I’ve been wanting to write about self-love but hesitated, fearing it would sound narcissistic. But many spiritual tomes I’ve been reading say you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else, so here I go. As with much of what I write about in Exploring the Mystery, self-love is a topic I have been ambivalent about. After a decade in Freudian psychoanalysis, it dawned on me how I took almost everything the analyst said personally. It was then a horrible shock when I realized I interacted like that with everyone. Personalizing what others said meant the focus was on me, but it wasn’t self-love.
I first heard about loving yourself in Sunday School. The Golden Rule—”Love others as you love yourself.” I imagine myself scrunching up my nose when I heard this. I had never been taught about loving myself. The minister preached on Sunday to love your parents, siblings, people in church, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But he never said anything about self-love.
Nor did my time in Freudian psychoanalysis give me any direct answers. Most of our time was spent identifying my dysfunctional patterns by minutely examining the relationship I had with the analyst! The overall purpose was to make the unconscious, conscious. The analyst looked for the type of patterns I enacted with her when I was stressed or tired, ones that caused problems for me and hurt other people. While eventually knowing these behaviors became immensely helpful, it didn’t bring me closer to answering the question of what loving myself would look like.
Self-love turned out to be more possible when I consciously chose to stop believing that I was born a sinner, a not-so-helpful lesson from Sunday School days. My pattern of shutting down feelings and acting like nothing bothered me was a hard one to come to grips with because it made me feel safe; being vulnerable felt dangerous. And while analysis didn’t teach me anything directly about self-love, learning about this pattern helped me open up and touch more directly into my basic human goodness, which my Buddhist friends always talked about. And somehow, by paying attention to basic human goodness, I was able to understand what Jungian writer Robert Johnson meant when he wrote that the unconscious can be a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom.
My second memoir, Leaving Analysis: A Year of Finding Freud, Reconnecting with the Sacred, details how the habit of courageous self-exploration I developed on the couch increased my self-love, but not in a narcissistic way. Pre-orders coming soon!
If you have ideas about what loving yourself looks like, please email me or leave a comment at nicolamendenhall.com.
IMAGE: A close-up of the bookshelf that people see when I am in a Zoom room. The figurine, a gift received from Flavio when I visited Mason in Brazil, depicts a young pregnant woman of the Terena people, an indigenous tribe that lives in the Amazon Rain Forest.
