A conversation to define self-love in our daily life

At the end of our talk we had decided that love is
overstated but underrated among modern humans.

I am sipping my favorite honey ginger lemon tea listening to Jesse Cook's soulful music on Thursday evening. I will share a useful conversation that I had with another therapist. She said she believed anyone who says love is overrated hasn’t experienced true love and added: “love needs an object to manifest itself.” As we sipped our tea, she made me think of history filled with expressions of love and devotion for something or someone worthy of it – be it love for one’s nation, God or gods, or the scent of the beloved.

We both agreed love expressions are widespread. We say love and hate quite frequently, many times to express our personal opinions about transient and mundane matters. We have understood from the intricacies of romance that love also has a direction and can increase or decrease in intensity according to how we relate to each other. Common in all expressions, however, love appears to be found in our actions: we do something when we love. So, we agreed self-love is viewed in terms of action(s) taken towards the self.

As in the beginning there was the word, we felt compelled to look at the language of self-love in day-to-day expressions in English, Farsi and Spanish. We found love can be a verb, subject, object or an adjective. To connect them, I offered self is a unique experience of awareness that the person or thinker has through which he recognizes his existence in a particular physical form and psychological state, both appearing in a particular moment and at the same time. Insofar we thought, self-love is an experience that originates from and returns to one's self.

Common social directives – such as "you have to love yourself more," "if he only loved himself, this wouldn't have happened to him," or "you can't love another person until you love yourself first" – point to an action that can only be taken by a person towards (and not necessarily only for) herself in order to achieve more living fulfillment. Self-love, hence, is an action-inspired state of awareness that is also responsible for self-generated desirable experiences of an autonomous person. Indeed we help create our own mental states through our actions. 

We lastly spoke about another definition of self-love that is only understood with an open mind and so not to be mistaken by the entirely separate inquiry – how do I love my “self?” I think self-love is a state of conscious positive regard for oneself that stems from actions that uphold growth in all dimensions of human experience – be it of personal, interpersonal or spiritual nature. In this way, self-love actions are dynamic: actions that mature us despite our limiting beliefs are many and the opportunities are tremendous. In a world where positive initiatives of love are at times only minimally appreciated by others, self-deceiving clichés such as “I have no time for that” are reinforced to strip us of our attention to self.   

Perhaps, self-love is best understood through its impact on our life. It’s when we begin to accept much better our weaknesses as well as our strengths that we feel less need to explain, conceal or distort our shortcomings. It is through cultivating compassion for our own humanness struggling to find personal meaning that we become more centered in our life purpose and values. Proclaiming his religion to be love, the mystique poet, Rumi, urged not to merely seek love but to remove the barriers that we have built against it. Perhaps our task in the domain of love is to expect living fulfillment through our own efforts and our own efforts only. 

In the next self love biweekly, I will introduce the triangle of self-love. Thanks for sharing your time here! To maintain confidentiality rights, I welcome you to share how you define self-love for yourself through direct messaging me. 

May all be affected by the power of self-love! 

Dr. Hessam

4 tips to improve your media viewership quality

Today marks the beginning of Self Love Therapy Biweeklies. I hope that you find reading this content useful in your life and perhaps worthwhile to share. My hope is that through time, we learn to share ourselves progressively more authentically on this weblog platform. Now, that's exciting, new, and unknown for me! But, for now, I have today's post to share with you...

Please Press Play!      

We are the average of the media we consume because the chronic exposure manages to impact wherever our emotions go, particularly our relationships. I feel deeply sad whenever I dwell on negative news for a longer than a few minutes. And I feel anger in realizing our news is not a reflection of "truth" often times - it's highly screened and selectively shown based on the relative entertainment value of the headline stories. The goal is to grab and keep your attention by means of language and emotions that tend to exaggerate and stimulate interest with fear, anger, and other heightened stressful emotions. Cultivating our own advocacy is the only antidote the researchers agree on - that is empathy.  

The harm comes through when our emotions get parted and polarized. Because we hear so much of the bad news, we risk becoming inured to tragedy. To numb the pain, we swing from empathy to utter callousness. And that can cast a growing shadow on different areas of life, until we feel hopeless about everything. alternatively, one cannot just feel better by feeling excess pity because it is equally damaging. What we refer to as “emotional balance” may mean to be sensitive without falling into the dichotomy and clinging to one of those two poles: if I shut off the news as some do, I experience feeling uninformed which, by experience, is not an attractive quality to me.

More preferably, we want to be able to manage our emotions as we take in the information with an ability to handle the news. So how do we aspire to more than shutting off but without compromising our emotionally balanced viewership of media? If the sophisticated solution is balanced viewership, the unsophisticated solution is to feel hurt, sullen, defeated and over-pitying. The other extreme of unsophisticated solution is to become callous and indifferent to the suffering of others. Now, the danger of the naive solution is that it overgeneralizes: people start feeling more callous about friends, loved ones, everything, while we hope the goal is to develop a sense of empathy and maintain it. 

For emotional health, the ideal is to uproot over-pity and callousness and to tune into a special kind of attention to others’ emotional suffering. Processed in the most evolved part of the human brain – the prefrontal cortex – an empathic response involves complex tasks of intuiting, sensing and appraising others’ emotional experiences. Empathy is the ability to experience a situation vicariously without overgeneralizing but also without dismissing it as irrelevant to your life.
 

Without empathy but with gross pity, we lose our vital ability to separate the abundance of data we get from the media from the data we get from family and friends; without monitoring and maintaining our internal awareness as we encounter popular media, we may relate to those around us with over-pity or insensitivity, replacing our innate capacity for compassion towards self and others. Here are some tips on how to avoid being stressed out by the daily news:

1. Get the Headlines and Head out! Watch the news to be informed of the world around you as its status impacts your life but don't dwell on it more than a few minutes.
    
2. Get a Fair Share of Daily Positive News.  Do not start or end your day with negative news, instead find sources that also report positive news to maintain a more balanced viewership perspective. Starting your day with the positive spin of an uplifting news is a great start. 
    
3. Don't Take News to Bed! To wind down turn off the news and give your brain a break at least 30 minutes before retiring  for the night. A destructive habit is to leave it on for your unconscious mind to take it in while you sleep. If you need sound to fall sleep, download a soothing music like the one used for this post or use a soothing sound machine or guided relaxation.  
    
4. Feel Empathetic While Raising Resilience. Start and end your days with some quiet time! Learn to meditate in the most effortless way possible for you. Acceptance does not mean you agree with what is happening.     

In a moment of hardship, it is important to resist feeling helpless and hopeless on the one hand, and callous and indifferent on the other. Neither is good for understanding others or yourself. How do you avoid feeling stressed out by the daily news? I would like to read your thoughts in the comments.