Should we love ourselves?

The Sage

Interviewing the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton a few years ago, I was struck by a remark he made about the need to “make ourselves more loveable to each other”. Today’s conventional wisdom is that everyone deserves to be loved, whoever they are and whatever they do. Being loved is a human right, and the idea that it is down to you to make yourself worthy of it is absurd.

That certainly seems to be how we view self-love. It has become a truism that you cannot love anyone else unless you first learn to love yourself. But even if that is so, it does not follow that your self-love can or should be unearned.

Take as a parallel the message of The Staple Singers’ 1971 hit “Respect Yourself”. As the song makes clear, respecting yourself requires you to behave respectfully to others as well. As the first line has it: “If you disrespect anybody that you run in to, how in the world do you think anybody’s supposed to respect you?” You respect yourself by making yourself worthy of respect. The same is true of self-love. Loving yourself irrespective of how much you deserve it is vain, not virtuous.

But isn’t unconditional love meant to be the best, purest kind? For God, perhaps. After all, if he created us, with all our failings, he has a duty of paternal benevolence to everyone. But for mere mortals unconditional love looks like folly. There may be a kind of generalised goodwill to all humanity that should be universal, but the love that touches us most deeply does so because it loves us for who we are as individuals. Indiscriminate love has its place, but we can only value and cherish the uniqueness of a person if we appreciate the genuinely good qualities they really have.

For self-love to have any value, we must be able to find things within ourselves that make that love worthy. Scruton is right. Rather than trying to love ourselves, we should simply try to make ourselves lovable, and the rest will follow.

The Shrink

One of the pioneers of family therapy, Virginia Satir, found inspiration in a black iron pot she remembered from growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. This pot contained different things at different times, so that anybody wanting to use it had to ask what it was now full of, and how full it was. She found this a useful metaphor when discussing her clients’ feelings of self-worth. A “high pot” became shorthand for everything that goes with high self-worth, a “low pot” for the opposite. It seems there are many leaky pots out there.

Satir called it self-worth, but the most commonly used label nowadays is self-esteem. Large numbers of people self-diagnose a lack of it and feel they should acquire more. At the risk of sounding somewhat indulgent, we could also call it self-love. Whatever we label it, how we think of it matters. What kinds of positive feelings towards ourselves should we aim to fill our pots with?

Not any old positive self-regard will do. It doesn’t really help to pump up our opinion of ourselves without paying attention to how we act. Convincing ourselves we’re great when our behaviour is selfish and inconsiderate, for instance, or when we know we’re not doing our best, is not very sustainable. It’s important to be honest in our self-appraisal. An excess of self-esteem, which can make us appear haughty to others and over-reach ourselves, is also something to guard against.

The most appropriate form of self-love is what Buddhists would call loving kindness towards oneself. This is echoed by psychiatrist and cognitive therapist David D. Burns, who, in the classic self-help book Feeling Good, suggests that a constructive way of thinking about self-esteem is that of treating oneself like a beloved friend.

Burns also advises readers to forget about the worth equals achievement equation, which is ultimately nonsensical, and start doing the things that give them joy and satisfaction. Now, if we can fill our pots with compassion and with activities that stretch us and that we enjoy, we will have made a good start towards the kind of self-love worth having.

The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England.

Stephen Grosz returns in two weeks.