The trouble with self-love

Worthiness and self-acceptance

Somewhere pre-COVID, I’m sitting on a toilet with my pants around my ankles scrolling through social media. My feed is awash in messages of self-empowerment.

Self-care is important.

Embrace yourself.

You are worthy.

Practice self-love daily.

While shitting on the toilet after a sleepless night with infants, shrouded in a caffeine haze of self-disgust and doubt, I found these messages to have the same philosophical texture as the waste now leaving my body. I was offended by them. What was likely intended as positive messages of love struck me as blindingly ignorant declarations of privilege and victim-blaming.

In the years since, I sense the fascination with self-love has fallen out of vogue, perhaps in part because of its inevitable association with masturbation (which, frankly, is a message I could more easily get on board with). Notions of self-care, however, have remained. Keep yourself safe. Practice self-care. What’s your daily self-care ritual?

I’m not outrightly opposed to these ideas. I’m fascinated by them and have used some to improve my life. When I can, I exercise, try to eat well, and occasionally book a massage.

While we have become more adept at valuing self-care, we are generally less well-skilled at addressing its twin: self-hatred. I can’t stop thinking about the topic since listening to an interview with psychiatrist Blaise Aguirre, who stumbled upon a substantial gap in psychological research while treating over 5,000 suicidal patients.

In all of the questionnaires that psychological patients receive, surprisingly few ask about the patient’s relationship to themselves. If patients say they hate themselves, the research has not valued this as a noteworthy insight. In Aguirre’s work on suicidal ideation, however, tackling self-hatred became the most important symptom to address. First things first: keep the patient alive. Tackling self-hatred became the number one priority.

I’ve hated myself for almost all of my life. Becoming a parent and many years of therapy have helped that, and I’ve been able to turn my self-perception around. It’s a topic that often comes up with my coaching and counselling clients, who are almost all creative practitioners. Their creative impulse is a gift, because it can transcend self-commentary. But only if they trust themselves enough to surrender to it - and if self-hate is part of the picture, self-trust is usually out of reach.

I’m still allergic to the social media-fied plea to love yourself, or the Queer Eye-adjacent plea to commit to self-care. I’ve grown more comfortable with what chef Nigella Lawson called ‘self-tolerance’.

In her beautifully English way, she posits that relentlessly thinking about oneself is usually unhealthy, no matter which direction (love or hate) it spins. The best one can hope for is to get on with life with levity, managing a kind of banal self-acceptance and remaining vigilant for the more toxic or destructive self-hatred when it appears.

In the meantime, there’s life. I often return to a quote by e e cummings, given to me by fellow writer Claire Christian on a fridge magnet over a decade ago: ‘be silly. be honest. be kind.’

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My books are open for clients and the first fifteen minute chat is free. I really do recommend that interview with Aguirre.