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.
The hidden piece
In the background of every young life, there is a web of tangled feelings. These include guilt and a revolt against authority. There is also fear: fear of not being good enough, not being accepted, and not being loved.
Together, these create attitudes of self-contempt and feelings of inferiority.
We also despise ourselves for the many ways we wish to shortchange life.
We want the easy way.
What child doesn’t?
This desire is at the root of our self-contempt and our feelings of inferiority.
Nothing else comes close.
To the extent we feel insecure, we wish for escape. This side of ourselves is hoping for a nice return. But it has no interest in paying the price of taking the risk of exposure.
In short, we want to cheat life.
When we find this hidden piece, we’ll find the root of our inferiority feelings and lack of self-respect.
But not before then.
Until then, we’ll stay stuck in the vicious circle that all these machinations create. The turning point happens when we decide we no longer want to shortchange life.
Then we begin to gain the self-respect we need to heal. From that point on, we will be able to love ourselves in the right and healthy way.
We’ll be able to walk away from the wrong kind of self-love that leads to self-contempt and makes us feel bad about ourselves.
We simply cannot harm another and have it truly benefit us. We need to see how wrong such thinking really is.
Why we try to cheat
The sheer act of giving up our intention to cheat life has a purifying effect on us. One thing we’ll realize more clearly is that—in the spirit of oneness—it is not possible to gain an advantage if it causes a disadvantage to someone else.
We simply cannot harm another and have it truly benefit us.
Believing otherwise is one of our human blindnesses. It is caused by the fact that we only see a small part of the whole picture.
But once we get a sense of some inner recognition, we will see more of the bigger picture. Then we’ll see how wrong such thinking really is.
We may continue down the road of gaining advantages over brothers or sisters who then get less than they deserve. But ultimately, this will take a far greater toll on us than what we would pay if we gave up such “bargains.”
Whenever we discover wrong forms of self-love, some type of rejection—real or imagined—must have played a role.
Those are the two poles of this duality: distorted self-love and rejection.
If we can unearth the source of where we have felt rejected, we won’t be so hard on ourselves. And we’ll see how we tried to counteract this rejection by withdrawing from life.
And by trying to shortchange life.
In some subtle way, we want to cheat life.
Seeing this is the remedy—the way out.
This allows us to stop cutting off the good and healthy feelings we have about ourselves that exist next to our distorted reactions. That’s how we regain our gratitude and the joy in our goodness.
Denying ourselves is not the answer
For a long time, people have had the mistaken idea that to love oneself is sinful. But this is just as misguided as any distorted form of self-love.
Nothing in the Bible or in any spiritual teaching of truth backs up this notion that we shouldn’t love ourselves. That would mean we do not love the divine manifestation we are.
It denies the essence of who we truly are.
It stops us from loving and helping others.
So we need to persevere in sorting out the difference between healthy self-respect and distorted self-love.
One thing we struggle with is a mass image—a collective belief—that to consider the self is to be selfish, and is therefore sinful.
This makes it hard to make a decision. For it would seem that any decision that benefits the self is wrong.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. There are no hard and fast rules here.
But decision-making is a requirement for living a healthy life.
This becomes very confusing.
We’re often called on to make decisions where it’s not obvious what’s right and what’s wrong. Decisions can hurt people, and we don’t always have to be the one getting hurt. This statement seems to contradict what was said before. That to cause a disadvantage to another cannot possibly be an advantage for us.
But this is not a contradiction—both are true.
At times, we need to make decisions that are going hurt us or someone else. When this happens, we are looking at the final outcome of a whole series of deviations and chain reactions from the past.
This is a past we can neither change nor avoid.
And not making decisions is not a way out either.
In such cases, we must weigh everything with integrity and honesty. The outcome will differ each time.
We need to find the place of proper respect for ourselves.
When we bump up against a common hidden belief that says, “I do not deserve it,” we tend to overcompensate. Deep down, we’re really rebelling against a low opinion of ourselves.
All this back-and-forth is happening at a hidden level of feelings. It may not even register on an intellectual level.
It is important to take the time to sort out these bundles of confused feelings. We do this by working with someone who can help hold the light as we peer into the shadows of our psyche.
The role of punishment
Another thing that shows up in human personalities is the role of punishment. In addition to self-punishment, there is a form that shows up in the child, as well as in the immature adult.
It is the desire to punish others.
This arises when the other doesn’t follow our wishes. We may not witness this in actions as much as in inner attitudes.
Let’s start with the premise that each of us, as we were growing up, experienced unpleasant feelings. There was hurt, disappointment, frustration and rejection.
And those feelings made us feel as though we wanted to die.
Not to literally die.
But more like to punish someone: “Then they’ll be sorry. They’ll see what they’ve lost and they’ll cry at my funeral.”
So melodramatic.
We probably know adults who still behave this way.
Most of us are past this and no longer indulge this type of fantasy. Yet the germ of it may live on in sneaky little ways.
Now we are more sophisticated in how we attempt to punish others. We need to be on the lookout for this whenever we feel slighted or rejected in some way.
If we find it, that’s a victory.
Try not to sink into guilt.
View these behaviors from a wise distance. This is the way to respond to any childishness still living in our souls. Because chances are good, if we’re still human, we’re still carrying around some young aspects.
We want to see them.
Smile at them.
But let’s not get lost in the drama.
We can also try to figure out our own personal favorite form of punishment. There are many ways we go about it.
One way is through sickness.
Does being sick not bring about tenderness, sympathy and some much-wanted consideration?
Seeing ourselves this way brings light and fresh air into our souls. And this is what will bring us back to health.
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