“Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult.”

Bear with me a minute through the dull bit.  There’s a point, and even a picture, at the end.

Something to think about from Carl Jung regarding self-hatred (emphases mine):

Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy –all these are undoubtedly great virtues…

But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth is reversed: there is no more talk of love and long-suffering; we…condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world; we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.

(C.G. Jung, CW 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Chapter V, “Psychotherapy or the Clergy,” § 519-520)

This reminded me of one of the most useful things I’ve learned in therapy, the concept of mirroring, which is the idea that my gut reactions to people are often driven less by rational thought and more by a fear of recognizing something in them that I don’t like about myself.  Pushing those people away, so the theory goes, allows you (okay, me) to avoid thinking about that rotten internal part, and also to handily avoid dealing with it.

It works the inverse way, too, of course; we are attracted to qualities (real or perceived) in others that we would like to possess.   It’s an interesting scrim to look through when examining your initial reactions to people.  I know part of what made Lieu so attractive to me was that he is incredibly brilliant, and I admire that in him, and I really liked it that someone that smart didn’t think I was dumb–a huge insecurity of mine. But by that same logic, I am totally threatened by really funny people because I feel like being funny is one of my few reliable calling cards, and I don’t want anyone trumping it. (I also dislike good spellers, though I hide it.)

(EXAMPLE: Headed out to drinks once with my NH friend, I asked, as I always do, who exactly would be there. It helps me fret accurately. She responded that person A, B, C, and C’s brother, a comedian, would be there. I liked these people, and they had just moved in nearby.  My NH friend was trying to throw us all together so that we’d be friends. But, “I’m not going out to drinks with a comedian,” I blurted, appalled, when she recited the list to me. “I knew you were going to say that,” she replied darkly.

I went. It was fine. He’s kind of famous now.)

Anyway, I think the Jung quote takes my mirroring epiphany one step further. It’s not enough to realize that my own insecurities are controlling the way I interact with people and approach situations, and to be aware of that and struggle to work around it (by, for instance, not just assuming I will dislike everyone I don’t already know.) I need to figure out how to accept the parts of me I’m not fond of and get right with them.  I myself stand in need of my own kindness…I myself am the enemy who must be loved. I need to make peace.  Now that I’ve caught hold of the corners of this idea, I can’t let it go.

How do the parts of my personality that I struggle with hold me back?  Or, more bluntly, how do the parts of me that I hate hurt me? I think the unloved parts of a person are like any unloved thing: if you ignore them, and revile them, and starve them, and kick them in the teeth when they sidle up to you, they become twisted and malignant and even more repulsive. But if you take care of them–and take care of them like a grown-up would, by feeding them what they need and providing firm boundaries and taking them for walks in the sun and giving them plenty of affection–well. THOSE are the parts that grow up to finish college and go to grad school, where they meet a fierce, enchanting, kindhearted man with a high sex drive, and then get married in New Orleans and go on to have two kids with really unusual yet culturally acceptable names. Without in vitro!

Ahem.

Ever since I got my first dog and became helplessly ensnared in my love for him, despite how irritating and demanding and hairy he is, I’ve had this theory. I think that, because human babies are so helpless for their first couple of years, our species has evolved to love the things we take care of, simply because we are taking care of them.  The more we take care of them, the more we love them.  And then it becomes a kind of virtuous circle, because the more we love something, the more we take care of it.

It’s win-win, from a “propagate the species” perspective, and it must be true, because the sacrifice/reward ratio on human babies is so skewed for so long that otherwise, we’d all have been abandoned in the woods when our parents figured out that we really were just going to poop wherever for, like, two years.  Minimum.

Profound, no?  Through years of self-reflection, therapy, study, and effort, I have concluded that we should all accept ourselves for who we are and treat ourselves kindly.  Am I the only one who smells a book deal coming?  I suppose simply writing “Be good to yourself” might have been a more succinct way to express the same concept. But if it were that easy, my god, what would we all talk about?

Also: easier said than done, yo.

I was complaining to someone recently that my efforts to fix myself haven’t amounted to much; I’ve figured out what my “issues” are; how I hold myself back, and treat myself badly, and manage to repeat the same patterns over and over, and all of that other fun stuff that Oprah specifically advised against, but I haven’t figured out how to, you know, STOP FUCKING DOING THAT.

She sighed.  ”I know a thing or two about this,” she said. (Spoiler alert: it was my shrink.) “Figuring out that you need to do this work and starting it is hard, and it’s a big deal. But actually doing the work, actually breaking the patterns and learning new ones, is probably the hardest work you’ll ever do in your life, and it doesn’t happen fast.”

If that is not the germ of a new marketing campaign for psychotherapy, I don’t know what is.

(Interestingly, the chart above is also pretty clear evidence that the fixers among us shouldn’t linger too long taking care of people who aren’t returning the favor, lest we be caught up in a vicious love snare that’s hard to work loose.  Very hard.)