Why is Self-Love So Hard? Because it’s a Betrayal of Shame
Image by Andi McLeish
Have you ever been on a self-love kick, and everything is awesome and you’re feeling great? And then out of nowhere you find yourself back in a dark hole of oblivion and you don’t know what the heck happened? We all know self-love is important. Most of us have a list of things we could be doing for our own self love. So why is it sometimes so hard?
Well, one reason might be because self-love is a betrayal of shame. Stick with me, here.
Shame is different from guilt. Where guilt tells us we’ve done something wrong, shame tells us we are wrong—that we are fundamentally bad or defective in some way. There is a purpose to this, as uncomfortable as it is. Shame allows us to internalize bad things that happen to us. That might sound like a bad thing, but it can actually be adaptive. When someone we love is hurting us, especially when we are dependent on that person (for example when we are children), it makes more sense that we are being hurt because there’s something wrong with us than for some scarier reason, like that our caregiver is dangerous, that the world is unpredictable, or that we can’t prevent harm from coming to us randomly. For many of us, shame is how we made sense of the world for a very long time. Shame helped us stay connected. It helped us survive. Of course, when we live our lives under the assumption that we are bad people who don’t deserve to be treated with kindness and respect, we can run into a bunch of other problems.
Self-love is, essentially, the opposite of shame. When we behave in alignment with the idea that we are worth loving as we are, we are in alignment with the idea that there’s nothing wrong with us, that we deserve, for example, healthy food, enough sleep, and pleasurable experiences. For some of us, that causes a kind of rebound effect where we end up falling back into self-punishment and in our familiar old hole of shame.
That’s because, from the perspective of the nervous system, self-love is unsafe. It threatens a very old survival system. It threatens the idea that I was hurt because there’s something wrong with me, and that belief feels safer on some level than any other possibility. It doesn’t matter how long ago we learned this old strategy. From the nervous system’s perspective, this is all happening right now.
The good news is that we can interrupt this pattern. First, we may need to spend some time entertaining the idea that there’s nothing wrong with us and we never deserved to be hurt. Most of us know this intellectually, but the body may not agree. Bringing this idea to the conscious mind and sitting with the feelings that come up around it is the first step to shifting the body out of this old pattern of belief. It can be really helpful to do this with a supportive witness like a counselor or healer (and this is something that we can do within my Pathfinding program).
Next, we have to understand that self-love is not a given, it’s a practice. Like any practice, it takes time to get better at it, and discomfort is a natural result of doing something new. Learning to tolerate the discomfort by acknowledging the parts of ourselves that are afraid when we try to love ourselves can be powerful way to soothe those parts without letting them be in control of our choices.
With time, we can improve our self-love practices and it can start to feel like second nature. But we’ll have to work at it. We have to trust that it’s safe to betray our shame. And then we have to actually do it.