Learning how to love yourself is extremely important if you want to learn how to love someone else. Especially if you aim to have a healthy relationship.
Being a narcissist is indirectly related to not knowing how to love yourself.
Can you still love someone without loving yourself? The short answer is no.”
More specifically, your ability to learn how to love another is directly proportional to your ability to learn how to love yourself.
Related: 11 Lessons I Learned From Falling In Love With A Narcissist
If you don’t love yourself, you can certainly idealize someone, miss someone, or even seduce someone, but that’s not the same as actually loving someone else.
Can you really define self-love? Would you like to know what self-love is, why it determines your ability to love another, and most importantly, how you can use this knowledge to increase your self-love and your ability to have wonderful, loving relationships?
Fun fact: When you don’t love yourself, you’re more at risk of engaging in a variety of narcissistic behaviors.
You may have thought that narcissistic behaviors were compatible with self-confidence, but this is actually not the case.
To start, you need to understand the term “narcissism.” This term is commonly misunderstood by most people who consider narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
Narcissism, as classically defined, is a pathological condition associated primarily with an inflated and inflated sense of self and an apparent inability to love another (because others are viewed simply as a means of soothing or satisfying the self, rather than as actually separate persons). to care).
Narcissism is primarily a failure in the ability to love, based on deep insecurity.
What you may not understand is that the boastful self of the true “narcissist” is a cover for a massive sense of insecurity.
Narcissists, who need to constantly boost their self-esteem through accolades, adoration, and appeasement from others do so because they have no real self-esteem to begin with!
Narcissists, despite their overt grandiosity, are ultimately highly insecure, although they use their disorder very effectively to avoid feeling that way. NPD is the extreme example of a person who does not love himself and therefore cannot love another.
It is important to understand this dichotomy because you can immediately understand the relationship between self-esteem or self-love and the ability to love another. They are directly proportional to each other, but you must understand what self-love actually is to apply this to a good result.
When you don’t love yourself, you’re at high risk for engaging in a range of unlovable narcissistic behaviors, even if you’re not close to developing BPD.
Loving another person, by definition, means that you see him as a person separate from you, with his own independent thoughts, feelings, needs, and perceptions.
When you truly love another person, you can tolerate your differences because you’re not looking for them to agree with you, to feel the same way as you, or to really do anything to validate your fragile sense of self.
You cannot do this if you are using the other person to boost or protect your self-esteem or self-image.
This has very practical implications because it means that when you have true self-love, you can tolerate hurt feelings, disagreements, and different needs or choices. Couples who fight fairly do so because they are not unduly hurt by their partner or feeling differently than they do.
Couples who get into toxic cycles because they constantly interpret their partner’s bad moods, difficult feelings, disappointment, or different needs as an insult to their sense of self. You don’t have to have a narcissistic personality to be guilty of this to some extent!
If you enter a relationship with a weak sense of self, it may take one of two forms.
An inflated or inflated display is a person who appears indifferent to others, honks his horn, shows off, and appears outwardly “confident” but does not see or appreciate others for who they are.
A “covert narcissist” is someone who is never boastful, but is instead always vigilant in managing his fragile self-esteem. They will do almost anything to avoid the slightest insult to their self-esteem. They feel the slightest insult as a tremendous injury; A feeling that can send them into extremely painful feelings of inadequacy, shame, or guilt.
Because this is a terrible place psychologically, the covert narcissist will essentially, albeit subtly, manipulate his or her close relationships to avoid this place. The problem is that manipulating the relationship to avoid insults and hurt directly interferes with their ability to actually love the other.
When you don’t love yourself enough, you will unwittingly engage in some level of these covert behaviors in your intimate relationships.
In other words, if you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to love someone else enough. When you don’t love yourself, your attention is necessarily aimed at protecting your fragile sense of self.
In this state, you simply cannot care enough about communicating with your partner or being in tune with their identity, state of mind, and what they need.
Let’s use the analogy of a parent who needs to put on their own oxygen mask before their child’s mask: When you don’t love yourself, you’re like the parent who can’t find or put on their own oxygen mask, so you’ll never be able to put on their own oxygen mask. Go somewhere where you can breathe well enough to care for your baby (or someone else).
The basic requirement for mature love is the ability to overcome the feeling that you have unintentionally disappointed or hurt your partner or that he or she is experiencing something that you cannot immediately fix, and to remain open to it because your sense of self is strong enough. To endure that inevitable feeling of failure.
