Well, my final question is that I've heard you speak quite eloquently about the power of self-love as sort of a bedrock for our well-being.
What would you like people to know about self-love? What can we do to foster that? What is the value of it?
Well, people confuse as usual self-love with narcissism or selfishness.
To love yourself is to be egotistical and dis-mpathic and so.
But of course, narcissism is the exact opposite of self-love.
Pathological narcissism is when you hate yourself and then you create an image or a facade that is exactly opposite to who you are. It's a denial of who you are because you hate who you are.
You feel that you're inferior, so you project a facade that you're superior. You feel that basically you're an idiot, so you're trying to convince everyone you're a genius. We call this process compensation.
Pathological narcissism is a compensatory mechanism.
But what is it that you're compensating for? Your self-hatred.
You perceive yourself as bad, unworthy, inadequate, and so on, and then you say, I don't want other people to see me as I truly am. I want people to see me as I wish I were.
And so you create what Freud called the ego ideal, and then you are on a missionary, religious path or trajectory trying to convince everyone, convert everyone to the cause of believing your false self that has nothing to do with self-love. It's the opposite of self-love.
Narcissism, self-love, involve several elements, self-awareness and so on, accepting yourself exactly as you are.
No daylight between who you are and who you would like to be. You are the best version of yourself, as far as you're concerned.
Of course, you can always better yourself. But as you are right now, you did your best. And that's it. You accept it.
If I had to summarize it in a single sentence, which is not easy for me to do because I love the sound of my voice, I would say that self-love is about being your best friend.
Think about how we would like your best friend to be and be that to yourself.
Now, why is self-love important?
Because it's a defense. It's not a psychological defense, but it's like defending, protecting you. It's protective. Oh, that's the word. It's protective.
If you lack self-love, you're vulnerable. You're vulnerable to people who offer you substitute self-love, like narcissists. You're vulnerable because you're bound to sabotage yourself, self-defeat and self-destruct, because you don't love yourself. You're vulnerable because in the absence of self-love, it's very difficult to maintain a sense of self.
So you're beginning gradually to dissipate, like the famous painting by Dalí, Galatea of the Spheres.
So, you know, self-love is the glue that holds yourself together.
That is not Vaknin, that is Jung. Jung suggested that narcissism and introversion are critical to the formation of the self, to what he called the constellation of the self.
So you don't have a self gradually if you don't love yourself for a very long period of time. You don't have a self and you're amenable to outside influences that shape you and reshape you and you begin to shape shift. You begin to be ephemeral, you know, fuzzy like a cloud. You become a cloud.
Self-love is the glue that holds this together.
But self-love is also the glue that holds your relationships together. If you don't love yourself, there's no way on earth you can love other people.
The first experience of love is self-love. It is like a training camp, a boot camp.
If you didn't go through this boot camp, you would never make it to the infantry.
So self-love is the boot camp of love. If you didn't go through it, graduated. No way. You're never going to love. You are going to convince yourself that you're in love or that you are loving, but it's not love.
These will be substitutes, these will be imitations, cheap imitations, and they will get you in trouble.
The inability to identify true love, especially in other people, is the recipe for disaster in personal life. I would trace 80% of all personal catastrophes and 90% of mental illness to self-love blindness or what Rosenberg calls self-love deficit.
Self-love is a guide. It's like a light in the darkness, and so forth, but it allows you to relate to other people via love.
I have a whole playlist on my YouTube channel. It's called Life's Wisdom. It's not a grandiose title, as you may notice, but it contains several videos on self-love.
And rather than rehash myself, I think people should just go there and they can find what we know scientifically about self-love, some philosophical ruminations, some grandiose statements inevitably, and so on so forth. They can find this cocktail mixture there and maybe get better acquainted with this.
There is a belief in modern society that we are all consumables, we are all the equivalent of products. We consume each other.
And so when you consume other people, you begin to consume yourself.
The way you relate to other people is the way you are going to end up relating to yourself.
If you abuse other people, you will end up abusing yourself. If you consume other people, you will end up consuming yourself. If you hate other people, you will end up hating yourself.
It's a boomerang. You're going to pay the price for your choices on how to relate to other people.
If you are incapable of loving other people, you are incapable of loving yourself, and the opposite is also true.
Only if you're capable of loving yourself, you're capable of loving other people.
And in the absence of love, not love in the stupid romantic sense of the 18th century and 19th century. I'm not talking about this kind of love.
This kind of love is not love, actually. It's what is known as limerence or infatuation. It has nothing to do with love.
Love is a very mature complex of emotions, which takes decades to develop and usually targets highly specific individuals. It's sort of fuzzy thing, sort of diffuse thing.
So it's a lot of work. Love is a lot of hard work. A lot.
But in the absence of this, you can accomplish nothing really. You can end up being a billionaire. You can not be famous and celebrity and this and that. But none of this would feel real.
It is love that makes the world feel real. In the absence of love, nothing feels real.
And I think the reason is that love is intimately connected with identity and love also provides us with continuous memories.
We know that when we're in pathological states of mind, our memory is discontinuous. We know there are memory gaps. This process is called dissociation.
So, for example, if you have borderline personality disorder, you're dissociating.
And when you don't have continuous memories, you don't have identity. Identity is just another name for your album of memories.
If you're incapable of loving, you're incapable of memory.
We now know that the only way to retain long-term memories is to associate them with emotions. And that the most powerful emotion that induces in us contiguouscontinuous memories is love.
What do you remember most vividly? Your love for your children, your love for your dog, your love for your wife or husband, your love.
Most vividly, you remember your love.
You remember other things, a great restaurant, you know, a one-night stand. You may remember these things, but they're not really vivid and they fade away with time.
Love keeps memories full of color, full of potency.
And when you don't have it, your memories fade away, and then you fade away. There's no identity without memory.
Well, Sam, thank you for that beautiful explanation for this interview for your lectures, your book, and for your rules for going no contact.
You've had a tremendous positive impact in my life, and I'm so grateful for this time.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me and the opportunity.
Take care. i hope you recover from this interview.
I'm sure I will. Drink something, take a nap.
Okay. Thank you, Sam. Take care. Bye.