Love Yourself Exactly as You Are
In 1986, the State of California created a task force to raise its citizens’ self-esteem.
It sounds like a punchline, but it wasn’t. The legislature funded it, members were appointed, and it met for three years. Its champions described self-esteem as a “social vaccine” against school failure, drug abuse, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, crime, child abuse, and welfare dependency. Feel better about yourself, and the rest would follow.
In 2003, a team led by the psychologist Roy Baumeister reviewed the evidence. High self-esteem had some real benefits: people were happier, and they kept going after failure. But raising it didn’t improve school performance, and low self-esteem wasn’t what drove violence. The authors didn’t recommend continuing the campaign.
The campaign had other ideas.
You know the current version, because it’s in your feed. Love yourself exactly as you are. Treat yourself; you deserve it. That’s just my trauma response. Protect your peace.
Some of that is decent advice. A little kindness toward yourself goes a long way.
But there’s a line in there that the slogans blur, and it’s the whole game. Accepting who you are is one thing. Approving of everything you do is another. The first is sanity. The second is a license.
I was in high school in the 80s. I remember when “love yourself as you are” arrived. It wasn’t on a phone yet. It was on posters, in assemblies, and in the curriculum. What I remember is the tone of it: participation trophies, grading that avoided red ink, and a steady message that showing up was the achievement. The intentions were good. The lesson a lot of kids seemed to take from it was simpler: the feeling of not measuring up was the problem, and the feeling was what needed fixing.
What discomfort is for
Discomfort is an alarm. It’s the part of you that says this isn’t right; do something. Guilt after you’ve hurt someone. Frustration with a body that won’t do what you ask. The sick feeling when the credit card statement arrives.
None of it is pleasant, and it isn’t meant to be. An alarm you can ignore comfortably isn’t doing its job.
Take the discomfort away and something often moves into the space it leaves: complacency. The status quo gets comfortable, and comfort offers little reason to change. It’s hard to fix a problem that doesn’t bother you.
Relabeling the alarm
The psychologist Nick Haslam calls it concept creep: ideas about harm and pathology stretching until they cover ordinary experience. It’s been at work here too. Dissatisfaction with yourself, which used to be a normal and useful thing, gets renamed. Now it’s “self-harm,” or “toxic,” or “negative self-talk.”
The research does draw a real distinction, and it’s worth getting right. June Tangney’s work separates guilt from shame. Guilt says I did a bad thing, and it tends to drive repair. Shame says I am a bad thing, and it tends to drive hiding, denial, and defensive anger.
On average, shame backfires. But averages hide individual people. For some, self-contempt is fuel: they’re disgusted with themselves, and the disgust gets them moving. For others it’s poison. It depends on how it’s read, and the culture increasingly reads it as poison by default.
Kindness isn’t the enemy here, either. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that self-compassion actually increased people’s motivation to improve after a failure: more studying, more willingness to make amends. Compassion that helps you face a failure is one thing. Absolution that helps you avoid it is another.
When I’m going through hard stretches, the advice I hear most often from loved ones is: give yourself a little grace. It’s meant kindly. For me, grace is the thing that lets the alarm go quiet. For others, those same words are what get them out of bed in the morning. That’s the problem with advice built for everyone: it lands on individuals.
The real question to ask of any advice is what it lets you do next.
Three moves
Watch how discomfort gets handled in practice and the same three moves keep showing up.
Dismiss it: I don’t need to change. The body is the most familiar example. Love your body exactly as it is. Said to someone who’s been tearing themselves apart, that can be a mercy. Said as a rule, it’s a way of switching off the alarm. It’s been playing out against a steep backdrop. In the late 1970s, about 15 percent of American adults were obese; by 2018 it was nearly 43 percent. Genes matter; they set the susceptibility. But the human genome didn’t change in forty years. Genes load the gun, and environment and behavior pull the trigger. The outside pressure is real. The sugar industry paid Harvard scientists in the 1960s to point the finger at fat. And you still own your part.
The wallet has its own version. Credit is nothing new, but it used to take some effort, and nobody sold it as self-care. Now there’s a button at checkout that splits the purchase into four payments, and a slogan to go with it. More than one in five consumers with credit records used buy-now-pay-later in 2022, and about 63 percent of borrowers had more than one of those loans open at once at some point that year. Treat yourself has a payment plan.
Diagnose it: I can’t change. This is where therapy-speak comes in. That’s my trauma response. My anxiety won’t let me. I’m setting a boundary. These describe real things, and for some people they’re exactly the right words. But used loosely they turn into a permanent exemption. The discomfort gets a clinical name, and the name comes with a pass. It’s concept creep in the first person, and it’s harder to argue with than an ordinary excuse because it sounds like medicine.
Displace it: you need to change. The last move sends the discomfort outward. The hard relationship becomes a toxic one, and walking away gets called health. Karl Pillemer’s national survey found that 27 percent of American adults have cut off a family member. That number doesn’t say how many of those cuts were necessary, and many were. Real abuse is real, and getting clear of it is survival. But the family psychologist Joshua Coleman has watched therapists side with the adult child and diagnose a parent they’ve never met, often as narcissistic. Once someone’s been given a label like that, there isn’t much reason to call them.
Families are messy. Relationships are complicated. Memory is reconstructive, and everyone at the table remembers a different childhood. Pillemer found that the people who did reconcile, and were glad they had, mostly gave up on getting the other person to accept their version of the past. You don’t walk away because something is hard. Sometimes the hard part is the relationship.
The moves don’t always come in order. When they do, the escalation is plain. First you excuse yourself. Then you exempt yourself. Then you blame someone else.
Not your fault
Underneath all three is a sentence that sounds like mercy: it’s not your fault.
Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s exactly what someone needs to hear. Genes aren’t your fault. Neither is the drug that wrecked your metabolism, or the parent who got it wrong, or the lender who made debt a one-click affair.
But settling whose fault it is leaves every other question standing. What can I change? What help do I need? Did I hurt someone, and do I owe them something? An explanation can tell you exactly how you got here and still leave you with work to do.
Blame looks backward. Responsibility looks forward.
Fragile, then owed
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt made the argument in The Coddling of the American Mind: treat people as fragile and they become fragile. Tolerating discomfort is a capacity, and like any capacity it weakens when it isn’t used.
That’s how the loop closes. If discomfort is harm, you avoid it. If you avoid it, you never build tolerance for it. Without that tolerance, change gets very hard, because change is uncomfortable by nature.
The trouble with silencing an alarm is that the fire doesn’t go out. The weight is still there. So is the debt, and the parent you stopped calling, and the distance between where you are and where you meant to be. If you’ve been told you’re fine exactly as you are, that distance can’t be yours. It has to belong to someone else.
That’s where entitlement comes in. We’ve gotten very comfortable with the idea that we’re owed something, that we deserve the nice thing, the easy thing, the thing we want. I deserve something nice. When the world doesn’t pay up, the disappointment has to go somewhere, and it tends to come out as anger at whoever is nearest.
It looks like the opposite of the self-esteem crisis the task force set out to cure. It may be the same crisis, pointed outward.
The pool
Ovid’s Narcissus wasn’t comfortable at that pool. He knew exactly what was wrong. “I am he,” he says. He wept, beat his chest, and wished he could be parted from his own body. He felt every bit of it.
And he stayed. He lay there until there was nothing left of him.
Discomfort was never the whole answer. It’s the alarm, not the fire brigade. Feeling it is where the work begins, not where it ends.
What are you going to do about it?
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