Allow Myself to Introduce Myself

I appreciated the therapist I was working with last year, but he repeatedly suggested that I form a better relationship with myself. I always found this formula to be jarring and overly metaphorical somehow. I'm skeptical by nature and when I combine that with a desire for language to have clarity and accuracy, some of the psychotherapy-speak just rankles me. The idea of one's self having a relationship with itself reminds me of this glorious opening paragraph from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death:

"Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the 

self. But what is the self? The self is a relation 

which relates itself to its own self, or it is that 

in the relation [which accounts for it] that the 

relation relates itself to its own self; the self is 

not the relation but [consists in the fact] that 

the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is 

a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the 

temporal and the eternal, of freedom and ne- 

cessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a 

relation between two factors. So regarded, man 


is not yet a self."

I asked my therapist once exactly what he meant by "having a good relationship with oneself," and he offered the following list:

You are kind to yourself
You enjoy your own company
You do things you like to do, on your own
You take care of yourself: physically, mentally, financially, emotionally, spiritually
You enjoy being alone as restorative solitude, not loneliness
You develop confidence that, no matter what other people decide or do, you will be perfectly all right
You begin to be able to make choices in areas that have felt completely out of your control
You have a foundation from which to be in relationships, rather than having the relationship be the foundation

These ideas all make perfect sense to me. I could easily see that these are many of the best things I always want for people I love. It's easier for me to imagine taking the same stance toward myself that I try to take toward others. At the same time, it's easier for me to recognize when I am ripping myself off in ways that I would never tolerate other people treating me. 

It's fascinating how I can blithely allow a cascade of self hating statements tumble through my head, or engage in self destructive and self hating behaviors, but if someone else said those things to me I would develop the worst resentment, and if I were their friend and they were behaving in those ways, I would want to offer counsel. 

That little beast is actually kind of cute

There's tremendous practical value in a lot of therapeutic propositions that truly rattle the mind. This is why I always found it so difficult to read Cheri Huber's There is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self Hate. She is unrelenting in the recommendation to love oneself and recognize the various rackets self hate works, and she does so in cutesy typography. I often tell people that this book is the most difficult book I have ever read. The clarity and self love in it powerfully summons all of my worst demons. Simply the experience of that fierce cynicism and sarcasm in my mind is a wild awakening to how much self loathing is going on. 

One of the greatest gifts of 12 step recovery has been the plain realization that I have been the cause of all of the relationship difficulties in my life. The absolute end to blame and the re-centering of responsibility in my own attitudes, behaviors, choices and compulsions is painful, but also liberating. 

While the conceptually weird idea of "having a good relationship with myself" makes little sense, the practice of lovingkindness toward myself is tangible, realistic, manageable. It's also quite difficult a lot of the time.