Reflections on Loving Yourself

Love of self is not a new concern. Granted, we now have sprawling popular literatures on self-love, self-esteem, and related concepts, most of which are of fairly recent vintage. During the entire 1970s, Psychology Today published just one article on self-esteem.¹ It seems as though the importance of self-love has only recently been discovered.

Not so. Aristotle pointedly took up self-love in his discussion of friendship in Ethics. The second great commandment, first set down in the Book of Leviticus, enjoined the faithful to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and as the German philosopher Josef Pieper once noted, both Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas made the point that “the love we bear ourselves” is the root and measure of our love of others.² A tradition of reflection in this vein has persisted down through the centuries.

So why are we talking so volubly about self-love now? It is not because we have discovered something new about it, I would suggest, but because it has become so difficult to put into practice. Indeed, if there is one discontent that rises above all the others in our time, it is our inability to love ourselves as we should.

Struggles With Self-Worth

In my interviews and discussions with people, they typically speak of their distress as a kind of protest against who they are. They are not successful in being “somebody.” They are failing to stand out or reach their goals. They feel worthless, undeserving, or even guilty for not doing more. They wish they were someone they could feel good about, someone who merited their love and respect.

Similar judgments of personal inadequacy are a pervasive theme in self-help and popular therapeutic writing. Many authors discuss self-love in the context of a serious struggle on the part of readers, primarily women, with “shame-based beliefs,” “comparison-based self-criticism,” a “distorted body image,” and other painful feelings and challenges.

The Self-Love Workbook for Women, for example, currently a top title on the Amazon self-esteem list, defines self-love in terms of a set of beliefs and practices. All other sources I consulted said virtually the same. Self-love, according to the Workbook, means to

• Accept yourself as you are, with your flaws and imperfections, avoiding self-judgment and extending kindness and forgiveness to yourself.
• Make space and time to put yourself first
• Set healthy boundaries and prioritize self-care

Given that self-worth has become the object of endless and seemingly unsuccessful struggle, such therapeutic advice seems understandable. Cut yourself some slack, it says. Yet the advice fails to provide a definition of what self-love really is.

Regard for Ourselves as Persons

In On Love, the philosopher Pieper offers a provocative thought: “It seems to me crucial that in loving affirmation of ourselves, we always regard ourselves as persons, that is, as beings existing for their own sake.”

Perhaps that sounds obvious, but I think his point about people is significant. It helps us to think about specific orientations that self-love requires, three of which I will mention.

First, self-love requires that we relate to ourselves as subjects, not objects. We “think and judge,” to quote Pieper again, “in terms of our own impulses, fears, and goals, our inner motivations.” We do not, in other words, disconnect our experience from our desires, our purposes, our commitments, and our real-world circumstances. Rather than see them as alien, we understand and deal with our actions and our emotions as our own.

That is easier said than done, of course. The widespread medicalization of everyday suffering, of which I have written extensively, has driven out the ordinary ways in which people speak about their struggles. It has conditioned us to think and speak in terms of diagnostic concepts such as depression, anxiety, and attention deficit or in the popularized language of chemically driven brain disorders. Through such medicalized terms, our painful experiences—with their own unique histories and existential specificity—are disconnected from us. We are little more than objects or even “hosts” of various impersonal forces.

Self-Esteem Essential Reads

Mirror, Mirror: The Danger of Empty Reflections

The Wild Edge of Love

Another common form of self-estrangement—the tendency to view ourselves as a mere means to an end—is even more insidious. Such alienation is hard to combat because it often arises from the way we are treated by others. We are valued not for ourselves but only for our usefulness or achievements or personal qualities. Over time, as we learn that nothing about us—whether our character, our talents, or the work we have done—matters in itself, we come to think of ourselves in the same instrumental terms.

College students, for instance, whose every activity has been organized from a young age for maximum educational success, sometimes speak of such self-alienation. They have little idea of who they are, and recognition of that fact, they say, came only after something unpredictable happened, some jarring failure or life-changing experience.

Second, self-love, as the therapeutic literature emphasizes, requires active acceptance of ourselves, however challenging that has become. Each of us is unique, with a certain temperament and personality, strong and weak points, potentialities as well as limitations. Regarding ourselves as persons means accepting our whole reality. It means to wish to be who we are and not someone else.

But such self-acceptance cannot be, as the Workbook and many other sources say, unconditional. Our approval cannot extend to things we do that are wrong. Self-love cannot be mere self-satisfaction. We must remain discontented with our faults and imperfections. Otherwise, we do not take our own dignity seriously. We deny our capacity for growth and moral development. Our relation to ourselves, rather than being one of love, becomes an “echo,” to use sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s apt term for a relationship that is nonresponsive or indifferent.³ Self-improvement is frustratingly slow. Not “forgiveness,” but patience is the requisite virtue.

Third, and finally, self-love means recognizing and embracing our need for love. Persons are not solitary selves, independent of relationships with other persons and our being in the world. Love has the character of a gift, not self-conferred but received. It implies an openness, allowing ourselves to be touched and moved by others. It implies vulnerability and a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable.

The therapeutic literature seems to imagine something different. Many authors treat self-love as though it were a kind of personal self-sufficiency. The solution they offer to being too dependent or needy or trying to earn love with accomplishments or abilities is to cultivate autonomy from others. If we just love ourselves and insist on our boundaries, they imply, we can gain a kind of control. We won’t care what others think of us and can, as necessary, give ourselves all we really need.

Drawing in on ourselves in self-protection is understandable. But it isn’t self-love. It is another form of self-estrangement. We may gain some instrumental control over our circumstances but at the expense of our longing to love and be loved.

With all the forces of our world leaving people feeling unworthy and inadequate, we might begin to push back by learning to think of ourselves not as conditions or projects but as irreducible persons deserving and capable of love.