“The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.”
– Carl G. Jung
Is self-care selfish? Does self-love make one selfish, narcissistic and arrogant?
One can only be narcissistic and arrogant when one lacks love, self-love, and self-acceptance. Whereas, a person with a healthy relationship with oneself can extend this authentic love to others around them. When you are spent, you have nothing left to give. Self-love is not self-obsession, it is not about posting happy selfies, nor about being the centre of others’ universes, nor ignoring other people’s needs. Self-love is loving oneself; selfishness is excessively and exclusively concerned with oneself without consideration for others.
Prioritising your needs does not preclude your love for others; it just means that you need to take care of yourself first, so that you can take better care of others.
- I have used self-care and self-love interchangeably here, but know that self-care is a way of expressing/practicing self-love.
- Others could be people, or even work or the inexhaustible list of tasks.
Do you love yourself? Do you know what it means to love yourself? Would you like to know what it feels like to love yourself?
In ThetaHealing, we use a mix of Belief Work and Feeling Work, to clear (the limiting beliefs that no longer serves us) and to instil (what we call “downloads”). You may never have known what it feels like to love yourself, if you have never been allowed to love yourself (the environment you grew up in may have viewed this as selfishness, or that you have always had to take care of everyone and everything else before you can even think about yourself).
You may have subconscious “prerequisites” you set for yourself before you are allowed to love yourself. You may have felt that you are not good enough, or that you are not worthy of love, that you do not deserve love, or that you have to achieve [ this and that ] in order to be loved. You may even find something along the lines of “I have to be self-critical in order to be humble”. If you think the above is true, then do think again. You can be humble by being authentically humble; you can be humble without having to criticise yourself all the time.
Know that you are good enough to be loved for who you are. Know that you are a work-in-progress, and that everyday in every way, you are getting better and better. Know that you are worthy of love, and that you deserve love. Know that Love is unconditional; Love can be without conditions and prerequisites.
Know that it is okay to make time for you. That you are important too.
Background image: view from Taipei101 after we emerged from an ordeal.
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