Perhaps you were raised in a household with a chronically and deeply inculcated ethic of self-effacement. Perhaps people quoted to you that vexing line of scripture, Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Maybe that was a gendered experience, in which girls and women were raised to people-please, as if their maternal function were the only legitimate contribution they could make to the world. Or maybe it was a message for men and boys, that male people must be regarded as toxic opportunistic jerks, until and unless they establish their own goodness through people-pleasing.   

It’s true that people-pleasing and self-effacement are much better than the opposite extreme—where narcissists act as if the world owed them everything they could ever want, going through life exploiting others by deception, cheating, and entitlement. But there is a vast, wholesome, fertile middle-ground between these extremes.  

The culture of masochistic self-effacement—particularly common in the American Midwest, but not rare elsewhere—involves an extremely important error about human nature. When you withdraw into yourself like a turtle in its shell, giving up your claim to social space, resources, and dignity, other people in general do not actually benefit. Unprincipled characters may avail themselves of your services without reciprocating; such opportunists do not generally deserve what you’re giving them. Warmer folks might welcome your generosity and actually repay you in kind, but this is actual mutual goodness—not people-pleasing. Those who have the self-confidence to meet their own needs are going to do so with or without your self-sacrifice. And those who lack that confidence may be cowed by your example and feel shamed into emulating it (especially if you are their parent).  

Here are a few analogies, since the same principle applies in many other domains. Watching an anxious, apologetic musician perform is exhausting, whereas watching a confident and relaxed performer is energizing. When a singer is tense, tentative, inhibited, and nervous, the audience is drained by the performance and waits for it to end. When the singer is calm, expansive, centered, and open, the voice fills the whole space; the improvisation is playful and fluid; and the audience is captivated in delight.

Sociality tends to work the same way. The other people around you will benefit more from your loving self-acceptance than from your self-loathing. They are more likely to flourish if you flourish, than if you sulk, stagnate, or persecute yourself.  It is not anti-social to love yourself. It is pro-social to love yourself.  

As a brilliant Chinese political philosopher, Jiwei Ci,  once observed: “In a world of perfect altruists [who only promote their neighbors’ interests, not their own], no one has any interests for his neighbor to promote.”  

This same principle also applies to dating, where there are two major ways of being beautiful. One way is to absorb the standards of beauty that are tendered to you by the media and by your peers, and shape yourself to match those ideals as closely as possible. Some people will stop at nothing in pursuit of such external notions of aesthetic self-presentation, even at great personal expense, not all of it financial. Some will even inject their own faces with botulism toxin (“Botox”)—often at such youthful ages that there are not yet any wrinkles for the procedure to erase. The price is bigger than it seems, since the deactivation of facial muscles can make the human countenance less expressive, with serious possible consequences for emotional intimacy. Other forms of body modification have their risks, too. Fasting can have health benefits, or spiritual aspects, but starving oneself in pursuit of weight loss can constitute dangerous (even fatal) disordered eating. Working out in the gym can be a great enhancer of physical and emotional health, a rewarding and challenging part of self-care, and a venue for camaraderie. But it can also be the site of an “adonis complex,” where people toil for a missing self-respect that they associate with a highly muscular physique (this is a struggle often met with in some forms of Gay men’s culture).  

Most people benefit from some moderate degree of participation in shared ideals of attractiveness, maintaining their appearance as part of the pleasure of self-care—without overdoing it, or falling prey to excessive anxiety about how they look. At that point, the other approach to beauty takes over: sheer genuine confidence. So long as I have met this basic standard of self-care, my confidence that I am beautiful—even if my beauty is unconventional—has a benign influence on the way other people perceive me. Whatever my age, gender, sexual orientation, or social position might be, my comfort within my own skin, my genuine belief that, odd or not, I am cute as hell—is itself part of the way observers see me. The visual dimension of my self-image is part of my charisma; it is self-fulfilling.  

I’ve discussed musical performance and physical attractiveness as examples of the broader issue I raised at the beginning: my belief in myself is better for me—and for others—than my self-doubt. Put another way, other people will benefit more from my achievement of loving self-acceptance than they will from my continued self-denial and people-pleasing.

This applies to many more arenas than the few I’ve discussed here. For example, one of the best books I’ve read on sex is Male Sexuality: Why Women Don’t Understand It and Men Don’t Either, by psychoanalyst Michael Bader. He spells out the way that sex between men and women can go poorly if both people are entirely focused on the other person’s pleasure. Of course, it can also go poorly if they’re exclusively concerned with their own pleasure, but that problem is much more obvious, and much easier to discuss. Some generous attention to the other person is, of course, important, since sexual giving is both gratifying in its own right, and ethically salient—but so is some degree of embodied raw desire for stimulating experience of one’s own, without distraction, judgment, guilt, or ambivalence. When you share what’s yours, you’re sharing what’s yours.

As is said on every airline flight, and metaphorically repeated in myriad therapy sessions: put on your own oxygen mask first, because that’s the necessary preparation that makes it possible to help anyone else. If you do not start off by loving yourself (and it’s never too late for that), but instead regard yourself as a despicable sinner who must find ways to prove his or her own decency, then how do I know whether your kindness to me is a genuine gift, or just another impersonal effort to demonstrate that you’re a worthy human being? We generally prefer to receive kindness from people whose motive is not to escape hell (in this world or the next), nor to win entry into post-mortem paradise. We prefer to receive kindness as an authentic expression of somebody’s good nature, or, if we know each other well, as a communication about their feelings for us—not as a mere byproduct of their own secret wrestling match with a tyrannical conscience. Love yourself, and your love for others will mean more to them, not less.

Two thousand years ago, the great Rabbi Hillel said this unforgotten thing: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.