085-self-love

In many family cultures, self-love is misunderstood as selfishness. When a child expresses needs, protects boundaries, chooses his own life, or refuses self-sacrifice, he may be accused of being immature, unfilial, heartless, or selfish.

Many people therefore learn a false morality: to love others, one must suppress oneself; to be a good child, one must sacrifice oneself; to maintain relationships, one must abandon oneself.

True self-love is not selfishness or self-centeredness. It means recognizing that one is also human, and that one’s feelings, body, dignity, boundaries, value, and future are also worthy of respect.

Family Civilization holds that a person who does not love himself can hardly love others in a civilized way. He may use sacrifice to obtain love, control to demand love, pleasing to preserve relationship, or resentment to punish others.

Self-centeredness consumes others. Self-love respects oneself.

People without self-love tend to enter relationships through pleasing, sacrifice, dependency, control, or self-punishment. The pleaser fears losing love. The sacrificer turns unreturned giving into resentment. The dependent person hands life meaning to another. The controller uses external obedience to fill internal insecurity. The self-punishing person feels unworthy of being treated well.

True self-love includes love for the body, feelings, boundaries, value, and future.

It can be practiced by doing one thing each day not for pleasing others, practicing saying no, stopping self-judgment through parental eyes, allowing joy, and building a life structure not dependent on a single relationship.

Only after self-love can one truly love others. Self-love moves a person from deprivation to abundance, dependency to freedom, resentment to responsibility, and demand to sharing.

Self-love is not the enemy of relationship. It is the foundation of civilized relationship.