SELF LOVE
Knowing Yourself, Remembering Deeply, and Loving Anyway
Self-love isn’t just kindness—it’s curiosity. For individuals in Maryland and DC, this reflection explores how emotional insight begins with knowing yourself, and why the journey inward is both complex and essential.
Help me out. Does anyone know what this really means? I know you can look it up online and get lots of good ideas like being nice to yourself and trusting yourself and taking care of yourself. These all sound terrific. However, to do any of these, don’t I have to know myself? Does anyone realize how hard this is?
To know something means to do a careful study of that thing and to make a deep dive into understanding that thing. You must look at this thing with intent and not just glance. You must examine this thing from a variety of angles. Remember the joke where people are touching different parts of an elephant and deciding that this “thing” is a wide range of different things?
The person at the trunk thinks they are holding a hose. The person at the tail is convinced they have a hold of a rope. The person at the leg is convinced it is a large post. And so forth. Actually, it is none of these things. This is also true for a person. The co-worker thinks you are efficient and sensible. The neighbor thinks you are mean and aggressive. The cousin thinks you are arrogant and stuck up. The children think you are funny. The boss thinks you are devoted and can be told to stay late on multiple occasions. The religious leader thinks you are pious but should be giving more. The school principal thinks your parenting could use a tune up.
We are very complicated beings and at some point in time we may have been all those things and more. The hard part about knowing ourselves is that our brains actually retain all of our experiences. Let me say that again. Our brains retain ALL of our experiences. The problem with that is that many of our experiences are encoded in language that we cannot easily access. Before we learn to speak our brain encodes touch, sight, sound, movement, etc. Those memories are really hard to access. Those memories also have strong influences on the present.
Our brains also have this clever way of “hiding” experiences so that we cannot easily access them. I do not know exactly how they decide what to hide and what not to hide, I only know that our brains perform this function. This can be as simple as forgetting that our spouse told us their schedule for tomorrow or as complicated as forgetting a shameful or frightening experience so as not to retraumatize ourselves.
Knowing myself is not an easy task. I believe that the storage spaces in our brains can be accessed, even those non-verbal experiences from infancy can be unearthed. Doing so, however, is not an easy task. When you go rooting around in memories and mental storage lockers, you need to be prepared, and you need to be supported. I see the value in knowing myself at a deeper level and understanding why looking down a long flight of stairs makes my stomach do a flip, but opening every box in the attic may not be the way I want to spend my summer.
Want to explore how self-love and emotional insight are shaped by memory and self-awareness? Visit Psychology Today’s guide to the neuroscience of self-love, Brainz Magazine’s breakdown of knowing yourself and emotional intelligence, and Calm’s 7-step guide to practicing self-love.
If you’re reflecting on self-awareness, emotional healing, or personal growth, therapy can help. Learn more about individual therapy in Maryland and DC or explore therapeutic approaches that support insight, compassion, and self-love.
By Dr. Gloria K Vanderhorst