There’s a question I ask in the therapy room that most people can’t answer straight away. I ask people what loving themselves would actually mean, what it would look like on an ordinary Tuesday. And usually I get a puzzled look.
Sometimes a nervous laugh. Sometimes a long silence. And then something like: “I don’t think I do. I can’t look in the mirror and think I’m amazing.”
I’ve come to realise that this answer isn’t really about whether someone loves themselves. It’s about what they’ve been told self-love is supposed to feel like.
What We Were Sold
We’ve inherited a very particular idea of love. It comes to us through films, songs, novels, and the endless stream of social media posts about “self-love” — and almost all of it treats love as a feeling. Something that washes over you. You fall into it. You’re swept away by it. You know it’s real because of the warmth, the rush, the glow…
So when we turn that idea inwards, we end up expecting to fall for ourselves the way people fall for each other in films. Self-love becomes standing in front of the mirror and admiring what you see. Feeling beautiful, clever, enough. And because everyone online seems to have access to this feeling, the people who don’t conclude that something must be missing in them.
I see what this does to people. They wait for a feeling that doesn’t come, and the waiting itself becomes evidence against them. Everyone else can do this. Why can’t I?
But I think the picture itself is back to front. The feeling isn’t where self-love starts. Usually, it’s where it ends up.
The Mirror That Argues Back
There’s a study I keep coming back to. In 2009, the psychologist Joanne Wood and her colleagues asked people to repeat the phrase “I’m a lovable person” and then measured how they felt. For people who already felt fairly good about themselves, it helped a little. For people with low self-esteem, it made them feel worse.
When I first read this, it made immediate sense. When you say something to yourself that clashes too sharply with what you already believe, your mind doesn’t simply accept it. It argues back. “You’re lovable” summons up every piece of evidence for “no, I’m not”, and the gap between the words and the inner experience grows wider.
It was a small study, and I don’t want to build too much on it. But it matches what I see every week. Trying to feel self-love on demand, when it isn’t there, often leaves people feeling more of a failure than when they started.
Kristin Neff, who has spent decades researching self-compassion, offers a useful way of understanding why. She distinguishes between self-esteem and self-compassion. Self-esteem is a judgement — how favourably do I rate myself? — and it rises and falls with how things are going and how we compare with others. Self-compassion isn’t a rating at all. It’s a way of treating yourself, especially when things go badly. In her research with Roos Vonk, self-compassion was linked to steadier, less conditional feelings of self-worth over time than self-esteem.
The mirror version of self-love is really self-esteem in disguise. It asks you to approve of what you see. No wonder it’s so fragile.
Love as Something You Do
Long before any of this research existed, Erich Fromm was saying something similar. In The Art of Loving, written in 1956, he argued that we had misunderstood love by treating it as something that happens to us. For Fromm, love was an activity — something we practise, something we get better at. He described it as “standing in” rather than “falling for”.
He named what that practice involves: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. And he was clear that this applies to how we treat ourselves. Self-love, for him, had nothing to do with vanity. People who seem selfish, he argued, usually don’t love themselves too much, but too little.
The American writer and cultural critic bell hooks picked up the same thread decades later in All About Love, writing about love as a verb rather than a feeling — something shown through how we act, consistently, over time.
When I hold this alongside what my clients tell me, the question changes shape. “Do I love myself?” stops being a question about a feeling you either have or don’t. It becomes a question about practice. How am I treating myself, day by day?
Five Thousand Roses
I keep returning to The Little Prince, and to one moment in it that I think is often overlooked.
The prince has spent a great deal of time on his tiny planet caring for a single rose. He has watered her, sheltered her from the wind, put up with her vanity and her moods. She has told him she is the only one of her kind in the whole universe.
Then, on Earth, he walks into a garden full of roses. Five thousand of them, every one exactly like his. And he is heartbroken. His rose, it turns out, is ordinary.
It’s the fox who helps him understand. His rose isn’t special because she’s the most beautiful, or because she’s unique. She matters because of the time he has spent on her, the care he has given her. The love is in the tending.
This, I think, is exactly where the mirror version of self-love goes wrong. It assumes you need to find yourself exceptional in order to love yourself — that you need to be the best rose in the garden. But the prince didn’t love his rose because she outshone the others. He loved her because she was his to care for.
And it works the other way round, too. If loving the rose means taking care of her, then taking care of yourself is loving yourself. Not a step towards it. Not a preparation for the real thing. The thing itself.
You don’t have to admire yourself to love yourself. You just have to be the one you tend.
Does the Feeling Ever Come?
People often ask me this, and it’s a fair question. Is the warm feeling a myth?
I don’t think so. But in my experience it tends to arrive after the care, not before it. When people begin treating themselves with consistent, practical kindness, the warmer feelings often follow — slowly, sometimes to their own surprise.
I want to be honest about what the research can and can’t tell us here. Most studies on self-compassion run in the other direction: they show that people who are kinder to themselves are more likely to look after their health. A 2015 review led by Fuschia Sirois found that self-compassion was linked to healthier habits around sleep, food, exercise and stress, though the link was modest.
The idea that doing can come before feeling has stronger support from a neighbouring field. Behavioural activation is a therapy for depression built on exactly this principle: rather than waiting to feel better before re-engaging with life, you begin with action, and mood often follows. In a large UK trial published in The Lancet in 2016, behavioural activation turned out to be just as effective as cognitive behavioural therapy.
That isn’t research on self-love, and I’d hold it as a strong hint rather than proof. But it fits what I see. The feeling is often the result of the care. It isn’t the entry ticket.
When Kindness Feels Dangerous
There’s a part of this that rarely gets talked about, and it’s the part I think matters most.
For some people, being kind to themselves isn’t just difficult to feel. It’s uncomfortable. Even threatening. Paul Gilbert, who developed compassion-focused therapy, noticed this in his clinical work and went on to research it. He found that some people — particularly those who are very self-critical — can actually fear self-compassion, and that this fear goes hand in hand with insecure attachment, depression, anxiety and stress.
When I think about this through the lens of early experience, it starts to make sense. We learn how to treat ourselves from how we were treated. If care was patchy, conditional, or simply absent when we were small, we may never have seen what steady, ordinary care looks like up close. It’s hard to give yourself something you were never shown.
Sometimes part of this work is grief. Grief for the care that should have been there and wasn’t.
And this is exactly why thinking of love as action can be a gentler way in. You don’t need to feel tender towards yourself to drink a glass of water. To go to bed a little earlier. To book the appointment you’ve been putting off. The actions can come first, long before the feelings feel safe.
Tending, Not Fixing
There’s one more thing I want to say, because I’ve seen how easily this idea can be turned against people.
The same action can come from love or from punishment. Going to the gym because you value your body is not the same as going because you can’t stand it. Eating well because you want to feel nourished is not the same as controlling food because you don’t feel you deserve to take up space. A strict routine can be a form of care — or a way of policing yourself.
This is where Fromm’s idea of respect becomes important. Care without respect slides into control. Tending a plant means working with what it actually needs. It doesn’t mean forcing it to grow into something else.
So the question I’d invite you to ask isn’t just am I looking after myself? It’s am I tending myself, or trying to fix myself?
And consistency doesn’t mean perfection. Many people find routines genuinely hard — because of energy, health, circumstance, or simply the way their mind works. For them, “show up for yourself every day” can quickly become one more standard to fail. But a gardener doesn’t stop loving a plant because they forgot to water it one week. Tending is about coming back. Again and again. Not about never missing a day.
Just the One You Tend
If you’ve spent years feeling that self-love is something everyone else seems to have and you somehow don’t, I’d like to offer you a different way of looking at it.
You don’t have to be the best rose in the garden. You don’t have to look in the mirror and feel amazing. You don’t have to wait for a feeling before you’re allowed to start.
Love — including love for yourself — is built from small, repeated acts of care. A glass of water. An early night. Saying no when you mean no. Asking for help. Coming back to yourself after you’ve drifted away.
The feelings may come, in their own time. And if they don’t come easily, that isn’t a sign you’ve failed. It may simply mean you’re learning something you were never taught.
And if it feels too hard to do alone, therapy can be a place to practise it, slowly, at your own pace.
If You Want to Explore These Ideas Further
If the idea of love as something you practise rather than something you feel speaks to you, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956) is the place to start. It’s short, surprisingly readable for a book written seventy years ago, and still one of the clearest things written on the subject.
For a warmer, more personal take on the same idea, bell hooks’ All About Love (2000) explores what it means to treat love as an action, in families, friendships and in how we treat ourselves. It’s honest about where many of us first learned our ideas of love, and what those lessons cost.
If you’d like to understand the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion, Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011) brings together her research in an accessible way, with practical exercises alongside it.
If kindness towards yourself feels uncomfortable or even threatening, Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind (2009) is worth reading. Gilbert writes about why compassion can be so hard for people who are very self-critical, and he doesn’t pretend it’s simple.
And if you haven’t read The Little Prince since childhood, or at all, it’s worth going back to. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote it in 1943 as a children’s book, but it reads very differently as an adult.
For those who want to look at the research directly:
- Joanne Wood and colleagues’ study on positive self-statements and low self-esteem (Psychological Science, 2009): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19493324
- Kristin Neff and Roos Vonk on self-compassion versus self-esteem (Journal of Personality, 2009): doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2008.00537.x
- Fuschia Sirois and colleagues’ meta-analysis on self-compassion and health-promoting behaviours (Health Psychology, 2015): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25243717
- The COBRA trial comparing behavioural activation and CBT for depression (The Lancet, 2016): eprints.gla.ac.uk/180290
- Paul Gilbert and colleagues on fears of compassion (Psychology and Psychotherapy, 2011): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22903867
