One of the theories I have developed about people in the last few years and have come to passionately believe is that you cannot love others if you don't first love yourself.
People tend to view love as a feeling, and of course it is, a powerful and important feeling that does a great deal to move us. But perhaps more significantly it is an act; real love comes from the extension of the self for another. That's the hard part, and the part that demands the most from us. Love the feeling is infinite; love the act, requiring effort and time, is not. It's a big job for one human being to do all the acts of love that are necessary to interacting with our fellow men, even the ones who are precious to us.
Everyone of course needs love; there is an emptiness inside us that can only be filled by love. While we naturally want it from other people, part of it must come from ourselves or we are not complete, not truly fulfilled. Everyone knows someone who is a lovely, well-liked person for whom despite the love of others still cannot escape the unhappiness of not loving themselves. That, I believe, is the thing most often responsible for selfishness, unkindness, and absence of the acts of love.
No matter how much one dislikes oneself, it is only human nature to struggle to reach some state of peace and contentment with the person one is; it is very rare for someone, whether consciously or not, to make no effort to bring themselves to a point where they can like themselves. People with chronic self-esteem problems have a constant emptiness that they will always be trying to fill. But if you are constantly having to throw your love into your own empty pit, the effort of taking care of your own bad feelings about yourself detracts from any effort you have for acts of love toward anyone else.
Sometimes you take out your bad feelings on others, or you begin resenting those that have what you feel you don't. Also, it makes you profoundly self-centered, inclined only to what you want and not what's good for the people around you, if only because you don't have the thought (which, yes, is an effort in and of itself) to spare for the people around you. The result in any case is that you do not do the acts that you should to love the people in your life.
I see this tendency in myself. Normally I have pretty damn good self-esteem, often, as I'm sure some would heartily agree, a little too much. But even I get self-disliking sometimes, and when I do, God knows it's tough to expend the effort on other people when I don't feel good about myself. I get self-absorbed, which leads to being unkind to the people around me.
You have to love yourself. You have to believe you are a worthwhile, meaningful human being with something good to contribute to the world. You have to believe you are strong enough, good enough, and valuable enough that it is important for you to commit your acts of love. If you don't... you won't do them. You won't give because you feel you have nothing to give. You won't think about others because self-dislike absorbs you too much in yourself.
I am trying to remember this to forgive people who I see acting badly, and to help get passed this tendency in myself.
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