You're Not Enough (and That's Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love

by Allie Beth Stuckey

But here’s the thing: our sufficiency isn’t the answer to insecurity, and self-love isn’t the antidote to our feelings of self-loathing. Why? Because the self can’t be both the problem and the solution. If our problem is that we’re insecure or unfulfilled, we’re not going be able to find the antidote to these things in the same place our insecurities and fear are coming from.

The solutions to our problems and pain aren’t found in self-love, but in God’s love.

Self-love is superficial and temporary. God’s love is profound and eternal.

The first myth was that you are enough. My counter was this: you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, and that’s okay, because God is.

We are less than “not enough”; on our own, we’re nothing. But God.

The first step to getting out of whatever unhealthy cycle you’re currently in is realizing just how not enough you are. That means letting go of the responsibility to be your own source of fulfillment—a responsibility that was never yours in the first place.

Self-love is unreliable, conditional, and limited. Chasing after it always brings us to a dead end.

If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can’t also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment. That means loving ourselves more doesn’t satiate us. We need something else—something bigger. Simply, we need Jesus.

Who are we and why are we here? The world’s answer to these questions is “You.” You define your identity, your purpose, your value, your truth. Jesus’s answer is “Me.” He defines your identity, your purpose, your value, your truth.

This is why, for many people, the Cult of Self-Affirmation is much more appealing than normal religion. It encourages people to do what feels good and removes restrictions and responsibility to others. It values self-love over sacrifice, self-care over service, and self-interest over selflessness. It asks us to give up only that which doesn’t please us, and in exchange, it lends us a sense of righteousness.

But when we follow Christ, we are never at risk of “losing ourselves,” because our identity is eternally found in him.

And if we put ourselves on the throne of our own lives, deeming ourselves our own arbiter of truth, our heart, thoughts, intuition, feelings, and desires are all we have to lead us. We’re stuck looking to ourselves for insight that just isn’t there.

It’s not our or society’s truth that matters, it’s God’s. That’s because he’s perfect, and we’re not.

Biblically, there are only two kinds of selves: the old self and the new self. The old self is enslaved to sin, lost, looking for love and satisfaction in all the wrong places. The old self is totally depraved, hopeless, an enemy of God, and bound for destruction. This is who we all are apart from Christ.

“You’re perfect the way you are” leads us into accepting parts of ourselves that we should be rejecting, making excuses for ourselves when we should be repenting, and believing things about ourselves that hold no lasting value.

God made us needy for his strength and salvation. This is a much better comfort than the delusion that we’re flawless.

God calls each of us not to be our “best selves,” but to be filled with the fruit of the spirit, which, according to Galatians, is made up of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We are called to embody all of these qualities, not only the ones that come naturally to us.

Until you realize that the reason you matter is because God created you and sent his Son to die for you, you’ll be running a rat race toward the prize of perfectionism that doesn’t actually exist.

We don’t need to search for our purpose or the meaning of our lives. We have worth and our lives matter because the God who made us says so.

Once we realize just how not perfect we are, and how little self-discovery contributes to our fulfillment, we begin to see just how unreliable we are as masters of our own fate and rulers of our lives.

While all valid feelings are real, not all real feelings are valid. That means we can acknowledge our emotions without affirming them. The question of “Why?” can help us determine the difference between valid and invalid feelings.

Those who worship the god of self have no option but to validate their feelings, because feelings are their only arbiter of what’s true.

This means that, yes, of course we can exercise, lose weight, diet, change our hair and all the rest—but only if we do so in an effort to truly care for the bodies that God has given us. Only in order to glorify him, not in order to worship ourselves. Motivation matters.

No person and no role can replace the longing our Creator alone can meet.

When we follow him, he promises us not to give us everything we want but something far better—himself. He promises that no matter our job, no matter our salary, no matter our marital status, no matter our fertility or lack thereof, he will be with us.

to commit to self-love is actually to commit to selfishness.

Self-obsession and self-hatred aren’t mutually exclusive. Most of the time they go hand in hand. This is a hard to admit but universal fact of human nature.

Christians, our options aren’t boiled down to high self-esteem versus low self-esteem, or self-love versus self-hatred. We choose neither. Instead, we operate out of total self-forgetfulness.

Tim Keller illustrates this truth in his book, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. In it he explains that “the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”

Because of Jesus, we have an answer to our insecurities, our self-criticism and self-doubt, and it’s so much better than flimsy, shallow self-love.

Believing the lie that we have to love ourselves before we love other people will cause us to miss out on the most joyful experiences of our lives. And even more important, there are people whose needs won’t be met because we’re too busy meeting our own needs to pay attention to theirs.

The idea that “you can’t love other people until you love yourself” reeks of entitlement and elitism.

Without directions, we’re aimlessly wandering, looking for love and fulfillment in places that can’t give them to us. The only adequate guide is the God who made us, and through his Word he shows us truth and righteousness, and in his Son, Jesus, we find purpose for both this life and the next.