7 Barriers to Growing into a Healthy Love of Self
Tobermory, Ontario
One early summer we decided to visit this beautiful and out-of-this-world place located at the northern end of the Bruce Peninsula. Tobermory, Ontario, is not named the 8th wonder of Canada for nothing. As we were enjoying our hike along the portion of the famed 700-kilometre Bruce Trail, we found ourselves walking a short distance behind this middle-aged couple. The horrible scene almost ruined our sunny day in paradise. We had to slow our pace to widen our distance with the couple.
The odd couple
At first, we thought these two people were having a great time, with the guy talking loudly under these wonderful tall cedars, firs, spruce, pines, and oaks. As we got nearer, however, it became clear the guy was castigating his partner. Something must have happened earlier that really caused the guy’s fury.
“You are always like that… You are a moron…I cannot believe how stupid you are…We better go back…”
Those are some of the guy’s words that we could make out. Meanwhile, the poor woman was taking it all in, with her eyes staring on the ground. Amazingly, she was not crying at all.
My heartache
My heart was in so much pain watching the very sad scene. But the very first thought that entered my mind was not about how cruel the guy was. It was like, “How could she allow herself to be treated like that? And, worse, in a very public way?”
What this post is all about
This article is the final episode of the 3-part series on the importance of self-love.
First part
In the first episode, I talked about the biblical context of loving God, others, and self. Thus, if understood more closely, everything about love starts with the self. And I revisited an author’s relatable metaphor about a toothache. That when we are nursing such an agonizing pain, there is no room for other thoughts outside of the self. Everything in us is focused solely on our own pain. But inside that little world, there is no chance to have a healthy love of self. It is because, for the love of self to be positive, it must go out into the real world. Otherwise, it remains a selfish kind of self-love.
Second part
In the second part of the series, I shared about my own ordeal – my anni horribiles! For almost four years I was in great pain, having some dental issues one after another. While in that experience, I remembered the metaphor of a toothache to describe the unhealthy kind of self-love. A painful toothache prevents us from achieving the healthy kind.
Third part
In this article, I share with you some real-life situations that I have witnessed from other people and learned from. Over the years in my professional life, I have worn many hats. At a certain point I was counselling couples, married or otherwise. One important thing I have learned is that the number one cause of marital breakdown is the absence or weak understanding of a healthy self-love in one partner, or both.
What is a healthy love of self?
According to human relationship experts, a healthy love of self is about: a sense of deep self-acceptance and grateful appreciation of one’s uniqueness and individuality. With this kind of self-awareness, one is conscious that they deserve compassion, kindness, and respect.
The 7 barriers
Here are the 7 barriers to growing into a healthy love of self, in the context of human relationships. Particularly, among couples.
First: The inability to forgive the self
Self-acceptance means I have something which others do not have. As well, there are things that others have and which I don’t. And this is true when it comes to accepting the reality that we mess up things every now and then. And some of them may be huge, and it impacts the trajectory of our life’s direction in a bad way. But before we can move forward and to learn from that mistake, we need to forgive our own self.
When I counsel couples, I make it a point to have a one-on-one session. And believe it or not, I found out that between the husband and the wife, it is always the wife who easily tells the truth. And while the husband seldom admits his faults, the wife is honest enough to put the blame on both. But the downside is that, when it comes to her own shortcomings, she easily gets stuck into beating her chest non-stop. And in every counselling session that follows she would bring up the same self-blame that should have been left behind a long time ago.
So, I tell her that unless she learns to forgive herself for the past, it is difficult for her to truly forgive the past mistakes of her partner. It is possible that the concept of a loving and forgiving God is hard to believe in. How can we receive the good news that God can forgive us if we cannot even learn to forgive our own self? Or how can we accept forgiveness from others?
The self is to be treated as the closest friend. And it deserves all the forgiveness it needs.
Second: The “bad dog” syndrome
One reason why it is hard to forgive the self is the belief that we do not deserve to be forgiven, simply because we are bad. Some grownups were victims of what we now call “gas lighting” when they were young. Some parents, in trying to show tough love and push us to be stronger, do it in a very negative way by focusing so much on our frailties. Sometimes it generates the opposite effect. And some kids do not outgrow this self-doubt.
“I deserve all these sufferings because I am a bad person.” And life becomes an endless self-fulfilling prophecy. A healthy self-love is very hard to achieve if one’s self-image is that bad.
Third: The perpetual victim mentality
The inability to forgive oneself because of a bad self-image only leads to self-pity. In a twisted and weird way, one learns to find their comfort zone when they are the victim. They get uncomfortable when they perceive that they are not the victim in a particular situation.
Is this the reason why that woman in the hiking trail did not show any distressed emotion amidst the barrage of humiliation from her partner? (I must admit I had no idea if they were actually in a “couple” relationship. But, hey, whatever their relationship was, nobody deserves that kind of dressing down in public, or wherever.)
We do not love our self if we make our self an object of pity of other people.
Fourth: The hopeless “optimist”
Jesus
Some theologians say that Peter took an arduous and painful route to have a semblance of Jesus’ mindset. Jesus was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. He was a realist, meaning he was an optimist about other things and pessimistic about some. He was pessimistic that left alone, human beings would never be able to reach the true purpose they were meant to be. And he was optimistic that each human being is loveable and forgivable.
Peter
On the other hand, Peter started as an optimist. He enthusiastically followed Jesus, but when Jesus died a very humiliating death Peter went into deep physical isolation to lick his wounds. He transformed into a pessimist – Jesus was just one of those charlatans who came before him. But after the resurrection and appearance of Jesus, Peter came out in history as a realist just like his beloved teacher. He understood that there was no life without death. That even a devoted follower was not immune to pain and suffering. It is just part of life, a reality.
But some people get stuck in optimism even if reality and facts do not align with it. Two examples come to mind.
A husband caught the wife having an affair, and she admitted. But one affair later became three, involving three different men. All three men were married themselves. These happened within their three years of marriage. Despite this the husband still clung to his belief that things would turn around, and they would have a happily-ever-after ending.
A couple went to me to resolve their weird situation. The husband was having an affair with a rich young widow. It had been going on for two years, and they both got tired fighting over it. The reason the wife could not leave her husband was his promise that he would end the affair once all their financial debts were paid off.
Were they hopeless optimists? I cannot judge. But it was hard for me to see self-respect, self-compassion, and self-kindness in those kinds of situations.
Fifth: Looking at the “Magic mirror on the wall”
The very insecure evil queen in the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” would always find affirmation from the unlikely source. “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”
This is the reason why social media is a hit to humanity. Was it the famous comedian Trevor Noah who says that peoples’ pressing need nowadays is attention? Yes, to seek attention is part of our healthy self-image. But when social media become our mirror on the wall that we rely on everyday to give us a healthy affirmation, it becomes a problem.
Many active social media users get depressed because they cannot have enough likes, comments, subscribers, and followers. Meanwhile, their own self is crying for the much-needed attention.
One time we went camping in one of the remote parts of Ontario Parks. We were so excited upon reaching the place, when the “no service” popped up on my phone. Of course, I panicked. In this situation, communication would be a necessity for safety reason. But in the end, we decided to go for it. No calls, no text messages, no social media. Yes, it was scary. But we experienced how camping was supposed to be. It was about the self and the wild.
We are in trouble if first thing in the morning we take out our smart phone (or any electronic gadget) and say, “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” Instead of looking in the real mirror and ask our self how it is doing. And how it plans to do things for the new day.
Sixth: The crowd pleaser
Before my own world became much wider, I thought that passive-aggressive behavior was limited to a certain ethnicity. But the truth is this certain behavior has no cultural boundary.
What is passive-aggressive?
Passive-aggressive happens when there is “a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them.” That there is a “disconnect between what one says and what he or she does.”
For example, saying no is never always easy. Most often when we are younger, we love to please the crowd. We find it hard to refuse requests and invitations. We are afraid to offend others by doing so. Then time comes when, at a certain age maturity, we find it so overwhelming. We begin to have that feeling that we are not being true and honest to our own self. Then the light bulb switches on our head: what is all this for?
I used to have a friend who fell into a serious depression that it almost cost his beautiful marriage. He told me that ever since he could remember his amiable and pleasing personality was what brought him to his personal and professional successes. People loved him because he was very approachable and generous with whatever he had. But he came to a point where he realized something in him had changed.
But what was happening inside him was not in alignment with what was happening outside. He was human after all, and being one it was just normal that he would like some individuals, and dislike others. Yet, he could not express that dislike in the open. Now he was trying to learn how.
In short, his own self was now catching up with him. It was telling him that it was now time to be true and honest to himself. All his life, he was a yes man.
Seven: The ghost in the closet
I remember when we were young, when our parents did not want us to go to certain places, they would make up scary stories about those places. Of course, they meant well. It was not safe for us to go there, and one way of dissuading us from doing so was to scare the hell out of our wits.
Mind and heart
I truly believe that another way of loving the self is to enrich our mind and our heart with human experiences. But because of the ghosts that we keep within us, we fail the self to grow to its greatest potential.
I used to know somebody whose experience I could use here. When she landed in the US, she was so insecure with her command of conversational English. Although she was considered a professional in her native country and very fluent in English, she was aware of her verbal inadequacy.
Be not afraid to be different
So, she made a bold decision. She chose to hang out with native English speakers in every chance she got. For a time, this did not go well with her own ethnic community. She appeared aloof and snobbish to them. But it paid off. When we first met my first impression was, she either was born or educated in the US.
There are so many other ways to nurture our love of self. They can be through love of reading, watching good movies, healthy hobbies, meeting new friends, travel and allow us to be exposed to other peoples and their cultures.
Our soul is meant to soar like a proverbial eagle
As I mentioned earlier, a love of self that keeps to itself is not a healthy kind of self-love. It must go out into the world. To be tested, affirmed, inspired, challenged, and to grow more. After all, our self has a soul. And that soul needs to be nourished. In the end, wherever that soul is going, there is an assurance that it has grown more than when it first came into this world.
There you are. The 7 Barriers to Growing into a Healthy Love of Self. If we find we are in any one of these, we know that we are nursing some kind of a toothache.
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