'How Can I Love Myself Without Becoming a Selfish Person?'

Until you stop experiencing your own separate needs as immoral, you will encounter your own personhood, desire, passion, and wholeness as selfish.

Le Salut de Démiurge (1940), Jane Graverol

Dear Polly,

I have written you a couple of times and most of them were written from the stages of emotional urgency. I hope this letter sounds calmer to you.

First of all, I just wanted to say that I really love your book Foreverland, and I gift it to most of my friends, whoever asks for a book recommendation.

And among your columns, my all-time favorites one is “You Are Already Whole.” I think this email is a follow-up to that.

I was with a guy who used to break up with me every three months. Yes, Polly, every three months, so regular that I even marked some potential date on my calendar. He would come back after like a month or so and I would get back together with him.

Every time he dumped me, I would buy and read books on how to fix myself. Gottman’s book, books on codependency, attachment theory, Women Who Love Too Much, How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind, It Begins With You, etc. I am just naming you a few but over the course of one year of being with that guy, I read 11 books in total and I feel like a relationship guru. But he still left me with the reason that I am demanding and unhappy with him. The latter claim is true, though.

Anyway, I went into deep clinical depression and now I am in therapy. I have two therapists: one male and one female. And I started to notice that my male therapist doesn’t really think of relationships and break-ups as I do. I went in to the session one time claiming that I need to fix something about me: the need to control, to micro-manage people, and also my tendency towards codependency. He looked at me and he softly said, “Well, why don’t we just first talk about how you feel.” My brother also doesn’t buy the idea that I needed to be fixed.

After many relationships books and podcasts, I feel like I have nothing to fix anymore. Or should I say, I don’t have self-trust anymore. All I am left with is a list of “how to fight right,” “how to rightly communicate,” “how to make your partner listen,” “how to handle your anxious attachment,” “how to soothe yourself,” etc.

I feel like a neurotic person.

In your column, “You Are Already Whole,” you talk about how to get to the place of loving yourself in the last part. But can you give me a more expansion on that? How do I balance between fixing myself, loving myself, and not becoming too much of a selfish person? Particularly, when it comes to wanting to keep people in your life. What if you can only keep certain people in your life if you fix yourself a little bit?

Not sure if age can be a factor in your advice, but I am in my early 20s.

Yours,

Self-Improvement Obsessed

Dear SIO,

When you honor your whole self — your romantic vision of the world, your desires, your passions, your dreams, your body, your mind, your heart, your spirit, and even your darkest fears and emotions — keeping people in your life will not feel like a problem you need to solve or fix. You won’t have to dedicate time and energy to it. You won’t have to strategize or micromanage. You won’t have to solve problems. You’ll need your brain much less often than you think, in fact. What you will need much more often than before is your body, your heart, and your spirit.

Right now, it’s not just that you’re a people pleaser or you’re codependent or you expect too much of people or you don’t stand up for yourself. These are descriptions of some of the symptoms of how you are. They describe HOW YOU ACT. But they don’t describe what it feels like to be you.

Here’s how it feels to be you: You are someone who experiences her own needs as inherently immoral.

This is why, every single day, you aren’t just working on KEEPING people in your life. You’re working on not having needs, not having desires, not having a body, not having a heart, not having a spirit. You aren’t just erasing yourself. You’re struggling to keep your self — your sensations, your emotions, your imagination, your desires — out of your own awareness.

And when you become aware that you are a separate person with separate needs, the first thing you feel is panic and anguish: THIS MEANS I WILL NEVER BE LOVED. THIS MEANS I WILL ALWAYS BE ALONE.

You experience yourself — your emotions, senses, awareness, independence — as a direct threat to your own happiness.

This is why self-help books are such a mixed bag for you. You recognize the intellectual truth there. You can see the prescribed path towards a better life. But you still feel, at a gut level, that fixing yourself not only means that you’re very sick, it also means that you are deeply corrupt. So trying to fix yourself incites shame and panic.

In order to repair this state of affairs, you have to stop THINKING about what you’re doing wrong and what you need to do right in order to keep people in your life, and you have to start FEELING where you are right now instead.

You have to redirect all of your problem-solving energy into grounding your body, awakening to your senses, breathing in the reality of your existence, and reminding yourself that it is not immoral or disgusting or weak to be an independent person with distinct, unique, intense, colorful, ever-changing needs and desires.

This is what your brother and your male therapist are starting to sense. They’re starting to feel like the problem isn’t that you’re awful and need to be fixed. They’re starting to get the feeling that at the center of your struggles lies this conviction that it’s not okay to have separate needs and emotions, it’s not okay to be complicated and intense and confused, it’s not okay to be WHOLE and ALIVE and FULL.

You encounter your own independence, your free will, your separate perspective on the world, as selfish and wrong. That might not feel accurate as a way that you think. But if you check in with your body, you’ll notice that when you try to serve yourself in any way, you panic. You are convinced that giving yourself what you need will lead to being rejected, abandoned, and alone.

You took the same guy back over and over. His needs weren’t just a higher priority than yours. His needs stood in for your needs. You simply wanted what he wanted. So your rage and dissatisfaction with him were an extension of that confusing state. You resented him because he was the person robbing you of the right to feel your feelings, even when he wasn’t doing anything at all. (This doesn’t mean YOU’RE BAD. It means something very dramatic and wrong occurred in your childhood that taught you that your needs are irrelevant at best, repugnant at worst.)

In your letter to me, you tell me that keeping people in your life and not being selfish are two of your top priorities. In other words, while it feels good to consider finally loving yourself and feeling whole, even CONSIDERING these good feelings incites anguish over the notion that you will be rejected or ignored or abandoned or punished in some other way for daring to honor and respect yourself.

This anxiety causes you to reframe love and connection as a puzzle, a goal, a fear, a problem to avoid. This anxiety reshapes everything you care deeply about — romance, dreams, friendships, creative goals — into agony and panic and neuroticism inside your heart.

When you view something you care about through a veil of fear and a compulsion to PROTECT it, FIX it, KEEP it close FOREVER, you slowly start to lose it — the object of your love, but also yourself, and your joy, and your ability to believe in your life.

Loving, for you, feels like being erased. Because loving something means you aren’t really there. The second you love someone, they are more important than you are. You are nothing and they are everything. For some people, trying to pursue a dream feels like being erased, too, because they care so much that it reproduces their anxious childhoods, in which they were rejected or punished or ignored for showing signs of having separate needs and desires.

But it’s not just that they were CONDITIONED not to enjoy their love, their big hearts, their thriving bodies. It’s that they experienced themselves as satellites of their parents, designed to fulfill their parents’ desires.

Here’s why: If your parents didn’t treat you as a subjective, separate person with your own needs, if they treated your emotional needs as inconvenient at best and poisonous and pathetic at worst, and if they rejected your love or withdrew from your most direct attempts at connection, then you are likely to experience your own separate needs, your own emotions, your own love as not just unwanted but IMMORAL.

As a result, all of the directions you get about communication and relationships and not being codependent just feel like reading someone else’s script, and trying to play a part. You read a book and you decide how you need to ACT in order to KEEP LOVE IN YOUR LIFE. You’re intellectually doing the math and then you’re mimicking regular people, but you can’t feel it. You don’t understand a concept like “stand up for yourself” because your gut tells you that doing this isn’t just unpleasant or difficult, it’s selfish and wrong. In some cases it even feels like you have no self to stand up for.

Meanwhile, the most natural thing for you is to act in the interests of your love object. You don’t just want to give your boyfriend everything, you feel sick when you can’t serve him correctly. You don’t just want more affection, you feel small and erased when your girlfriend isn’t looking at you. When someone says “Stop trying to please people!” it doesn’t even make sense. It’s not like you TRY to PLEASE people. That sounds all wrong. You simply want to give people what they want, always. And when they seem dissatisfied with what you’re giving them, that makes you anxious, which makes you overthink it, which makes you try new strategies and get frustrated and lash out when your strategies don’t work.

All of this sounds pathological, of course. But it’s forgivable and natural that you would be confused. You have been experiencing yourself as an immoral, selfish being for decades now.

It’s time to change that. And when you start to change it, you’re also going to feel like you’re waking up from a deep sleep. But in order to wake up, you need to be brave and curious and really observe how completely divorced from your core emotions you are, and how completely uninterested in your truest independent needs and desires you are. You’re afraid of knowing yourself and loving yourself, because you’re convinced that if you do, you’ll turn into a monster who’s self-centered and all alone in the world.

TALE AS OLD AS TIME!

Listen up! You call things selfish that are not selfish because you were taught — your BODY was taught — to ignore itself. You became an extension of your parents’ needs. And your body now believes that when you’re not acting on behalf of someone else, you’re gross or you’re sick or you’re in danger or you don’t exist at all.

The very hard work you need to do right now is to LET PEOPLE LEAVE YOU.

Let them see you clearly and let them leave if what they see doesn’t please them. Let them hear you speak directly about who you are, how complicated it is being you, how dark it can get, what a tangled up mess you feel like some days, and also WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN, what you love the most, what you care about more than anything else, what you value, what you dream about. Let them understand that you didn’t serve your own body for years and now, that’s what you’re doing. Let them feel that you buried your feelings for years and now, you’re honoring them.

This is your path. You started at the bottom of a dark well and you climbed toward the light for YEARS! You climbed for years. You have an encyclopedic knowledge of modern psychology living inside your head. You know everything. You have worked so goddamn hard! Feel proud of the work you’ve done. But notice how your heart and body and spirit have been left behind. This is why you STILL don’t give yourself everything you need to feel good.

Now notice this: You don’t even feel good trying to KEEP PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE! You don’t want to do that job anymore! When you do that job, your love turns into a knot of anguish inside you. You disrespect your body and heart when you let that knot stay in place. Let it go!

That knot exists as a relic of acting on behalf of your parents instead of yourself. Let it go. You must risk losing a few people right now in order to honor yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to dump anyone. It just means your budding selfhood and nascent desires necessarily put relationships at risk. Daring to be everything you are ALWAYS puts so much at risk!

Risk is part of living in reality. Trying to eliminate all risk is a way of hiding from the world. It’s a way of keeping your fist clenched around what you have. This is where your anguish lives: inside this self-protection, this hiding, this fixing, this constant persuasion of others. STOP EXPLAINING AND PERSUADING AND WORKING SO HARD AND THINKING SO HARD. It isn’t helping.

It’s time to feed yourself and care for yourself quietly and calmly, like you’re a newborn. It’s time to notice how your heart and spirit feel when you’re sad, and to learn to be patient with those sensations. It’s time to observe when you feel angry, and drop all of your stories about who’s to blame for it. It’s time to keep stepping away from your complicated analysis of yourself and returning to your heart, over and over.

All you need — many times a day! every day! — is to ground yourself in this moment. When you connect with this moment, and feel your body, and acknowledge your heart, and honor your spirit, you understand yourself as whole, complete, beautiful, a work of art, brimming over with rage and passion and fear and love.

This is what it means to love yourself. You give yourself the right to be whole, without fear of how it looks to anyone else. You give yourself the right to speak calmly and clearly about what is true for you. You give yourself the right to stay silent and refuse to convince anyone of anything.

You give yourself the right to be who you are right now.

It’s okay to read more self-help books, of course. I remain very interested in my own problems — how they change shape and attach themselves to new areas of my life constantly. This is one of my passions. I can enjoy it and get curious about it without feeling ashamed.

Every day, I have to resist my urge to FIX PROBLEMS. I have to resist my compulsion to disappear into other people’s needs. When someone reacts to me in a way that makes me think they’re annoyed or impatient or dissatisfied, I have to notice when my body immediately gets anxious and my mind says “DO SOMETHING!”

I can tell that I’m doing well right now because I’m getting very good at watching people’s reactions to me with detached curiosity and good will. Yesterday, someone got impatient with me and I immediately apologized and changed my behavior without thinking about it afterwards. I had miscalculated the situation by prattling on happily to someone who was busy, and I understood her reaction completely. It wasn’t a big deal and I didn’t think twice about it. A few years ago, I would’ve agonized and stewed. Instead I forgot about it, and when she apologized for snapping at me later, I was like “Huh? Whatever man, you’re busy and I’m slowing you down!”

When you refuse to see your needs as immoral, you also refuse to see other people’s needs as immoral. If this person suddenly decided that I was too irritating to remain friends with, I would simply respect her decision, because I know that everyone needs different things. I can’t decide what other people SHOULD need! I can’t fix problems for them! I am not responsible for their happiness, either. I am here to honor and respect others the way I honor and respect myself.

What I’m trying to express to you is that becoming a separate, subjective, independent self with your own intense feelings and weird desires and dark emotions will make you feel light and free and strong. You will effortlessly assert yourself and you won’t agonize over how you are seen or whether or not you are understood. You will accept misunderstandings. You will respect distance.

YOU WILL LET PEOPLE GO. YOU DO NOT STRUGGLE TO KEEP THEM.

These challenges are so much bigger and more important than whoever it is you’re trying to keep right now. This is about your whole life, your dreams, your soul. Your soul needs you to feel free for the first time. Your soul wants you to love who you are right now.

Loving who you are makes you whole.

Once you start to understand that, once you start to love your darkness and your light, your intensity and your damage, your desire and your sadness, you’ll manifest acceptance and love in everything you do. You will give other people a break from their crushing shame just by speaking to them directly and listening to them closely (without struggling to fix anything for them).

Once you can own your whole self, and refuse the myth that says that life is a constant effort to upgrade yourself and become more lovable, you won’t spend time with people who experience your needs as inconvenient.

It starts with you: You experiencing your needs as a gift. You experiencing your hunger as divine. You experiencing this day as delicious and full of promise and discovery. You don’t have to change anything to get that feeling. You just have to believe that you are lovable and strong and whole right now, exactly as you are, with no changes.

It’s a leap of faith. You resolve to understand yourself as a pure creature, full of love, full of joy, vulnerable and worried and tired but so full nevertheless. And look, I know you’re young and you’re scared. I know it hurts to think of losing anyone else. But it’s time to stop underestimating yourself. You’re tired of ignoring how strong you are. You’re tired of pretending that you’re less than you are. You’re tired of other people’s scripts.

Speak from the heart.

Know your heart.

Trust your heart.

You’re not here to make everyone love you. You’re here to be loved — madly and deeply and completely. When someone shows you that they can’t love you enough, they can’t see you clearly, they can’t feel your love, they can’t believe what you tell them, they can’t celebrate who you are, right here and now, that means that they came here from the distant past, to see if you ever grew up. Growing up requires recognizing that your heart is pure, your desires are beautiful, and this life is dark and gorgeous and fleeting and needs to be enjoyed and embraced and savored as much as possible. These spirits from the past came here to see if you’re finally strong enough to love what you are.

Love what you are, SIO. Don’t change a thing. Be just as dark and broken as you want to be. You have so much to share. But you have to believe in what you are, right here, right now, and every single day. Believe and believe and believe in what you are.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Honoring and respecting your body is very difficult when you weren’t honored and respected as a kid. Don’t underestimate how much joy you might be blocking from your awareness, just to escape the shame of having your own needs and desires.

Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Sincere thanks to each and every paid subscriber: You make this column possible and I’m grateful to you every single day.