Patients sometimes say things like this: “If psychotherapy is largely a process of cultivating self-love, where is it supposed to come from? I don’t feel like I love myself. I can hardly stand myself. Where do I begin?”

Well, anyone who is alive to ask this question has survived, because at some point in the critical period of their infancy they, too, were loved. And babies love their caregivers, because love works as a circuit, a between-ness, like the glue between two surfaces. The love feels good because it works: my caregiver is loving me and I’m receiving it, and when I love her back, I experience my own goodness in the delight she takes in my smiles, my sounds, my touch, my presence.

My goodness is twofold, without any distinction being drawn: I am worthy of the Mother’s love, and my love for her is good. Therefore: I am good. I love myself. Trauma interferes with the benefits of that good foundational experience—but not completely, since you are still here, even though you’re also in pain. The task at hand is to reawaken those early, primitive good feelings and make them sustainable.

First, who do you love? It need not be a human person, but it must be a person in your eyes: a dog, a cat—a bear or an elephant if you know anyone who is an actual member of those species—or your nephew, grandmother, partner, friend—anybody you love. It could be a figure from religion or the arts, so long as admiration is not the main thing, but love. And if there is nobody in your life, bring to mind your feelings on seeing a baby or an elderly person, your spontaneous compassion for children in distress, even kids you don’t know.

If you can think of someone for whom you feel love, think of your feelings for this person. Feel the feelings. Notice that they arise naturally, without structure or measurement or transaction. Notice that they are not based on achievements, or talents, or cost/benefit calculations. As the philosopher Kant taught in the 18th Century, persons are ends in themselves, not means to an end. Adults love the baby because-the-baby.

An infant is too young to have accomplished anything cultural, and it’s too early to tell whether there are any significant talents present or not—thank goodness. That way, these extrinsic grounds for esteem can’t interfere with the fundamentally non-rational flow of love between caregivers and babies that is absolutely necessary for the survival of individuals, and of the species. As we therapists never tire of mentioning, babies tend to die if they aren’t loved-over-time by at least one individual caretaker, whatever other love, food, and shelter they do receive. If you’re still here, somebody loved you. That means you have some experience of the thing you’re looking for.

Thinking of a person you love brings up feelings of care, protectiveness, belonging, warmth, similarity, compassion, and esteem. You need to get yourself onto the list of beings who deserve this good stuff from you. Then you need to get yourself up to the top of that list. The fundamental reason to love yourself is because it is your right and role, your dharma, your vocation as a living organism on this planet. But if that currently feels too foreign and far-off, be motivated by altruism. Some depressed people only hate themselves, while others hate everybody; right now, I’m addressing the first group. Love yourself because the oxygen mask on your own face will keep you capable of giving oxygen to somebody else, instead of collapsing for lack of it.

After some time spent trying to love yourself so you can help other people, your motives may ripen and expand to include genuine, intrinsic self-love. Meantime, Nietzsche wrote, “The self-despiser nevertheless esteems himself—as a self-despiser.” In other words, if the only thing you can approve of about yourself is that you have sufficiently high standards by which to condemn yourself, well, those high standards are an esteemable form of investment in the Good, so start from there, and build out. Are you using the high standards as guides to improvement, or as a blunt instrument for self-punishment? If switching from punishment to guidance is hard, there is some internal cruelty in the mix, and you may currently be addicted to that cruelty.

Well, how would you feel and act if the person you love was being treated the way you treat yourself? You would intervene protectively; you would make emotional contact, to make sure the person was ok; and you would help your beloved to defend against attacks. Do that for yourself, as a matter of ordinary responsibility, like washing your hands after you use the bathroom, or like offering a glass of water to somebody who obviously needs it. Decency. If you can’t be kind to yourself, start with being polite to yourself, and work your way up to lovingkindness.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written about the inner exercise you can do to get better and stronger at self-love. It is an imaginal exercise, something you do with your imagination. What’s “imaginary” is a mental representation of something physical, compared to which the representation is relatively unreal—it is “merely imaginary.” But working to heal your inner child is itself a mental (both emotional and intellectual, both affective and cognitive) job. The problem, the solution, and the work of applying it are all psychic, not material. They all share the same form of realness, namely psychic reality. Inner actions are actions indeed, just as much as taking out the garbage, changing a tire, or dressing a flesh-wound is taking an action. A better analogy would be practicing with a musical instrument, because each session of practice—with all its frustrations and small glimmers of triumph—improves the prospects for progress the next time. Like therapy.

 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.

We often want to help people with their regrets, by telling them: “If you could have done any better, you would have. The reason you didn’t, is that you were constrained by your trauma background, your history.”

They reply that this is a slippery slope; that if they allow themselves the solace of explaining their bad choices by invoking their past history, they might recklessly let themselves off the hook for all kinds of error—laziness, impulsivity, greed—in the present and the future.

But it is not a slippery slope, so long as we locate the determinism in the past, where it belongs, and the freedom in the present, where we need it. Both the past and the present are constrained by the effects of the remote past I call my childhood. But the past of my young adulthood is already fixed, whereas the present is still relatively fluid, with room for choice and decision.

What is the precise extent of today’s freedom? How far can I hope to excel my previous performances? How free am I this morning, to do better than before? The only way to find out is to do the best I can now do, and learn about the flaws in today’s efforts only in hindsight, later on. Only tomorrow’s perspective will reveal the hidden limits of today’s freedom. I can best reach those limits—I can make optimal use of today’s undefined opportunities—by living as if I were entirely free of the constraints my origins impose on me. I am now 55. For my twenties, therefore, this process is now complete, so I’m now free to conclude that at 25 I indeed did the very best I could do—even though some of my choices that year were relatively disastrous. Had I been more free, I would have done better.

This is not a moral framework; the goal is to understand, not to excuse. Understanding will give me the breathing room to choose how to handle the moral dimension of my past conduct, prioritizing compassion over punishment, wisdom over bitterness, edification over regret.

Every child experiences some particular mixture of three things: getting the good stuff (love), not getting the good stuff (neglect), and getting the bad stuff (misuse, or worse: abuse). The particular mixture supplied by a particular childhood has consequences—exerts constraints on our freedom of thought and action—for the whole lifetime. But those constraints can loosen and fade with experience, especially with enough good experience. At no point am I ever in a position to assess exactly how much my early years are still shaping my current actions and perceptions right now.

So: today, I will do the best I can, as if I were no longer limited by the consequences of my origins. Tomorrow will show me why I got as far today as I did, achieving no more and no less than my level of maturation could permit. The psychotherapy that helps me understand the tragedies of my young adulthood also equips me to improve my future, not only because it helps me learn from experience, but because it explains why I suffered from the particular ignorance that I did.

Today’s ignorance will be tomorrow’s knowledge. As I contemplate the ways I fell short in the past, the more compassion I can muster for my youthful self, the less regret I must endure today. From present contemplation of my past mistakes, I must learn both prudence in dealing with the outside world, and mercy in dealing with myself.

Of course my history limits my choices. But exactly how much? I don’t know, and that’s a good thing. Our ignorance of the precise nature and extent of our constraints is part of our freedom. And just as a temperate optimism can enhance my odds of success in the world outside, my inner life will likely go better if I let myself assume I have achieved more growth and healing than I can readily prove. “With every mistake,” wrote the Beatles, “we must surely be learning.” In the absence of an impossible certainty, we are better off trusting in the human spirit’s innate powers of development.

One way to have that experience, to grasp for that faith, is to “see” your elderly future self kindly smiling down on you from the future. You might as well… look.

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.

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.

The sadomasochistic contract goes like this. The sadist says, I can do whatever I want to you, because I know you won’t leave me. The masochist says, You can do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t leave me.

In the kink world, “masochism” means getting pleasure from pain. But in the mental health world, it refers to something very different: a chronic, unconscious need for punishment, and all the things a person does to indulge that need—unconsciously motivated mistakes, losses, self-defeating behaviors, regrettable remarks, anything that will trigger an authoritarian response from within, and/or a retaliation from without.

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be a free choice, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Masochism outside the sexual sphere—an ongoing, dynamic need for punitive suffering—generally has no redeeming value. You might suppose it serves as a spur to achievement, but that’s just compulsion, not the voluntary embrace of work for work’s own intrinsic goodness. You might use it to assuage guilt, but that reinforces the guilt without addressing its irrational roots and its basic injustice. You might use punishment to stay connected to a parent whose love was autocratic and severe in a way that felt reassuringly firm and unmistakably present, but that prevents a healthier form of love from developing in its place. The need for punishment is a relic of old defenses that have come to cost more than they’re worth.

The way out involves correctly labeling the masochism as an old solution to an old problem, reinforcing its connection to the past that explains it. That was then; this is now. So there’s a new opportunity to settle things differently, in a less moralistic way, geared to the facts at hand, not to the old situation and its more primitive world of tyranny and hierarchy. Long ago, that world taught you that a cosmic balance would only be maintained if you contributed sacrifices to it, in the form of large chunks of your personal pain. This has long since turned out not to be true, but the masochism somehow got locked-in by a hidden contract that runs on misguided loyalty to the child parts-of-self that first signed onto it. It may also be enforced by an equally unconscious hope of eventual rescue-from-outside, so that breaking the contract (giving up the need for punishment) is linked to despair about rescue and guilt about disloyalty.

The present masochism gets dissolved by reaching for the past, where the explanation lies, and the future, where the possibilities are. In the future, I will one day die—and my renewed awareness of this finitude wakes me to the fact that I might-as-well let go of the old need for suffering. Also in the future, but closer to the present, are all the nights and days I still might enjoy if I can dissolve the masochistic pact in a solvent stronger than fear, which is love. I am more loyal to my child self, not less loyal, if I dissolve the contract I signed as a little kid and replace it with loving nurturance and protection, the free gift from my adult self to this terrified inner kid. The long-awaited rescue from outside is really a rescue from inside, because it’s from a part of me—but it is from outside the child part, as its source is the grown-up self I have become in the long meantime. Therapy helps to direct resources to this loving adult self, rather than let those current resources get routinely burned-up in the service of the old masochistic machinery. The well-resourced adult self is better able to bestow those resources, as loving-kindness, onto the child parts of you that need it most.