Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with the many contradictions
and confusions concerning self-love; healthy,
real self-love defined; the operational definition of self-love; and
ends with the functional definition of self-love, plus a few important
questions; more.
Contradictions and Confusions
“I’ve been told again and again I need to learn to love myself but I
don’t know what that means. I also have been told that before I can
successfully love somebody else I first have to love myself, and until I
love myself no one else will be able to love me enough or right. Is
all that true? How can I figure all this out?
“As a kid I was told self-love was a bad thing. It seemed to mean
being selfish or self-centered and egotistical, conceited and even
narcissistic. Sometimes it seemed to mean doing something with myself
that was sexual and bad but I never figured out what all was included
there. I knew I was supposed to put others first and myself last, and
if I loved myself too much no one would like or love me.
“My religion taught me to love others and not myself, then the
opposite by quoting Scripture at me telling me to love others as I love
myself. Isn’t that contradictory? I don’t know what to think. I’m so
confused about ‘self-love’. What am I to do? I know I’m supposed
figure all this out on my own but I don’t know how.”
This lament is echoed by a large number of people whose mental and
emotional health, indeed, will greatly improve if they come to have
greater, healthy, real love for themselves. Not only that personal
enrichment, but their relationship life, likewise, probably will show
lots of improvement if they learn what healthy, real self-love is all
about, how to do it, and practice what they learn. But how are they to
do that if they don’t know what it is?
Loving Those Who Don’t Love Themselves
There is another perplexing problem related to this confusing and
contradictory self-love situation. If you are trying to love someone
who doesn’t know what healthy self-love is, who doesn’t know how to
practice healthy self-love, and who even may practice anti-self-love,
you possibly are going to have a very problem-filled love relationship.
If you’re trying to love someone whose healthy self-love is low, or
someone who is indifferent to themselves, or who even hates themselves
it is likely you are in big trouble and are going to need help. Oh,
loving these troubled people can be done and it can turn out well but it
sure isn’t easy. However, if you can encourage them to learn about
healthy, real self-love, and to practice it, your love relationships
with these un-self-loving people can get a lot easier and way more
successful.
Getting A Sense of Healthy, Real Self-Love
You might be thinking, so Dr. Cookerly, are you going to tell us what
self-love really is? Yes I am and rather exactly, but first let’s try
to get a sense of self-love before we more precisely define it. Let’s
examine several important ways to get a feel for what self-love is
really all about.
First, understand that ‘self-love is healthy, real love’ going from
the self to the self. It’s sort of like feeding yourself healthy,
tasty, nourishing food. Next, be aware that loving yourself may involve
some psychological actions you may not be used to. For instance, it
may involve your ‘adult self’ talking to your ‘inner child self’ in very
loving ways.
The more scientific may prefer thinking of this as your neocortex
sending composed messages to your brain’s limbic system in very loving
ways. Brain research shows that this positive internal dialogue
accomplishes real neurochemical improvement, which you experience as
feeling better and increasingly thinking more positively about
yourself. Some prefer to say it is your ‘cognitive, conscious mind’
choosing to speak lovingly to your subconscious mind.
Then there is a behavioral component. Healthy self-love involves
treating yourself well, taking good care of yourself, doing yourself
favors, taking yourself into good experiences and enjoying them, being
sure you surround yourself with good people, and a host of other actions
which demonstrate you acting with love toward yourself.
People who do the actions of love toward themselves tend to
experience the feelings of happy, healthy self-love which usually
follow. At the emotional level healthy self-love can mean feeling
really good about yourself, glad to be you, feeling upbeat and positive
about and toward yourself, highly honoring and highly valuing yourself
without getting into the forms of false self-love like egotism,
arrogance, overbearance, insolence, vanity, ostentation, conceit,
self-pity, grandiosity, etc.
Awe and Joy
Healthy, real self-love can involve becoming awed, thankful and
joyful about the one-of-a-kind, unique bundle of miracles that you are.
Deeply becoming aware that you are a product of a miraculous creation
system that got you started, and keeps you going, and is all part of who
you really are – and this, I suggest, is truly awesome. Therefore, it
is worth being joyous (occasionally or even often) about these aspects
of yourself.
Regrettably, if you have been brought up only on ‘product’ valuing
yourself instead of ‘essence’ valuing yourself, in response to these
self-love messages you may think something like “But I didn’t do
anything to earn that”.
You are much more than what you earn.
You are born with high-value and you maintain your essence-value as a
part of your core whether you do anything productive with your essence
or not.
Perhaps you have been trained to discount your value by thinking
something like “But there are so many humans; I’m just one of the many
millions. There’s nothing special about me”. Not true! You are an
individual work of art. No one is exactly like you. You are unique
and, therefore, special. No one thinks exactly like you, has exactly
the same emotions, or behaves exactly the same way as you do. We all
are just like our fingerprints – totally one-of-a-kind, though somewhat
similar to others. So, you can value yourself, especially your essence
and core self. Consequently, the experience of awe and joy about
yourself, your essence and your core can be part of healthy, real
self-love.
Self Delight
Do you delight in yourself when you figure something out? Do you get
a little spark of happiness when your wonderful, incredible memory
system brings to you the memory you have been searching for? When you
appreciate anyone or anything do you appreciate yourself for a few
seconds for having an appreciation system which brings you happiness?
When you fix something broken, or make something new, or cause
someone to smile, or help someone in any way at all do you also take
just a little bit of time to appreciate yourself for being able to
accomplish what you just accomplished? Do you ever look back on the
best experiences of your life and think something like “Good for me, I
got and let myself experience that, and it was good”.
Do you take joy into yourself when you see, or touch, or smell, or
taste or hear something beautiful and then have a good feeling about
being able to do that? When you have a really good time with another
person are you also glad about your own ability to have that good time?
All these things and much more are (and can be) part of healthy
self-love. Actually, when you were a young child you did all these sort
of things naturally (baring some disabilities). Young children around
the world do ‘self delight’ unless and until they are taught
anti-self-love. Your own natural tendency to do this may be deeply
buried but it’s there, and you can resurrect it. If this ‘self delight’
mechanism is active in you, but a little rusty, you might polish it up
with awareness and experience it more.
Self Care
Part of healthy self-love comes from valuing yourself enough to take
good care of yourself. Diet, exercise, good medical attention when
useful or needed– developing a very positive, mental/emotional attitude
about life and yourself with lots of healthy empathy for yourself so
that you are really in touch with your inner messages – healthy,
positive, strong relationships full of love of many different types (a
couple relationship, friends, family, pets to name a few) – and keeping
yourself psychologically growing and actualizing your potentials, all
are part of the healthy self-love and the self-care picture which you
can develop.
Self-Love and Other Love
Self-love involves a lot of ‘loving others’ and this is how it
differs from what might be considered selfishness. A great deal of
research shows us that when you love others well you do yourself a lot
of favors. Those who are good at loving others tend to have lowered bad
cholesterol, better brain functioning, stronger community connections,
greater longevity, get treated better by others, and a host of other
benefits.
Those who live by the great commandment
“love others as you love yourself’,
in fact, do the best at succeeding and being benefited in life. Those
who don’t love themselves, or don’t love others, or don’t love both
themselves and others are much less happy and much less benefited in
life.
Healthy, Real Self-love Defined
With all the above in mind, I hope you have a sense of what healthy,
real self-love actually is. So, let’s now define it more accurately.
We will use this site’s working definition of love, found in the left column
as “
The Definition of Love”.
Healthy self-love is defined as:
Healthy, real self-love is a powerful, vital,
natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and
taking pleasure in the well-being of the self.
I will now, with healthy self-love, brag that this site’s definition
of love recently has been acclaimed in places as diverse as Egypt and
China and the US.
Let’s take a look at the elements in this definition.
Powerful,
yes, healthy self-love is powerful. It is something you can greatly
change your life with, for the better and it can make you much more
powerful in beneficially influencing the lives of others.
Vital, means it is important to life and for enhancing life functioning, and that’s exactly what healthy self-love can do.
Natural, demonstrates that it is part of nature and essential existence biologically, psychologically and relationally.
Process, refers to healthy self-love being an active succession of systemic changing operations, all aimed at natural well-being.
High valuing yourself in a deep, emotional sense is the key factor which leads to
desiring for and
acting for your own well-being and
taking pleasure in your own well-being. It is by this that healthy self-love brings you to thriving wholeness and joy.
The Operational Definition of Self-Love
One of psychology’s ways to define something psychological is to
describe its operations. This usually means to detail the observable
actions or behaviors which bring it about, or which occur when the
phenomenon being discussed is occurring. For example, smiling,
laughing, animated movement and other such behaviors are acting in ways
called happy.
This gives us the operations or behaviors that occur with happiness.
Therefore, those actions give the operational definition of happiness.
Healthy, real self-love can be operationally defined as doing ‘to or
for’ yourself ‘one or more’ of the
eight major groups of behavior which operationally define healthy, real love.
These behaviors can include things like talking to yourself out loud
or silently with loving words, using loving tones of voice and feeling
yourself smile as you do this; lovingly caressing or holding yourself;
affirming yourself with praise and compliments and accolades; exploring
and, with ‘insight’, self disclosing yourself to yourself with
appreciation and acceptance; tolerating your shortcomings, failures,
etc.; receiving deeply inside yourself praise, compliments, thanks, etc.
from others; giving yourself both ‘object gifts’ and ‘experience
gifts’; and a host of similar actions. To learn more about the
operational definition of love consult the “
Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in the left column on this site.
The Functional Definition of Self-love
Another way to define something is to give its functions, or describe what it does or what it accomplishes. There are
five major functions accomplished by healthy, real love. There also are the same functions found in healthy, real self-love.
Healthy, real self-love functions to:
1. Connect you to yourself and, thereby, harmonize all your parts
2. Safeguard yourself
3. Works to
improve yourself in many different ways
4. Causes you to act and be
self-healing if you become physically, or emotionally, or relationally damaged or ill
5. Rewards you for doing any or all of the above with joy and other highly pleasurable feelings.
To learn more about the major functions of healthy, real love study “
A Functional Definition of Love” found in the left column of this site and in “
Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”.
Some questions for you to consider: Are you highly valuing yourself
in a deep, emotional way? Are you acting with the behaviors of love
toward yourself? Are you living by the functions of good, healthy
self-love? If not, are you going to learn these things and practice
what you learn? Are you going to inform and maybe teach those you love
about healthy self-love?
Special Note: There are many other kinds of
definitions of love and self love including poetic, biological,
psycho-neurological, phenomenological, recursive, nominal, mathematical,
linguistic and a great many more. Interestingly, the word ‘definition’
in a good dictionary has a very long entry!
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love Success Question
Have you been trained in anti-self-love thinking and acting
and, if so, are you practicing those actions and thoughts more than
practicing the actions and thoughts that go with healthy, real
self-love?