The Drug of Self-Love

We’re notorious overthinkers, creating meaning out of every detail encountered. Yet, our self-concepts are more burdensome than exhilarating, causing us to obsess over how they relate to others’ relations to us. At bottom, self-love is little more than an addiction. And narcissism entails the preoccupation with acquiring and maintaining it.

My views on pride have shifted over the years. Pride, which relates to a sense of one’s worth based on traits or achievements, is the foundation of self-esteem, or the collective assessment of our good, bad, and neutral traits. But pride seems to elude us when we consider our essence, no matter the amount of reasoning. It seems we’re better equipped to assess our achievements than our traits. In fact, we’re notoriously terrible at self-oriented character evaluations. People tend to misjudge themselves in either direction. Some consider themselves to be less attractive or intelligent than they are while others have grandiose self-conceptions (Social Psychologist David Myers notes the Lake Wobegon Effect, a psychological phenomenon wherein most people consider themselves to be above average in many categories). Empirically speaking, few, if any, are humble in the exact sense of the term; few possess an accurate understanding of who they really are.

On one extreme, Narcissistic Personality Disorder implies the relentless search for ultimate validation, a repetitive return to a well that fails to quench one’s thirst. For the chronic seeker of praise, he chases the high of self-love, which is, fundamentally, the high of certainty. One day, he believes, something or someone will finally satiate his gnawing hunger, much like an addict might refer to having “one last hit.” So, he obsessively negates (searches for and finds reasons to discontinue caring about someone or some accomplishment) and chases, devalues and idealizes, torn between the wonder of his own specialness and the debilitating self-doubt threatening to blow the house away. Yet, the thing that appears to elude him is the reality that his love was never meant for him; it was meant for others. Consider how much we tend to love those who don’t love themselves and despise those who appear to. The former type of person focus on others; the latter on their own joy. You can argue that surely one is capable of being content and altruistic. But, again, that doesn’t seem to appear much in the world.

I frequently ask my patients: Who do you know that’s happy and feels good about him or herself? The answer is either “no one” or some obviously delusional person. In the clinical literature, it’s often argued that parental love begets self-love, but I infer the opposite: parental love begets a lack of self-consciousness, or an excessive focus on protecting yourself from embarrassment. Healthy individuals don’t necessarily feel as though they love themselves; they just don’t constantly think about how repugnant they are.

On the other extreme, Body Dysmorphic Disorder is another indicator of our unreliable self-assessments. The individual suffering from it has a distorted perception of some perceived or actual flaw. This means that no amount of evidence and cognitive reframing will actually help them see themselves otherwise. The best case is merely accepting that others have different perceptions of them. And this is the path I often take with my clients, helping them reduce the frequency of their tendency to question others’ perceptions of them; we rarely directly address their own self-confidence. On the one hand, they can feel good about specific accomplishments; but on the other, try their best to forgo evaluating their own traits.

The more one chases self-love, the further away it gets. And how can it be otherwise? Self-consciousness in the sense of self-awareness will always bring you back to everything that you aren’t and the abilities you’ll never have. In the phenomenal show Baby Reindeer, toward the end of the series, the protagonist supports this point about self-love. He noted that he was addicted to self-hate, but he was really addicted to chasing and feeling self-love in spurts, beginning anew each time. He couldn’t accept love; he couldn’t trust it without constant admiration, being seen as “the person you came here to be.” His self-awareness was limited by his blindness to who he was: flawed.

Fundamentally, true self-awareness is the deep understanding of every reason you’re imperfect. But awareness of another is the bedrock of love and authentic happiness. Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams writes, “The analytic emphasis on understanding is partly attributable to the fact that the two participants in the work need something interesting to talk about while the nonspecific factors are doing their quiet healing… In fact, over the past couple of decades, almost all psychoanalytic writing about what is curative in therapy stresses relationship aspects of the treatment experience over traditional notions of insight.”

The relationship may heal because both individuals steer their attention toward the other. And they maintain their boundaries less so because they feel a warmth toward themselves and more so because they believe they deserve to experience it emanating from others. When I challenge my patients beliefs, I rarely explore their self-concepts; I explore whether they trust that others actually believe what they say about them. If one can learn to trust another, the validity of whether or not they’re beautiful or funny or smart becomes much less important than if the object of their affection believes they are. In seeing oneself in another, the rapture of love erodes the desire for truth. Consider a child. Do you think a child cares whether or not they’re lovable or more so that they’re loved?

We don’t ever develop the capacity to love ourselves; we merely benefit from feeling the affection we feel for others.