Narcissism: Giving Self-Love a Bad Name
True self-love is the opposite of how a narcissist feels or behaves
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:37–39 KJV)
God is love. Every major (and no doubt a few minor) religion in the world teaches this. The rub? The adherents of said faiths speak and act like they don’t believe it at all and, in fact, have heard not one whisper of this quaint love notion.
God is love. Burn the heretics!
God is love. Death to the infidels!
God is love. Kill the (insert your most despised person/group here)!
Huh?
What in the multiverse does any of that have to do with love? Utterly nothing, of course. And just as much to do with God. Zilch. Zip. Nada.
Our Creator doesn’t play favorites with love. God loves all created souls equally, and finds all of them worthy. That’s the textbook definition of unconditional love. No judgments. No hooks, No standards. No expectations. In other words, no conditions. Just love.
Here’s another hitch, and it’s a doozy. We created souls in no way return the favor. Whether we are in a physical life on planet earth (or elsewhere) or in spirit on the other side, we spend our individual eternities in various distressing states of self-loathing.
And we act every day out of that self-loathing. A cursory glimpse of the world today will reveal just how devastating self-loathing is on our behavior towards others — and toward ourselves. Just about the highest level of self-loathing possible is found in people who are narcissists.
Is there any way to change this situation? Is there any hope at all? Yes. There is. I write to share the love and healing — the hope — that I have lived.
Enter forgiveness. According to a CNN article, forgiveness is a science. Imagine that. Silly me. Based on more than three decades of experience as both a storyhealer and a storyhealed, I labored under the impression that forgiveness is first and foremost an emotional-spiritual act and a vital step toward full self-love.
But of course, forgiveness has to be a science, which is purely a mental body (conscious mind) endeavor. If it’s not a science, the powers that be do not take it seriously. Science has taken the place of religion in our secular institutions. Those who dare question science? Well! The nerve of them! Off with their heads!
Then there are those of us who do not need science to validate our lived experience. We already know how powerful forgiveness and the resulting increase in self-love can be because we have experienced it, and refuse to be scientifically gas-lighted about what we went through by someone who was not even present but is waving “data” around like it’s holy writ.
The two, forgiveness and self-love, go hand in hand. An act of forgiveness leads to less and less self-loathing, more and more self-love.
We also know that neither forgiveness nor self-love is something the mental body is designed to handle. The CNN article points out that forgiveness (as done by the mental body) will take time. I cannot argue with that. So skip the mental body and go straight to the emotional body (subconscious) with the help of the spiritual body (unconscious).
Going this route — tapping that missing half of the whole self — takes far less time. And a lot less guesswork. Why? Because self-loathing arises out of the emotional body. This part of self is each soul’s repository of the true cause of that soul’s self-loathing tied to need to forgive. Two words: Self-judgment. And vows, which are denials hooked to one or more self-judgments.
All these self-judgments and vows are pretty much hidden from our conscious mind. But they lurk inside each of us, causing too much grief and agony for anyone ever to catalog fully. There isn’t room in the multiverse to chronicle all the self-inflicted wounds we have suffered since creation and continue to endure.
Anyway, the CNN article leaves out something critical, except as a footnote. Forgiveness always starts with self. As does love. If we do not first forgive or love ourselves, then we do not own forgiveness or self-love. We cannot give something to anyone unless we first lay claim to it for ourselves. That applies to forgiveness—and to love/self-love.
Hence the quote at the start of this article from a great rabbi named Jesus. He points out that loving others and loving ourselves are inextricably linked.
Without self-love, we have no love to give to anyone else. When we love self, then we own it and can share it joyfully with others. Ditto for forgiveness. Only after we forgive ourselves are we then capable of forgiving others because we have claimed a measure of self-forgiveness first.
Now, some surely wonder, how does this apply when someone has done something horrible? Like murder. Or rape. Or spread lies that harmed others. I will use my own past-life storyhealing as an example.
I lived one physical life as a young man in ancient Korea with the surname of Jin. Bandits attacked a convoy carrying the young daughter of the local feudal lord, and she died. Suspicion fell on Jin/me. The lord’s men tortured Jin/me to death after I denied any involvement. A truly horrible way to go. The lord also visited his wrath on Jin’s entire village.
Unforgiveable, from a limited perspective.
But during my healing meditation, the spiritual body’s gift of deep insight graced me with a much wider perspective on the entire situation and my inadvertent role in setting it up. Turns out Jin/I had an older brother, their parents’ eldest son. That brother had mild Down’s Syndrome, and wasn’t nearly as quick-witted as Jin/I. Jin/I often made cutting remarks at his elder brother’s expense or belittled him in front of others. Filled with anger, pain, and resentment, the brother lied about Jin’s/my involvement in the lady’s death.
Unforgiveable, from a limited perspective.
In the storyhealer process, we often call all those involved in the painful situation to come in spirit so that the person in need of healing—Jin/me, in this case—can speak to them, and perceive their responses. So, in came the villagers, the lord, his daughter, the lord’s men, and all of Jin’s family, including his elder brother, who was cringing. I soon understood why.
Jin began by telling his torturers of the agony he experienced and that he never had harmed their lord’s daughter. Then, to the utter shock of present-day me, Jin, unprompted, turned to his fellow villagers and admitted, “I also have sins to confess. I disrespected my elder brother and was cruel to him. I was wrong.” Jin/I looked at my elder brother. “I hope someday you will be able to forgive me, brother. I wronged you.”
The joy and relief Jin/I felt was like trumpets sounded and a host of singing angels appeared. So immense and powerful. Jin’s/my brother then wept and confessed that he had borne false witness against Jin/me but never meant anyone else to suffer. He begged Jin’s/my forgiveness, which we both gave freely. My brother from that physical life and I hugged each other tightly, and became fast friends.
Then, as is possible in Sunan storyhealing, with the permission of all souls involved, I changed a few things about that miserable lifetime. I did not wave a wand and magically everything went right and we all became rich and famous. Not by a long shot.
But in this different lifetime, Jin and his elder brother were inseparable buddies, and were always together hatching silly pranks that made their villagers laugh. Jin realized that although his brother was not quick-witted, he was sharp and had terrific insights into people. He just needed more time to articulate his thoughts. So Jin was always asking his brother’s take on people and events, and then listening when his brother spoke.
The bandits returned to work their mischief and try to kidnap the lord’s daughter. But this time, Jin and his brother, away from the village tending their family’s fields, spied them and foiled their plot, with help from other villagers. They saved the lord’s daughter and earned the lord’s friendship for them, their family, and their village.
Smitten by the lord’s daughter, a woman he could never hope to wed, Jin never married. But his brother did and had children. As is often the case with Down’s Syndrome, the brother died early. Jin became the children’s surrogate father and missed his older brother for the rest of his days. Not anymore, however, because I now hold my elder brother close in my heart chakra, where he is free to come and go as he pleases, but is always welcome for a visit.
I/Jin could have chosen to wallow in self-pity and righteous fury at the wrongs done to us. But I/Jin was sick of that and ready to heal, and we both knew that in order to heal fully, we needed to acknowledge the wrongs we did that motivated Jin’s brother to bear false witness against Jin/me.
So many lessons and so much healing from this past life, but the bottom line is this. Are we ready and willing to forgive ourselves first and then others? Are we willing to release self-judgment/s so that we may love ourselves and thus others better? There’s no one right answer here. There are simply choices. One choice keeps things the way they are. The other choice leads to healing and self-growth.
What frustrates the dickens out of me is how so many people confuse true self-love with narcissism. It’s the exact opposite. Narcissists suffer from self-loathing to the max, self-hatred so extreme that they are too terrified ever to try to heal and grow. They just don’t want to know or face what’s in their hearts and souls. Hence their obsessive need for constant outside displays of validation and vehement insistence that they are perfect and that mistakes are always someone else’s fault.
Ultimately, we learn that by hanging onto our self-judgments and vows, we leave ourselves vulnerable to others’ abuse. I am in no way blaming the victim here. I am simply pointing out that long before any of us ever suffers abuse in this physical world, we have already abused ourselves through self-judgments and vows.
Abuse in this physical world simply reflects our inner situation back to us. This is the soul’s means of compelling us to let go and forgive ourselves despite our fears, and the soul resorts to such extreme measure only because we are not paying attention to its gentler messages. That is one of the profound consequences of narrowing or definition of self to exclude the heart and soul.
We always have choices. We can choose to forgive ourselves and others, or not. No matter what option we choose, we will invariably experience the consequences, happy or otherwise. Which consequences would you prefer?