Any truth can be distorted into an untruth. This is—without question—one of the most powerful weapons of evil.
Complete untruth is not the problem.
But take something true in one setting and apply it somewhere else, where it doesn’t belong—especially when it’s set up as a rigid rule—and we’re in dangerous territory.
Any truth can be bent into a distorted extreme that nullifies the truth.
The same is true for self-love.
Healthy vs. unhealthy self-love
There is a healthy version of self-love that exists in mature souls. But if we fold in a few distorted currents, suddenly we end up with a wrong version of self-love.
The crudest of the many forms is selfishness. We either want an unfair advantage or we always want to place ourselves in a better light than others.
Another twist on this theme is a kind of self-admiration that is sickly and obnoxious. We can easily spot this in others and can often, just as easily, identify it in ourselves.
It’s actually more harmful if this is hidden in emotional layers—those that are not so obvious on the surface. Especially if the person believes their conduct truly reflects their innermost self.
Such self-delusion can be worse than the worst outer deed.
We need to uncover these kinds of distortions. Then we need to find out the reason these wrong kinds of self-love exist. Without this, merely knowing about these twisted currents won’t do us much good. Because we won’t be able to straighten them out.
What we’ll usually find is that what causes lack of self-love—in the right sense—is the same thing causing the distorted kind of self-love.
Simply put, if we don’t love ourselves as we should, we are bound to overcompensate and move in the wrong direction.
We seek the wrong solution.
But if we just loved ourselves properly, we wouldn’t need to love ourselves too much.
Listen and learn more.
Finding Gold, Chapter 4: Self-Love
