with those of you who are more skeptical. In my view, self-love is more often about eliminating self-hate than about showering yourself with affection.
And the benefits of removing self-hate are abundant. You feel freer, less weighed down by guilt, more confident. And it’s actually much easier to love others from this place.
And this is difficult work to do. There arelayers of beliefs and conditioning that reinforce the ways in which we dislike and even hate ourselves. So how do we begin to deconstruct that self-hatred?
That brings me to the second belief…
2. You must believe that every behavior has a positive intent
This point is often emphasized early on in NLP training. (NLP stands for neuro-linguistic programming — it’s a ridiculous title, but a brilliant model for doing inner work.) Here are several ways I’ve found it worded:
“All behavior, even the most awful or bizarre, has a positive intention.”
“Everybody is doing the best they can with the resources they have at the moment.”
“Behind every behavior is a positive intent… As strange, heinous, otherworldly or bizarre as a behavior may appear to others, each one has some rationale for the client that makes it the best choice that they can perceive in the current context.”
First, let me explain why this is true, and then why it matters for self-love.
We know this is true mainly by looking at examples. For even the most harmful of actions, there is some positive intent. (This does not justify the behavior. But there is still something good that is being pursued.) If someone yells awful insults at a loved one, this may seem irrational and done purely out of some evil desire to hurt the other person. But deep down, what was the real reason for this? More often than not, people get angry when they are feeling insignificant or powerless in some way. By yelling and hurting the other person, they’re able to get the attention they feel they need. Again, this doesn’t justify the action, but it does explain it. It isn’t a senseless evil.
The same principles carry over to even the evilest actions. We all have a need to feel like we belong to a group, to have some certainty about our identity. Whereas many have gotten that sense of belonging and certainty through loving their biological family or some other group, many have also achieved that by having an enemy. And some have been so afraid of being abandoned by the group, that they murder, abuse, and slander based on someone having a different skin color.
Obviously, this justifies nothing. But it does humanize. And specifically, it eliminates the absurd notion that people are a mixture of good and evil. Whether consciously or subconsciously, many people imagine that within them, there is this source of chaotic evil, that simply does bad things for the sake of doing bad. We often are confused at our own motives, especially when we continue in behaviors we don’t like, and we make sense of this by supposing that there is a monster within, hell-bent on destruction and evil for evil’s sake.
The more accurate image is that there is a broken, hurt, wounded child within you. Not a monster. Just by virtue of being human, we have certain needs. And when those needs aren’t met through helpful means, we find unhealthy and harmful ways to meet them. Often times we learned unhealthy coping strategies as children, which helped us survive at the time, but are no longer useful.
This was liberating for me. When I began to recognize that I didn’t get angry at people because I was a monster who just liked to hurt people’s feelings, but because I was a human who wanted affection, it made it so much easier to (1) get that affection in a healthy way and (2) to stop beating myself up for being “so evil.”
Remember that at least how I’m defining it, self-love is about your self-concept, and removing self-hatred. The first big shift you can make in your self-concept is in no longer believing that there is a monster inside of you, but that there is simply a wounded child. There isn’t an evil substance inside you; behind even your worst behavior there is some positive intent.
3. You must believe that everyone deserves love
Many people say “it is hard to love others when you haven’t learned to love yourself.” And there is truth to that. But I want to flip it on its head: it is very hard to love yourself if you don’t believe that everyone is worthy of love.
Here is what happens. I ask you, “Is everyone deserving of love?” And let’s say your answer is no. After all, there are people who murder. Seems reasonable enough. So I follow up: “So what are the conditions that make someone deserving of love?” And your answer might be: “Well at the very least, they can’t be a murderer.” But can they be someone who cheats on their partner? Or what about someone who doesn’t reply to their friend’s text over petty jealousy?
The point is this: as soon as you introduce conditions for being worthy of receiving love, you will soon find yourself suffocating under those own conditions as well. Because at least a handful of times, we’ve all done things that were quite cruel to someone else. And if any conditions for love were to exist, it would be reasonable to draw ourselves outside the lines.
To truly be able to loosen the psychological chains of self-hate, so you can live in the freedom and joy of having a compassionate view of yourself, you need to begin with the belief that everyone deserves love, simply by virtue of being human.
And I’ve found that for most people, this belief is rather weak until they put some extra layers on it. For many Christians, the belief in the universal worthiness of every human is cemented by additional reasons: we are all made in the image of God, God didn’t need us but created us anyway, Jesus died for us all, etc.
And even if you’re not religious, I invite you to strengthen this belief with some broader view of the world. Finish these sentences to get a sense of your own view:
“We are all worthy of love, because…”
“We are all worthy of love. Therefore…”
“Every human deserves love, because every human…”
Recognize that love, respect, and compassion are your birthright. You didn’t need to work for it, and neither does anyone else.
4. You must believe that it is possible to love yourself
Lastly, not only must you believe that you deserve to be loved, but you must also believe it’s possible to love yourself. What does it mean to love someone? At a very minimal level, it means you don’t hate them. We have talked about that. But it also means you like them and try to make them happy.
When it comes to being able to practice self-love, you must believe that you are actually able to be happy, and that to some extent, you are able to steer yourself in the general direction of happiness. I won’t claim that you can directly control your emotions and “choose happiness.” Everyone knows emotions are experienced as mostly involuntary in the moment.
But from the broader perspective, it’s also quite clear you can steer yourself toward certain emotions through what you believe, focus on, and do. Of course, the things that happen to you are also a factor.
But I want you to imagine yourself with a partner. And no matter how hard you tried, no matter what you did, what you said, or how you approached them, you never made them happy. Eventually, if they didn't break up with you first, you’d eventually leave. Why? Because when we love someone, we need to know we can make them happy, at least on some level, at least sometimes.
And it’s the same thing with yourself. Before you’re able to truly change the way you feel about yourself, and develop the freedom and confidence and lightness from having a loving self-concept, you need to believe you can provide yourself with some happiness. And even more importantly, it’s joyously accepting the responsibility for being the primary person in charge of your own happiness.
What if you don’t believe that it’s possible to be happy? First, seek help from a therapist or life coach who know what they’re doing. Second, take inventory. Oftentimes, when happiness feels impossible, we are suffering from a selective memory that filters out the good. Write down 3 things from the last 24 hours, 3 from the last week, 3 from the last year, and 3 from your life that made you genuinely happy. You should have 12 concrete experiences. After you write them down, go through them one at a time in your mind and relive them. Remember them in as much vivid color as you can, and do it as if you are reliving it “through your own eyes.” Use this past proof to convince your brain that you truly are capable of happiness.
Conclusion
I hope that this article was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or simply want to talk.
Also, feel free to connect with me if you’d like :)
