It’s hard to avoid mentions of self-love these days. Social media inundates us with jargon about achieving self-love by knowing our attachment styles and “re-parenting ourselves,” while assessing others for red flags so we can cleanse our lives of toxic people. This builds on decades of self-help literature that shifted our focus to self-optimization at the expense of connection with others, threatening to worsen the current friendship recession.

While the advent of more accessible psychological principles and techniques can indeed further our own self-understanding, often popular media erroneously simplifies these complex theories. Additionally, family estrangement, known as going no contact, is climbing and becoming more socially acceptable. The deeply painful decision to distance ourselves from loved ones may indeed be warranted on occasion, even though it comes with ambiguous grief.

As a self-love researcher and psychotherapist, this cacophony of discourse alarms me because it risks harming people’s personal growth and exacerbating loneliness and disconnection. Some supposed self-loving acts, when administered without nuance, may actually encourage people to avoid hard conversations that could have deepened relationships and provided valuable insight. Moreover, when we do the difficult work to overcome discomfort with others, rather than dismissing behavior as toxic, we gain perspective on people different from us and make vital connections that build a more cohesive social fabric.

Human nature demands that we love; in fact, love periodically tops the most hashtagged words on social media. Part of self-love is strengthening our own understanding of why we are the way we are, of our internal emotions, bodily responses, needs like self-attunement, and the thoughts we tell ourselves. It helps us discern the accuracy of our inner monologue that echoes our beliefs, helpful and unhelpful, about how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.

What self-love looks like online

My research examining the captions of approximately 188,000 Instagram and Twitter posts with the use of topic modeling demonstrated that #selflove was used in posts discussing four main themes:

• self-acceptance (e.g., self-validation and Self-compassion),
• well-being and Mental health (e.g., strategies to improve wellness and coping during hard times),
• self-care (e.g., baths, face masks), and
• engagement with others (e.g., greetings to the community, seeking followers on social media).

In the past five years of this research, I’ve largely come to see true self-love as having a relationship with oneself to ultimately further connection with others. When we love ourselves more, we cultivate trust in ourselves and make choices that are aligned with our values, which leads to more whole-hearted relationships.

Yet misconceptions about self-love prevail.

One is that self-love’s essence is selfish, and relatedly, capitalistic, promoted by a $500 billion U.S. wellness industry and an estimated $2 trillion market globally. My social media research found self-love to be used synonymously with self-care, the most hashtagged word in the #selflove posts, with some showcasing images of manicures and frappuccinos. There is a mass market of products seeking to soothe our discomforts, and a plethora of self-optimization apps that perpetuate the idea we are a problem to be fixed or that we must strive for more.

Not only are the myriad of self-care products and outlets affordable to only a certain socioeconomic class, we are seeing this idea of self-care being radically confused with self-love; replacing our social connection with solo retreats and ice baths, to name a few, and risking the depletion of our conflict resolution skills. We may then see the solution solely as the individual’s burden of responsibility, which may also lead to a sector of society less engaged in creating, improving, and overhauling larger community and societal systems. Taking steps to care for ourselves is essential and needs to include our ability to relate to, connect with, and grow alongside others.

A second misconception about self-love is that it is flowery, soft, potentially even weak. While self-love can look like soothing ourselves when we are stressed (e.g. binge watching Netflix), caring for ourselves also means taking responsibility for our lives. Changing our behaviors is hard because we are getting a benefit from our current actions—whether they serve us in the long term or not—otherwise we would not continue them. Consider wanting to keep the peace, known to some as people-pleasing. While we account for others’ needs, we disregard our own and prevent ourselves from fully showing up.

Ultimately, people-pleasing protects us from uncertainty and discomfort that others may be upset, at the cost of personal growth and authentic relationships. When examining 902 #selflove and alcohol and drug recovery social media posts, my team found that taking responsibility was one of the most frequent topics. Cultivating self-reflection and awareness, with compassion and curiosity, helps us understand which behaviors are serving us and which are not.

What self-love can be

Rather than self-love as a form of self-preservation to facilitate more connection, social cohesion, and collective activism, I see self-love being misunderstood as a protective blockade.

For example, the idea of “protecting my peace” has the intent of preserving one’s emotional labor but may have the impact of disguising our own discomfort and ability to take risks–with the consequence of stopping others from getting inside and seeing us. At a time of rising geopolitical conflict and domestic policies causing discord and marginalization, it’s natural to seek predictability and retreat from conflict. But it’s an illusion that reducing our connections provides safety. Signs that we may be falling into this trap include: telling ourselves a story about a person or situation and continuing to accrue supporting evidence without checking the facts; letting mind loops run rampant (rumination); and all-or-nothing thinking.

Instead, when a loved one doesn’t text us back or says a harsh word, consider a switch to curiosity rather than rush to judgement. If not, we may end up losing out on intimacy: knowing someone else more deeply, having them know us, and knowing ourselves more authentically. We are in a moment that calls for clarity and strategies for loving ourselves while still being in relationship with others. To move toward this goal, we can take steps that include the following.

Use sensory and cognitive supports to balance the strong emotions triggered when we feel discomfort, want to disengage, or experience a conflict–internal and external. These may be breathing techniques or hand on heart, or cognitive ones such as journaling to express our thoughts unfiltered and non-judgmentally. These techniques remind us: “In this moment, I am safe.” They teach us that we have the capacity to sit in discomfort. Play with various techniques to find which ones work best for you. If you notice that your nervous system is still struggling to feel safe in the present moment, seek out a trusted loved one, a trauma-informed somatic practitioner (e.g. breathwork), or an EMDR therapist.

Create space to decide how to proceed. When in a conflict, we can ask ourselves questions like:

• What is my first instinct when I think of this conflict? Is it a relationship blocker, such as one of the the four horsemen identified by psychologists John and Julie Gottman: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, contempt?
• Have I asked the other person about what has transpired and been assertive so they are aware of my needs?
• How might I have contributed to this conflict, and do I need to make amends for my part?
• Have they made efforts to repair with me in the past, or if this is the first conflict, do I think they have the potential to make amends and repair with me?
• What will the pitfalls be if I decide to end this relationship?

Asking questions and determining the extent to engage with the other person is courageous and gives us a sense of empowerment during uncertainty.

Get curious about our needs. This can be in the moment based on our current emotion or more long-term related to our values. For the latter, Acceptance Commitment Therapy provides worksheets online that help identify our values. A common challenge can be to determine whether a value is truly yours, or if you are selecting it because you think you “should” based on family or societal expectations.

When you are unsure how you are feeling and what your needs might be, use HALT, taken from recovery communities, to extract what may be bothering you. First, pause; then ask yourself: am I Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Or Tired?

If we are angry, we then know that a value of ours has likely been challenged or violated. It calls on us to acknowledge an underlying emotion (e.g. hurt, fear), an unmet need, and advocate for ourselves (e.g. having a conversation). If we are lonely, connecting with ourselves or with someone can help. If we are tired, then resting may bring ease. (A caution: sometimes tiredness can mask loneliness, so if you take a nap and you’re not rested, perhaps loneliness is the culprit.) Understanding our needs and acting from our values allows us to be clear with others and ultimately, connect more effectively.

Approach conflicts or decisions with a wise mind. Drawing from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, wise mind harmonizes rational mind and emotion mind. Emotion mind says, for example, “I’m hurt and I want them to feel hurt too”. This can lead us to take revenge, ultimately extracting more of our own emotional labor. Rational mind may say: “It only happened a few times; they didn’t mean it” or “The moment has passed and there’s not a good time to bring it up”. This can dismiss or invalidate our experience.

Instead, wise mind says: “I’m hurt and I’m strong enough to determine how my loved one views this situation.” Often when someone bothers us, annoys us, or angers us, the story in our mind continues to build, yet we don’t feel that we have the capacity or skills to actually check the facts with the other person. Wise mind allows us to take action from a balanced place.

Use assertive communication. This method respects yourself (not being passive) and the other person (not being aggressive). It demands that you risk to express yourself vulnerably, share how you’re feeling while making an ask of them for something you need, without knowing if they will be able to meet the request.

Setting boundaries is often pitched as a common solution nowadays when we feel wronged. A boundary represents our own values and needs, and is followed by action aligned with them. It’s a mistake to jump to cutting someone out of our lives or controlling them with rules on how to engage with us, prior to getting clear about our own needs. There are indeed abusive and unsafe situations that warrant rules of engagement or estrangement. Assertive conversation helps in the times when we are avoiding the hard conversation.

The DEARMAN framework is a useful tool to construct our ask: Describe, Express, Ask/Assert, Reinforce, (be) Mindful, Appear Confident, and Negotiate. This is done in the spirit of bringing two people closer together.
Examples of an Ask include:

• “When I ask for a time-out during our hard conversations, could you please let me have 20 minutes to myself and trust that I’ll come back to you to resume when I’m ready?”
• “Several times a week, could we share 30 minutes of uninterrupted time together in the morning to connect?” (Typically with a live-in partner.)
• “Would you consider going to therapy?”
• “Could you help me understand the reason that when I invite you to do (insert activity) with me, you seem to decline most times?”

When preparing to assert a need, it can help to ask ourselves several questions:

• How might having a conversation with them about the hurt bring us closer?
• Even though I am unsure how a conversation with them will go, am I willing to take a risk with the potential that it may go better than I can imagine?
• If the conversation does not go well, how can I care for myself?

Ensure you cope ahead and have a plan already in place to care for yourself when broaching hard conversations.

Strategies like these can help us avoid confusion amid messages about setting boundaries, prioritizing ourselves, and protecting our peace. Practiced intentionally, self-love can bring us closer to ourselves and one another. If we can sidestep the understandable tendency to disengage or avoid hard conversations, strategies that allow us to be seen and see others are sometimes the very medicine that our nervous systems need.