3.16 Among the blessings, deeper self-love

Winning approval and developing self-love are very different things.

When I was a kid, the church I belonged to taught me I was unlovable. Period. That’s it. The final verdict. Nothing to discuss. Checkmate.

So I pivoted…

I adopted a strategy of winning approval as a substitute for being loved.

And I got good at it.

When I became an activist in my twenties, I immediately teamed up with the people playing the sacrificial-savior game. And wow, I got hooked.

I mean if you’re one of the people saving the world, you get very big approval points.

And if you’re sacrificing your personal life to do so, well how noble, and so you get A+ bonus points for that.

So for a couple decades I had good self-esteem in that, given my mission, I believed I was a good person. And I had good social-esteem, in that a lot of people told me I was a good person.

But inside, I was drowning in despair, because of this irony:

The more approval I earned, the more empty I felt.

Over the years, I listened to New-Age gurus proclaim…

Just as you are, you are enough.

You’re a child of the universe, and that, in and of itself, is all you need. You don’t need to change a thing. Just the fact that you exist means you are worthy of self-love.

But that gospel didn’t work for me. I did help a lot of people. I made a difference in a lot of lives. No doubt about that.

But at the same time I was so lost in a fog of compulsive approval-seeking that I couldn’t even see myself. So how could I love myself?

And in fact, I didn’t like who, as a result of my childhood, I had become. I didn’t like hanging out with me. I did lots of good deeds, sure, and that I could respect. But I didn’t respect myself.

When I finally realized that I was down at the end of a dead-end street. I looked for a new way to do my work and to run my personal life.

I started putting together what I now call the Deep Nurturance OS. And…

Approval-seeking was not part of it.

Instead…

I decided love was the heart of the DNOS.

And I chose the word “nurturance” for the title because…

Nurturance is love in action.

And I had another problem with the happy message of the gurus. What about the people who run our society and keep themselves busy day after day exploiting others? I don’t find them to be naturally lovable. And I don’t understand how, if you’re hurting others in a systematic  way, you could really love yourself.

In fact, I would hope that’s not possible…

I would hope that self-love could not be used to support exploitation.

Many of those folks, though, because they’re super successful, have high self-esteem, and so they’ll tell you that they love themselves.

So I guess I have to admit that I don’t believe just because someone is human, just because someone exists, they deserve to be loved, or deserve to love themselves.

There are too many people who do too many bad things. And human history is filled with too much evil for me to think that.

Of course, I believe that every child deserves advocacy and care. I believe every child deserves the chance to grow up to feel lovable—because she lives in a way that actually makes her lovable.

And I understand this is a bit of a complicated thing I’m saying. But it brings me to what I believe is the source of the deepest kind of self-love, and that is…

Moral self-development….