The Dark Side of Self-Love (And What It’s Hiding)

“Be the love you never received.” “Fall in love with yourself first.” “Treat yourself like someone you love.”

Umm okay. Thanks. But how the f*ck do you do that?

Putting my desire to cuss profusely aside (it’s an Australian urge, so don’t blame me), I want to give a voice to something I don’t see spoken about enough in the healing field:

How self-love can be used as a covert self-shaming tactic. 

Being loving towards myself is something I’ve been struggling with a lot at the moment. The combination of stress from multiple areas of life (family, business, societal, and just life shit in general) has put this inner work healing path to the test. 

Like vultures that have been circling above me, irritability, stress, and the threat of burnout have been my companions for many months now. Call it the existential threat of AI to livelihoods like my own, mixed with caring for an emotionally volatile toddler, and extended family drama – whatever the case, things have been difficult.

Thankfully, I have a robust inner work and soul recovery practice to fall back upon in times like these – one that has been forged through years of trial, error, and breakthrough. A path that can hold me in times of need, even when there aren’t many others I can turn to.

But I realize that not everyone has a mature self-love practice. Not everyone knows how to show compassion to themselves in times of stress and overwhelm. Perhaps you’re one of those people.

If you are, here’s what I’ve learned about how to avoid drowning in the “dark side” of self-love. Because, yes, it can be used as a way of ironically hurting yourself even more if you aren’t careful.

When “Love Yourself” Becomes Another Way to Fail

Firstly, let me say that self-love, genuine heart-centered self-love, is deeply healing. It is the bedrock of inner work. There’s a reason why everyone from self-help gurus to spiritual teachers and clinical psychologists recommend it.

Self-love provides a stable foundation for everything else in your life. Want a better relationship with others? Learn to love yourself. Want to live a meaningful, purpose-driven life? Learn to love yourself. You get the picture.

But there’s a difference between heart-centered self-love and mind-centered self-love. One comes from a place of compassion. The other comes from a place of ego – of dualistic thinking. One heals. The other destroys.

Self-love becomes weaponized when we use it as a yardstick to measure how “evolved” or “healed” we have become.

What part of us does this? Usually, it’s the inner critic – that part of our psyche that negatively judges how we look, what we think or feel, and how we behave. 

Some signs that your inner critic has weaponized self-love include thoughts like this:

• “I shouldn’t have judged myself so harshly; I always do that. What’s wrong with me?”
• “I should have been more loving towards myself. I failed, again.”
• “I have to be 100% self-loving all the time.”
• “I have so many negative thoughts about myself. I can’t seem to love myself. I must be broken.”
• “Well, ____ knows how to be self-loving. But I just can’t seem to do it.”
• “That old pattern came up again. I judged myself negatively for the 1000th time. I’m a failure.”
• “I’m not healed or self-loving enough yet.”

You might notice a pattern here: judging our judgments. Rejecting our acts of rejection. Feeling angry at our feelings of anger.

This gets very “meta” and reminds me of the movie Inception: dreams within dreams within dreams. 

The Hidden Cruelty of “Just Love Yourself”

Moving from a state of self-loathing to self-love doesn’t just happen like that. This is something I’ve learned the hard way, and a truth almost nobody talks about. 

It happens via a series of slow steps. And it’s common to take two steps forward and one step back. There is no linear process. There is no “just love yourself.” That’s a cruel thing to say to someone stuck in the quagmire of self-loathing.

The journey of self-love looks more like this:

• Stage 1: Self-loathing
• Stage 2: Self-dislike
• Stage 3: Self-tolerance
• Stage 4: Self-like
• Stage 5: Self-understanding
• Stage 6: Self-acceptance
• Stage 7: Self-kindness
• Stage 8: Self-love
• Stage 9: Self-compassion

This path of inner work happens in degrees. And this can only happen through a slow commitment to getting to know our hearts and minds (which is one of the reasons why I created the Self-Love Journal as a gentle step-by-step guided journey).

The Covert Shame Inside Modern Self-Love Advice

My core wound is shame, and so whenever I hear shaming language, the red-eyed feral wolf within me raises its hackles and howls hysterically to the wind. But no, really, there is a lot of shaming self-love advice out there.

Take this as a prime example from author Gary Zukav. I’m not necessarily a die-hard fan of his work, but I do appreciate his contributions to the world. This isn’t an attack on him as a person, as I think he’s a great guy, just a critique of this passage in his famous book Seat of the Soul,

“If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others and you cannot stand to see others loved.”

This is a popular quote on social media, and heck, I think I’ve even reposted it once upon a time. But when you stop and really examine this quote, you can see that it reeks of covert shame.

I get the gist of it: that trouble loving yourself means that you will struggle to love others fully because you’ll be seeking that love in them rather than in yourself. It can lead to codependency and all that jazz.

But honestly, things are not so black and white. Can someone who doesn’t love themselves love another? Is that even possible? Yes. I think it is. A mother or father who struggles with low self-worth can absolutely love their child. A person who is critical of themselves can certainly give love to their partner, friends, or family members.

Is that love free of enmeshment, codependency, and other inner issues? No, probably not. But it doesn’t mean that they cannot love them, as Zukav seems to suggest in that passage.

I won’t even touch on the second part of that quote (“…and can’t stand to see others loved”) because it follows the same logic.

Then there are self-help and spiritual gurus out there teaching us about self-love by conflating it with buying Mazzeratis, getting boob jobs, and treating themselves to retail therapy … which … don’t even get me started on that and the covert shame it can induce in those who don’t have the means to do likewise.

What Authentic Self-Love Looks Like (Minus the Shame)

I’ve had to be very careful when it comes to topics like self-love in my own practice, because my inner critic is humongous. It will grab onto anything – a look, a word, a concept – and use it to feed into my core wound of shame. 

That is the hidden trap of words like “self-love.” They look warm, fuzzy, and gentle on the surface, but these same qualities also make them prime targets for the ego to take and weaponize. 

This corruption of the idea of self-love reminds me of those sneaky weeds you see in the garden, camouflaged so well you wouldn’t notice them without squinting. They disguise themselves as their host plant, and if you don’t uproot them, they end up eventually becoming monstrous usurpers of your garden.

So let’s not let that happen with bogus shame-inducing self-love. 

“How do we do this?” you might wonder. There are two techniques I have. The first I call the Fractal Self-Love practice (because hey, I enjoy coining terms).

Fractals are infinitely repeating patterns. They look the same at any level of magnification.

This is how the Fractal Self-Love practice works:

• Love your inability to love.
• Accept your non-acceptance.
• Embrace your tendency to not embrace.

Essentially, apply love to even the most unlovable states, emotions, and tendencies. Apply love as the self-healing balm to all inner states of crisis. This technique requires connecting with the heart, which I’m aware not everyone has access to. But if it calls to you, try it out.

For example, the next time you find yourself judging your lack of self-love, see if you can connect with your heart and love the one that struggles to practice self-love.

The second technique is Divine Inner Parent practice.

Essentially, notice that all angry, judgmental, and self-critical parts in you are actually scared inner children or lost teenagers that just want to be reassured that everything is okay. That they are okay. The voices of self-hatred and shame within you come from these younger inner parts, and the last thing they need is rejection. What they truly need is to be embraced by loving energy, or what I call the Divine Inner Parent. Although I’m not Catholic, I have a statue of the Virgin Mary in my house as a symbol of this energy.

***

Self-love is a deeply transformative and life-changing practice. But it can be appropriated by the ego to reinforce a sense of shame and isolation.

If something stinks of mind-centered self-love, please trust yourself. You don’t need to accept what the world teaches you about self-love unless it aligns with your own soul’s deepest wisdom. Only you can walk your path, and only you know what is truly nourishing or not.

That’s it for now.

Tell me, what does corrupted self-love look like? What are the signs to watch out for? I’d love to hear in the comments.

If this post helped you in any way, it would mean the world if you could buy me a coffee.