What is self love, and how to love the self (Homayoun Shahri, PhD, MA, LMFT)

WHAT IS SELF LOVE?
Yesterday one of my clients, who is facing many life challenges, asked: “What is self love?” I asked him to explain what an ideal loving mother would do for her infant/child.

He replied: “She would nurture her baby, nourish him, hug him and give him contact, she would unconditionally love him, accept him with empathy, would not judge him, she would respect the young human, she would put the child in his bed with kindness when he is tired, she would not hurt/harm him emotionally and physically, she would have empathy for him and his growing pains and thus would know when he is in need of connection and contact and can provide it for him.”

I then told him, when one treats oneself just like this ideal mother would treat her young child, one loves himself. Thus we love ourselves when we are aware of our needs and our state of mind/body, can freely express ourselves, have compassion for ourselves, will not do anything that harms our body/mind, take care of ourselves when we need rest, and nourish/nurture ourselves when needed, will not judge ourselves and are kind to ourselves, etc..

Incidentally, I told him that love for another starts from love of the self. If one cannot love oneself, love for the other is merely an infantile attachment or passing infatuation and not mature love.

HOW TO LOVE THE SELF?
Now that I know what self love is, how can I learn to love myself, my client asked. I told him that he could not learn to love himself anymore than he could learn to feel any other feeling. Feelings occur spontaneously. We thus cannot learn to love someone or ourselves. He asked me how he can develop self love then.

I mentioned to him that when an infant/child experiences the unconditional love, nonjudgmental acceptance, empathy, and care of his mother, he develops the sense that he must be good and he must be lovable and worthy of love. He than will love himself because he has experienced love. Viewed differently, if he experienced all these he would internalize his mothers love and would then love himself. But if an infant/child did not experience these, he would search for love in vain for the rest of his life to compensate for what he did not receive, and would consequently suffer man heartbreaks. Or defensively, he might close his heart completely to love.

He then told me that this is very depressing. Are you telling me that I can never love myself if I did not receive what I needed from my mother? It is not so bad, I replied. You can still develop self love and become a loving person. How, he asked? I said to him we were all hurt in a relationship, it thus takes a relationship to heal us. I told him that he needed to feel my care and love, nonjudgmental and unconditional acceptance, and my empathic attunement to him, and be able to take them in over time and once his trust was established. He needed to feel that I am impacted and touched by his experience of life. In other words he needed to receive from me what he did not receive from his mother. If he was able to take these in for long enough time he would internalize them and would then be able to love himself and can become a loving person. Or from a neuroscience point of view new neural pathways will form in his brain that would correspond to this new experience, one of being seen for who he was and in a caring and loving way. He asked why couldn't he get these in a romantic relationship? I replied, that romantic love was not unconditional, nor would it be necessarily healing. He would have responsibilities in a romantic relationship. But in his therapeutic relationship with me, he needed to just receive my loving presence and empathy and did not need to do anything. He did not need to care for me anymore than an infant/child did not need to love and care for his mother. The love of the mother was just there for him to enjoy. He asked how I was touched by his experience, to which I replied that when he shared a deep shame evoking experience with me, I had tears in my eyes which he noticed and which resulted in a shift in him. His shame disappeared as he felt seen non-judgmentally by me and felt my empathy. He felt that my heart as well as his were touched, and we resonated (limbic resonance) in that session.

But as a therapist I also have responsibilities. Once I show my care, empathy and loving presence to a client, I may open up his longing for contact and connection which I cannot fulfill, nor should I. I need to take responsibility for this and accept the consequences of it, and also accept my helplessness to rescue him as he is an adult and ultimately responsible for himself. This is an important part of healing. Many aspects of what I am discussing here are part of relationally based therapies, but they also include a feminist therapeutic model which posits that therapy is mutually transformative. It is not just the client that transforms, therapist is also transformed in the process. This is based on this new egalitarian model of therapy.

I would like to end this with a quote from my therapist/teacher/mentor Dr Robert Hilton (Relational and Somatic Psychotherapy):
“We are whole beings, heart, soul, and sexuality. This wholeness and sense of well-being is maintained through the empathic core relatedness of our caregivers, and more importantly, in their desire to repair misattunement. When this repair does not take place, we become divided and split from our original spontaneous selves ... If misattunment divided us, it is empathic attunement that gives us the possibility of recovery. This kind of attention causes us to feel the preciousness of our souls and the true value of our love ... We slowly become free to choose, love and express our separate and true selves.”

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