On Loving Yourself

 The  New Agers, or what I call the booga booga followers make a big deal of self love. So what is wrong with it?  I have said before that it is an oxymoron.   Oxytocin is what I call the hormone of love.  If you rub an animal’s belly, levels rise.  If you lick her, oxytocin also rises, but if you rub yourself it won’t. You cannot love yourself.   There is more.

What does it mean to “love yourself”?  What it doesn’t mean is to be able to feel love in the present, no matter what.  Because once you are unloved throughout your childhood it is imprinted—you are unloved and feel unloved even when you don’t know it.  It drives all later behavior; either to try to get it (depending on the birth, whether parasympathetic/giving up, or sympathetic/keep struggling).   You give up when the birth is basically struggle and fail; and you keep on trying when the birth was struggle and success.  (I have written about this in my books and blog.  It pretty determines personality, but for now, it is another matter).

     While I am discussing oxytocin I should mention  a recent study where they sprayed the chemical into the noses of human subjects. They had a control  group.  They were all alcohol addicted. Those who were sprayed had fewer cravings for alcohol, afterwards.  They had milder withdrawal symptoms.  The control group   got placebos.    The “sprayed” were less addicted later.  So what does this mean?
Since oxytocin is the hormone  of love, inter alia,  it means  that love stops the craving.  Of course.  And when you are loved at the start of life  there will not be any craving  or addiction later on--permenantly.  All else being equal.   (I have written in the blog about the nature of love and how you can love a fetus; you  fulfill its needs  when you understand them).

    OK now you feel deeply unloved because you were.  How do you go from there to loving yourself?   I mean, it is good to take care of yourself, stop  acting out  that you deserve nothing, stop  being  self destructive; all that helps.  But hug and  kiss yourself?  A little pat on the head when  you were five?  But with the imprint the unconscious will still drive  all that bad behavior no matter what.   Of course there  are stop-gaps and we should all do what we do to feel better, but none of that, NONE OF THAT,  will help us feel loved.  Why?  Because we were indeed  unloved and it is registered  and re-registered throughout our childhood.   We feel unloved and nothing will cover that over because it is now engraved into the system.  We are unloved in the brain, the blood and the muscles; we are unloved in the cells.  All of those register trauma  (lack of love is trauma) in their own way.  It helps a lot to know that you are attracted to those cold fish who cannot love so that you can struggle to get love out of them but need wins out.   Yes,  conscious/awareness helps, but it fights a losing battle.

   Cognitive therapy, focused in the present, which is what the left brain  does, can help us  understand the kind of situations  or  people to avoid  but they cannot begin  to touch the drive that makes it happen.   They, and therefore the patient, never understands the unconscious.  And never gets well.   That includes the therapist  who helps the  patient skim along the top, never  asking “why?” A little word with a big meaning  that is avoided  in that  therapy.   They claim that they don’t need to know why.  Yes they  do.

     It is the difference between help and cure.  If you want help you don’t  need to know why.  But the unconscious will never  cease to  drive you even when you are not aware  of being driven.  It is the function  of the  unconscious  that you  remain unconscious.   So you shouldn’t know, otherwise, you would be in  pain all day long and your face would  show it.  We would all walk  down the  street grimacing and frowning and hunched.  What a world.  That is truly the world of our unconscious; thank God (If I may call on it for a moment) for the disconnect.   Repression saves  and  repression kills; it creates and destroys.   It is optimistic because it doesn’t  understand  the true situation; and that optimism kills us because it denies the pain and keeps  it alive and active, gnawing  away within the system.  It is unrelenting which makes our behavior unrelenting and unforgiving.   We become obsessive because of it.   We are forced into wrong choices  by the unconscious and it is unwavering  in its neurosis.   Why?  It seeks out the early situation again for us to try to  master it; so we seek out the critical ones when we had critical mothers, and  we  seek  out cold men  when we had  a cold father.  We need to start again  to try to make them approving and loving.   We need the struggle.  Why can’t we go straight for  love?  Because the imprint is supreme.  And it  stays unconscious.  We go for the unlove first.  It is all we know.  If we feel unloved and that we don’t deserve love, we DO NOT  GO FOR IT.   And believe me. When we were  not  loved we  nearly always feel that it is our fault  and  that we do not deserve  it.