They Call Me Selfish For Thinking About Myself, I Call It Self Love

There always comes a moment in our life when we finally take the step. We finally free ourselves from certain situations, things and even people who, far from offering us well-being, do us harm. This act of personal bravery is seen by many as the reflection of selfishness, when in reality, it is the glow of self-love.

We must also take into account that this psychological idea is never completely understood. Traditionally, the idea of self-love is often related to certain narcissistic ideas and to that individualistic egoism that only seeks its own benefit. This is not altogether true.

There is a widespread opinion among psychologists and specialists in emotional matters, which says that people, in general, “are scholars in rational matters, but illiterate in emotional matters.” Repressing what you feel or want is not healthy. Nor is it healthy not being able to respect or empathize with the needs of others.

You are not being selfish if you say “no”, no one should be labeled for daring to take the plunge and say … “Enough is enough”. We’d love you to reflect on all of this!

Lack of self-love fuels our fears

Lack of self-love fuels our fears and makes us vulnerable. To understand this idea a little better, we need to enter the fascinating world of neuroscience. According to a study carried out by the University of Dartmouth (New Hampshire, United States), the area of our brain associated with self-esteem and self-love would be the frontrostriatal pathway.

The greatest activity in this strong area in the brain is our self-esteem. Now, a common misconception that people usually have about this realm is that people with high self-esteem and strong self-love are almost always the most intelligent and successful.

This is not true, or at least the one is not related to the other. In fact, researchers are clear about one aspect: the activity on the frontrostrial pathway is a reflection of our emotional health: at a lower level of activity people are at greater risk of fears, insecurities and in the long term, there is a higher risk of depression.

From an emotional point of view people who do not care, and who do not value themselves as they deserve to, seek others to fulfil that role, thus covering over those shortcomings to “feel secure”. They need recognition and affection in a very intensive way. Far from “self-sufficiency” with a good dose of self-love, they are captives to the will of others, and hence begins a slow self-destruction.

The subtle link between self-esteem and self-love

At times, we fall into the subtle bewitchment of thinking that it is always better to attend to what is outside of us than to listen to the needs that our interior is calling out for. The fact that this is so is sometimes due to educational patterns, different surroundings or the people around us, and these can violate our self-esteem.

The worst of all happens when this external conditioning causes us to need the acceptance of others as a way of regaining our emotional stability. All this will cause us to go through the world as broken people and in so many pieces that we need to “patch ourselves up” even more with other people’s rules and convictions until we become unravelled and empty.

We explain below how to avoid it.

How to “light up” our self-love

Faced with an injured self-esteem the most important thing is to be aware of the “wound”, the “fracture” that has disconnected us from, above all, ourselves.

• Practice emotional compensation: the reassurances to all your fears, the questions for your emptiness and the relief for your sorrows are not always outside of us or in the people that surround you. You must seek your own emotional compensation. The love that can help you in these cases is undoubtedly self-love.
• To turn on our self-esteem, we must think about the following: trying to please others is exhausting, and to do it every day for the rest of our lives can destroy us. It is not real, it is not healthy. Nobody should be considered selfish or cynical if he simply says what he thinks and puts into practice the sincerity that is born out of respect, but who also knows how to mark boundaries to protect themselves.
• To raise self-esteem and have a good self-love we should consider ourselves as valuable people. And we should continue to do so, despite our mistakes and our failures. Because these mistakes do not determine who you are, they are determined by whether, after you fall, you are able to get up again.

  

So, far from comparing ourselves with others, or letting malicious criticism affect us, do not forget to feed that bond of love with yourself. Because as Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, religion should simply be the act of knowing how to love oneself.