Today's Thursday • 5 mins read
Self-love is one of the trickiest ideas in psychological discourse. It’s often misunderstood, misrepresented, or reduced to slogans.
Self-love is a compassionate process of developing and practicing self-acceptance and self-care. —Underwood, Mercer University, 2020.
So, if you cannot accept yourself, it isn’t easy to love yourself. And if you don’t care for your physical and emotional needs, again, self-love is hard to come by.
What makes things worse are some persistent myths about loving ourselves. Let’s look at those.
Myth 1: Self-love is selfish
Many people cringe at “self-love,” thinking it means grabbing all the oxygen in the room, neglecting others. That view misunderstands both self-love and selfishness.
Selfishness is rooted in fear, scarcity, and compensatory striving. It doesn’t genuinely endorse your well-being—it tries to extract, exploit, or highlight your worth by diminishing others. In contrast, self-love means holding your own well-being as worthy of care.
Erich Fromm argued that loving oneself is not the same as selfishness. He wrote that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. In his view, true self-love does not come at the expense of empathy, responsibility, or respect for others.
Self-love is the polar opposite of narcissistic love. In self-love, you maintain empathy and compassion towards others, while narcissism often masks a lack of self-love.
Narcissists tend to overcompensate for their lack of internal regard and safety with grandiosity, entitlement, or control over others.
When you care for your own needs, you’re better equipped to hold space for others’ needs too—not in opposition, but in deeper relational balance.
Myth 2: Self-love means always feeling good about yourself
If every day you told yourself, “I love me, no flaws, all good,” you’d set yourself up for trouble. That version of self-love is brittle, because it’s conditioned on mood.
Real self-love includes permission to feel negative emotions: sadness, anger, disappointment, confusion. You don’t cancel your humanity because you’re sad. You treat yourself kindly through the lows, not just the highs.
Psychologists often draw a distinction between self-esteem (which can be fragile, comparative, and mood-dependent) and self-compassion (which holds dignity even when suffering).
Self-love leans closer to compassion: we don’t demand perfect mood stability; we acknowledge emotional turbulence and accompany ourselves with patience.
When you’re angry or sad, self-love means asking: What do I need now? How can I tend to this?
Instead of forcing yourself into positivity or denying the pain, you sit with it, validate it, and respond to it with care.
Myth 3: Self-love requires perfection
Often, you hear, “Once I fix my flaws, then I’ll love myself.” That’s backward.
Self-love starts exactly where you are, with your imperfections, fissures, regrets, and shadows.
You don’t need to polish yourself into a trophy before you deserve gentleness. You don’t need to eliminate your “bad” parts first. In fact, insisting on a flawless self becomes a barrier to genuine self-love.
Accepting imperfection doesn’t mean complacency. It means holding a more honest stance: you can grow, change, improve, but not by rejecting or hating yourself meanwhile.
The work of self-love is to see your flaws with curiosity, responsibility, and patience, not contempt or avoidance.
Myth 4: Self-love is narcissism
This myth often arises because people confuse respect for self with superiority over others.
Narcissism is relationally harmful: it positions you above, entitled, dismissive of boundaries or difference. Self-love, properly understood, does the opposite: it rests in mutual respect and humility.
Narcissism demands you become the center of all stories; self-love lets you occupy the center in your own story without erasing others’ agency. Narcissism inflates your self-image; true self-love holds you with gentle realism.
In psychodynamic and psychoanalytic views, narcissistic behaviors often compensate for an internal void of self-care or self-regard. The more fragile the inner ground, the more the outer structure must rigidly defend.
When you love yourself, you’re not asserting dominance, but anchoring worth.
You can say no; you can set limits; you can decline exploitation. But not out of reaction, but from self-respect. That isn’t narcissism, but presence with integrity.
Myth 5: Self-love is automatic if you’re successful
If self-love were a function of external success, then every high performer would be secure, joyful, and kind to themselves.
That’s clearly not the case. Many high achievers still struggle with self-criticism, burnout, and emptiness.
Achievements can boost confidence temporarily, but lasting self-worth doesn’t rest on performance. External validation is volatile and contingent; internal regard requires persistent cultivation.
Neuroscience hints at this. Dr. Nicole A. Tetreault noted that self-love is associated with greater activity in the prefrontal cortex (a region tied to emotional regulation and self-reflection), and reduced reactivity in the amygdala (linked to fear, threat, and anxiety). That suggests self-love is more a neural habit than a byproduct of success.
Even if you win big, you can feel insecure, anxious, or unworthy.
Self-love is a continuous internal practice. You turn inward, question your faulty self-narrative, and check in with your needs. It is not a reward you inherit for external wins.
Final Words
Myths arise when we oversimplify something subtle, so it becomes a shortcut instead of a living practice. Self-love resists simplification. It is not entitlement, nor perpetual happiness, nor a trophy after success. It is a steady presence.
You learn it by small acts: listening to your body, inviting emotional honesty, gently rephrasing your self-criticism, noticing harmful patterns, choosing restoration over collapse. You learn it when you refuse to trade your dignity for connection, approval, or escape.
Revisit these self-love myths and see them for what they are. And in time, you’ll gradually rewire how you relate to yourself. You’ll find that self-love is not a destination, but a way of walking through each day.
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√ Also Read: 8 Lessons Narcissists Teach You About Yourself
√ Please share this if you found it helpful.
